Going With the Flow

Looking as tasty as spun candy, Caleb Siemon’s multicolored glass bowls and vases combine ancient Venetian glassblowing techniques and contemporary zing, with a bit of serendipity thrown in.

“A successful design is one where you set some rules to go by, but then, within those rules, things can happen that you’re not planning on. That, to me, becomes the beauty of the piece,” Siemon says.

Siemon illustrates this with a bowl from his newest collection of banded pieces. “I’m basically playing with opaque and transparent colors,” he says, picking up the bowl. “I put on three opaques: celadon, tan and army green. Then three transparents--silver blue, amber and citron green--go over them. These colors overlap and create other colors,” he says. “There’s no way you can control the lines and the colors as the piece is blown and fired. It’s as if nature designed it.” This line, the second he’s created, will be introduced in February at the American Craft Council’s Winter Craft Show in Baltimore, Maryland. His first line featured bright lines of color swirled around a vase or bowl, almost like string wrapped into a ball.

Siemon, who was born in Newport Beach, says his glassblowing began at camp at age 17. “The first time I tried it it, was instant love. I decided there and then to go into glass full time. That was a scary decision.”

Today, 10 years later, Siemon owns United Glass Blowing, located in an industrial area of Costa Mesa. He opened the business in 1999. He designs and crafts pieces in a Italian factory-style studio like the one where he apprenticed in Venice, Italy, when he studied for two years under master glass sculptor Pino Signoretto. He went there after earning a bachelor of fine arts degree at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1997.

One of the most intricate Italian glassblowing techniques Siemon learned was the art of battuto, or engraving. “I put one color on the outside, then clear glass, then another color on the inside. You carve away at the outside color to reveal the inside color,” he says. These engraved pieces are labor-intensive and unique, so they can retail for as much as $2,000. Other pieces begin at $100 for a small bowl or vase.

Ironically, now that Siemon owns a company, he has little time to design new works. “When we first opened, we had no customers, so I was making things all the time and trying to figure out what people liked. When we finally made a line and had to produce it, it was hard for me because I wasn’t used to doing the same thing over and over,” he says.

He does feel, however, that he’ll never run out of ideas. “One nice thing about having the shop is it’s easy to experiment, and it’s so much fun to see your idea become physical within a matter of minutes. I have a million ideas and not enough time to develop them all.”

Siemon’s pieces are available locally at Barneys, OK on West 3rd Street and the Orange County Museum of Art. His Web site is at www.unitedglassblowing.com.

On Wednesday, Feb. 6 at 7:30 p.m., Renny Ramakers, founder of Droog Design, Amsterdam, will give an illustrated lecture at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, 960 E. 3rd St., Los Angeles. Free admission. (213) 613-2200; www.sci arc.edu.

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Kathy Bryant can be reached at kbryant @socal.rr.com.