Skip to content
Elias Studios
John Elias
"I enjoy playing with unique color combinations combined with layering which can evoke a remembered visual experience: a garden, a Tiffany window, a Monet painting, a bird... each piece bringing a surprise of unexpected, personal visual imagery to the viewer. Unlike my work in clay, I appreciate the immediacy of glass and the demands of being completely focused on each step in the blowing process."
John Elias discovered glass after years as a studio potter; he was immediately intrigued by the similarities between throwing pots on a wheel and shaping glass on a blowpipe. This initial encounter has endured into a thirty plus year exploration, inspired by the challenging fluidity and limitless potential of glass to use color. There is an excitement in how the colors flow across the surface of the glass, creating rhythms, movement and glowing interactions with light.
Using small chips of colored glass, called ''frit,'' John has created over one hundred color combinations. By layering these unique ''glass recipes'' over gathers of clear glass, he is able to develop ever-changing surface effects, sometimes enhancing the combinations with the use of metallic oxides. The effect of the oxides results in pieces that appear almost to be made of ''gold'' or ''metal'', adding great visual excitement.
John's initial encounter with blowing glass was simply spending a day with a student teacher at the former University of Massachusetts / Amherst glass studio. He enrolled in Haystack School of Crafts and then at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. After receiving his M.F.A. and teaching for six years at Hastings College, he founded Elias Studios to develop new color combinations and forms of color and glass.
John Elias discovered glass after years as a studio potter; he was immediately intrigued by the similarities between throwing pots on a wheel and shaping glass on a blowpipe. This initial encounter has endured into a thirty plus year exploration, inspired by the challenging fluidity and limitless potential of glass to use color. There is an excitement in how the colors flow across the surface of the glass, creating rhythms, movement and glowing interactions with light.
Using small chips of colored glass, called ''frit,'' John has created over one hundred color combinations. By layering these unique ''glass recipes'' over gathers of clear glass, he is able to develop ever-changing surface effects, sometimes enhancing the combinations with the use of metallic oxides. The effect of the oxides results in pieces that appear almost to be made of ''gold'' or ''metal'', adding great visual excitement.
John's initial encounter with blowing glass was simply spending a day with a student teacher at the former University of Massachusetts / Amherst glass studio. He enrolled in Haystack School of Crafts and then at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. After receiving his M.F.A. and teaching for six years at Hastings College, he founded Elias Studios to develop new color combinations and forms of color and glass.
