Glass Blowing Houston
Opportunities Abound!
Three Dimensional Visions offers you an experience of a lifetime! You get to see glass in its liquid state. You get to see it poured like honey, blown up like a balloon and then manipulated like silly putty. While you watch or participate you will be intrigued, amazed and even educated. Come on out and let your dreams come out and play!
Come to our showroom or one of our galleries and —Acquire Art.
Create Glass in one of our glass blowing experiences or workshops. Learn more in our Glass Blowing Classes.
Host Your Event and help your participants have an Experience of a lifetime.
Enriching lives through artistic self-expression.
The Studio is ours and the Dreams are YOURS!
After an exhausting search the group found the perfect site. The location is in the northwest Houston area, not too far off the beaten path (Texas State Highway 99, the Grand Parkway). Upon securing the location, the group pooled their heads, hearts and hands to build an almost magical place. On the outside it is an unassuming structure, but once inside Dreams are born. It is a place where glass flows like honey and the colors of the rainbow are there for the taking. It is a place where ideas take form and memories last forever.
We invite you to come express yourself in a new and wondrous way in a unique setting. The Studio is Ours and the Dreams are YOURS!
@ Three Dimensional Visions Glass Blowing Houston
Creativity…where does it come from?
Creativity is a funny thing…Sometimes it’s there and sometimes it isn’t. It’s erratic, nonlinear and unreliable. It defy’s logic and often endorses the opposite. As an artist one must jump from the right side of the brain to the left side and back again, all day long. In order to create something “new” and different one must go from logical to crazy, irrational to ordered, regimented to chaotic. Finally you get to a point where you are considered logically crazy and what you create is Art.
In order to be truly creative one must realize that exploring every logical, rational, ordered outcome is just half of an idea’s potential. It is the random, spontaneous and unscripted moments that produce quantum breakthroughs.
Glass allows us to be creative. It can follow the lead, but when it’s hot it can also take the lead..leading us to outcomes that make us better glass makers or give us new ideas.
Extraordinary is just the beginning – Glass Blowing @ Three Dimensional Visions
Do you ever wake up and think, “Wow”! I’d sure like to do something ordinary today”? Me Neither.
You my friend are in luck, at Three Dimensional Visions extraordinary is just a starting point. What we do with You and Fire is incredible. Let me describe the experience for you.
Think back to the last time you were sitting around a campfire with friends and someone breaks out the marshmallows. Remember impaling the marshmallow on a coat hanger and sticking it into the fire? The flames begin to soften the spongy white treat almost immediately and soon the edges begin to turn brown and get crispy. You could barely wait to devour this unique treat. Well, when you come here and work with our glass and guidance your experience is marshmallow sweet and the feeling you get warms your inside for a lot longer.
Have a good ordinary day. We will keep the fire hot for you till you are ready for the extraordinary!
“Enriching lives through artistic self-expression.”
Host your next Event with us!
Glass Blowing, Childhood & Creativity
Remember when you were a kid?
The world was yours to do anything: a paper grocery bag was a space suit helmet, a cardboard box was a fort, a house, or a car; a tree was a castle. Nothing stopped you from reimagining the world into any fantasy adventure. Do you miss that fun? Wish you could conquer the dragon, grab the treasure, create a new adventure and memories? You can…our dragon never sleeps and you can create wonders that will last for years.
Come Make some Glass with us @ Three Dimensional Visions – Glass Blowing Houston
Enriching lives through artistic self-expression.
Creative Process Observation
I was just straightening and cleaning up the showroom at the studio today. It is a boring, but necessary chore with absolutely no glamour to it. The most interesting thing about it is to me is keeping a running estimate of how many granddaddy long leg spiders I have vacuumed up so far. (By my estimate, the number is HUGE!)
Anyway, toward the end of the task I glanced out into the studio. There I watched one of the gaffer’s working with a renter. Together they had come up with an interesting glass blowing form, it was a geometric/ minamalist type look with an organic-like area at one corner. The pattern, color, scale and formed seemed to be working well. That is..until it was carried over to the crack off bucket, dunked in the water and shattered into a thousand pieces.
I could tell by their respective facial expressions that they were less than pleased. Being the artist/instructor type person that I am I went up to the renter and voiced what were the good points about the form, in my opinion. Then I told him it was an idea worth pursuing. He perked up a little. I felt good. He felt good and then I thought to myself, “In the pursuit of knowledge, nothing is wasted.”
——————Michael Kerry Brown
Giving Birth @ The Hot Shop
I was thinking about life here at the Hot Shop. You know, glass blowing, teaching others and boldly going where I’ve not gone before. Just the usual stuff. Anyway, it reminded me of a line from a Bob Dylan song. It went like this “Man not busy being born is busy dying”. And that in turn reminded me of the first time my mother-in-law came to the hot shop and watched what we do here. She said something like this, “Oh my, what you all are doing is wonderful…It’s so beautiful. It’s like giving birth.”
