Firehouse Glass rekindles artful mission in Vancouver

It’s as clear as gleaming glass that the new Vancouver waterfront is already providing the rest of downtown an economic boost.

But the creations that come out of Firehouse Glass, a longtime downtown studio, are not usually clear. They glow in hues such as cool teal, rich emerald, rose red and cobalt blue.

“Glass is just so appealing and exotic,” said Firehouse Glass manager Andrew Lueck. He’s the son and stepson of its founders, Greg Lueck and Rebecca Seymour, who launched the place as a studio and gallery on the day after Christmas in 1999.

That was after Seymour noticed that her husband, an engineer with an artistic streak, couldn’t be dragged away from a glass-blowing demonstration the couple happened to catch. She more or less insisted he enroll in a glass-blowing course at the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Greg Lueck said.

He thought it was a completely random idea, he said, but went along and discovered just how right his wife really was: “I was hooked from Day 1,” he said. One class lead to many classes, during which Greg Lueck discovered that the glassblowing community is really several different communities that are protective of their different approaches and techniques — coldworking, lampworking, casting, fusing — and don’t mix much.

Such divisions are just what Greg Lueck wanted to eliminate at his own start-up studio, he said. He bought the historic 1906 Vancouver National Bank Building on the corner of Sixth and Main and filled it with kilns, tools and technologies required by different types of glassblowers. The communal result was the first of its kind, as far as Greg Lueck knew, and he said he’s been gratified to see how other studios, all around the nation, have followed his example.

Firehouse Glass has been busy ever since, but the public had no real reason to notice. Its front-room art gallery quickly turned out to be a “loss leader” at a time when the same could be said about its entire bottom-of-downtown neighborhood, Greg Lueck said. Twenty years ago, lower Main Street was a landscape of pawn shops and vacant storefronts, Lueck remembered. When he arrived in the morning to open up, it often involved asking a homeless person to vacate the doorway. The studio thrived with glass-blowing classes and private rentals, but the gallery shut down after 10 years.

What a difference a decade can make. In recent months, the Luecks said, they’ve noticed being noticed — by a steady stream of new traffic that’s heading across downtown via Sixth Street to visit the shiny new Waterfront Vancouver. It seems like time to try again, said Andrew Lueck, who grew up blowing glass with his dad and became the manager of Firehouse a few years ago.

The Luecks are starting with a seasonal baby step: a design-your-own-ornament weekend, today and Saturday. Choose your own colored ball and your favorite design from a menu, and professional glass blowers will make it so for $30 a pop, or four for $100. (Or, try sketching your own design idea and see how the glassblowers manage it. Back in the day, Greg Lueck said, he nicknamed that challenge “Stump the gaffer” — gaffer being another name for a glassblower.) Icicles are $20 apiece.

Assuming all that goes well, the Luecks plan to reopen the gallery weekly and invite truly fine-art glass blowers to be part of it.

Hard and soft

Andrew Lueck attended the Vancouver School of Arts and Academics and has done all sorts of work with his hands, both artistic and practical. He’s a builder, a stonemason, a wood carver, a metalworker. “I’m skilled making things in 3D,” he said. “I enjoy that I do so many different things.”

But his greatest love is working with glass, he said. Unlike those other media, glass tests you in real time. You have to work quickly while it’s heated to a state somewhere between solid and liquid, but that doesn’t last long. “I like how challenging a medium it is,” he said. “You only have a short window.”

Andrew Lueck’s particular niche is lampwork, which means using a hand-held torch to make “hard and durable” products like bowls and vessels, beads and ornaments, he said. Greg Lueck may have the problem-solving mind of an engineer, but his preference is working softer glass into organic-feeling artworks that are inspired by nature, he said.

Father and son agree, there’s something undeniably magical about being a gaffer. He understands the chemistry of glass, Andrew Lueck said, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t wowed every time he opens the kiln and discovers glowing colors.

“The things that happen inside the kiln I find so fascinating,” he said.