Self-taught local glasswork artist fine tunes his skills

While he’s only been involved with glass blowing for three years, Richard Richards has already gained a reputation for his work glasswork flowers and the marbles that are becoming his passion.

On Saturday, Richards was set up out front of A Dispensary Near Me on Manzanares Street in Socorro, demonstrating his skills and trying to finish a delicate floral piece against the backdrop of an approaching rainstorm. “If any water gets on it while it is this hot, it will shatter,” Richards said.

He started dabbling in the art form when he lived in Bosque Farms, and a friend let him try working on a few small pieces. He’s self-taught on

many aspects of glass blowing and thinks out his projects before starting. “I just try to reverse engineer a project in my head. I will look at something if I want to learn the technique, and I’ll just kind of experiment and break it down and figure out their process on my own,” Richards said. “I have some basic glassblowing technique books and a lot of YouTube watching. I specialize in marbles.”

Not just any marbles, but ones with definable character faces and others with flowers. A single marble can take as much as two hours to make, and that’s nothing in comparison to some of the marble artists like Mike Gong, who Richards aspires toward. Gong’s work sells for thousands of dollars. Still Richards’ own work has been going viral in Facebook groups.

It’s a difficult art form and that’s what he likes about it.

“I really think the biggest thing is that it’s a complicated art form. It’s extremely difficult and full of failures. It’s so funny because a lot of us glassblowers used to be skateboarders. So, we’re already used to that lifestyle of 99 percent failure. When you get that one percent of success, there’s nothing like it. There’s no feeling all the hard work paid off,” Richards said.

Like an author starting with a blank page, Richards begins with a blank glass, and he explains that the technique he is using actually isn’t glass blowing.

“The correct term for this would be lampworking,” Richards said. “We use the term glass blowing because it’s something most people are familiar with.”

The “lamp,” in this case, is a torch or kiln capable of reaching 5,000 degrees in seconds. It quickly turns the glass blank Richards is working on into a goopy, almost liquid form. He begins forming the petals Ombudsmen are later break. As he nears completion of his floral piece, he adds a tiny bit of silver to the glass. of a flower with his torch and a tiny tungsten press.

Glass blowing or lampworking is an art form in which you are only bound by your talent and imagination. Richards is grateful to have been invited to A Dispensary Near Me in Socorro to showcase his work.

“Glass blowing has become very competitive over the last few years, and there are a lot of places turning to cheap foreign-made glass products that aren’t very good. I’m grateful to have a place like this where I can come. We have many talented people who leave New Mexico, and it feels great to be encouraged to stay local,” Richards said.

Richards has also chosen an art form that is very unforgiving. The slightest miss results in a piece of glass being eased off into a cooling liquid to be later disposed of because any air getting into the glass causes weak spots that will

“This is what gives it color,” Richards said. “I love glass blowing. The difficulty is appealing. It’s also the growth just because it’s so hard to balance. It takes a lot of time and a lot of practice to be able to achieve new techniques, and those are the best feelings.”