Perhaps she was right. At times the ideas and efforts flow smoothly and at other times it is hard work. I suppose, in our own way, you could say we create our little bundles of joy five days a week. It is exhausting at times and at others very rewarding. You know, kinda like raising kids…only not as expensive, or perhaps more so…
..Michael Kerry Brown…
When did glass blowing begin? a short version
One of the questions that we are constantly asked is “When did we start blowing glass?” Well, you can answer that in multiple ways, two of which are “When did we personally start blowing glass” or “When did human’s fascination with glass begin?” We will save our personal story for another day.
Glass making began about 5000 years ago and glass blowing is much younger being only about 2000 years old. People first created small cast objects of glass in molds or by shaping it with simple tools somewhere before 2000 BC in Mesopotamia. A great place to get a more detailed view on the history of glass is on the Corning Museum of Glass – Timeline of Glass History==> http://timeline.cmog.org
Stone Age man used natural glass objects to fashion spear points and sharp cutting tools. The earliest known man-made glass objects were beads, which probably resulted as an accidental by product of other efforts, like metal-working. During the late Bronze Age in Egypt and Western Asia there was rapid growth in the technology of glass making including the making of colored glass. There is a rich history of glass as a luxury item and then glass making developed slightly differently in each of the worlds culture. By the 14th century the island of Murano was the center for luxury Italian glass making due to the abundance of pure quartz pebbles.
The American Studio Glass Movement began in the 1960’s when Harvey Littleton, a teaching ceramicist at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, joined forces with the Toledo Museum of Art and held two historic glassblowing workshops. Dominick Labino, a glass research scientist also participated devising a small, inexpensive furnace to melt and work glass. After these workshops and learnings Littleton then started a glass program at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Some of the early students of this program (Dale Chihuly, Marvin Lipofsky and Fritz Dreisbach) became the innovative artists who led glass into its artistic forms of today.
Glass is literally involved in every facet of our lives today. Come with us and join in the world of glass. See it move, give it some color, give it some form. Come be a part of the Texas glass blowing movement by holding a party or event at our studio or joining in on one of our Glass Blowing Experiences, Workshops or Classes.
Enriching lives through artistic self-expression.
Three Dimensional Visions – Glass Blowing Houston
Why Glass? Our view from a glass blowing , kilnforming studio
We get lots of questions about glass in the studio, so I thought we might just provide some info to help you understand “Why Glass”!
For us glass is a state of mind, but in reality it a state of matter. It gets created when a molten material cools so rapidly that there is not enough time for a crystalline structure to form. In solids atoms are arranged in ordered lattice-like structures. In liquids atoms and molecules are able to move randomly, they flow. In glass, atoms are held rigidly – they cannot flow and they are not arranged in latices. Glass is called a rigid liquid.
When most people think of glass they think of it as a manmade object. But glass forms in nature:
Volcanoes spew molten rock which cools rapidly and is called obsidian.
Lightning strikes desert or beach sands and forms brittle tubes of melted sand that form fulgurites.
Meteors which fly through the earth’s atmosphere and then impact the earth with intense heat form terrestrial debris which cools quickly and is called tektites.
Silicious skeletons of marine creatures (algae, sea sponges) are shed onto the marine floor and form natural glass…
Glass is all around us. Think about it. What would our world be without glass?
It helps us control the temperature of our surroundings.
It aids our vision.
It facilitates communication through fiber optic cables.
It is used in packaging, tableware…
It helps express our identity in the form of art.
What does glass not do? Its applications are endless.
Most people think of glass as a solid. It’s fun to expose people to glass in its more liquid form. When we work with glass in the hot shop it is kinetic, it flows, it expands, it contracts and it dances with us. Glass is beautiful in its clear state, where you can take advantage of its optical qualities, and it is fascinating when it takes on color. Glass is a fantastic play material. You can make it into one form if you don’t like it you can remelt it and form it into something else.
Glass is paradoxical, it can last for thousands of years or be shattered in an instant.
Glass reflects the personalities of those who work it.
Michael’s joy is exploring his love for color and different forms in glass.
Patrick focuses on patters and the repetition of elements probably due to his strong musical background.
Glass is attractive to me as a scientist because when you work it in a logical manner, it is process oriented. Once you become competent at the steps and how to make the basic forms you can start to recombine them and make glass follow your lead. I look at boundaries as something to go beyond and try to mimic geological concepts with glass like a kid with a chemistry set and no instruction manual.I try to use everything, all my background and knowledge while exploiting all the resources at hand.
Without glass how would we recognize ourselves? Its reflectivity allows us to see ourselves as we truly are… Or maybe not.
Why not come out to the studio and learn more about yourself. See where working with glass may lead you. Believe us, it’s worth it and so are you. With glass the exploration is endless.
Three Dimensional Visions – Glass Blowing Houston
Enriching lives through artistic self-expression.
