Nick Oldenburg sat at his workstation inside a white wooden shack on the side of his house. A 3,700-degree Fahrenheit jet of flame hissed inches from his face. His hands — one twisting a glass tube, the other gripping a granite reamer — hovered on each side of the burning orange stream.
Just minutes earlier, this glass blower known as Nicko sipped a Dixie beer on his patio with his cat, Woods. Now he was entirely fixated on his artform: glass blowing, originally known as lampworking.
What started as a thin clear glass cylinder, enclosed at one end by incredibly high temperatures and connected at the other end to a rubber tube that ran to Nicko’s mouth, was shaped and blown into a gumball-sized marble called an “implosion.”
It contained a mesmerizing starburst of color at its core.
Using more heat, he melded the marble to a black tube. Nicko, unsure what the piece would become, improvised as the fragile material morphed to a manipulatable putty that he worked into something resembling an upright cobra.
“What makes something art is you get an emotional response out of it when you look at it or see it or touch it, whatever it might be,” Nicko said. “I like glass because it kind of controls itself to some degree. It wants to be something, so you have to work with it.”
Eventually, the unfinished figurine will become a pipe, or perhaps a water pipe for “tobacco use only.” Legal disclaimers aside, it will become a functional piece of art.
“It’s hard to sell art that’s just art for art’s sake,” Nicko said. “When it’s art that’s functional, whatever it might be — a chair, a teapot, whatever it is — it’s nice to have a form that gives you the most freedom artistically to play with it. The glass pipe, and the people that use them, let me do anything I want as long as it’s functional in the end.”
American glass blowers, such as Nicko, and their art-with-a-purpose are what influenced University alumni and brothers Travis Aaron and Todd Aaron to open The Lotus, which Travis dubbed a “smoker’s gallery” or “glass art gallery.”
The brothers opened their first location in Bossier City, La., in 2010 after Travis, who was working as an office clerk, convinced Todd to take the money he earned from working in the oil fields and invest it into art.
After the brothers discovered the “high-end glass art,” they set out on a mission to promote the art form and culture, which they had been enjoying for years from the other side of the sales counter.
“The original idea came when we found American glass art,” Travis said. “We’d always been into the culture as customers — myself more than my brother — and I kind of pushed him into it because he was the one with a means to get started. We got into the idea of functional art, whether it be glass pipes, pendants, wine glasses, marbles, paperweights — it’s art that also has a function.”
Travis said the original shop thrived, and a second location was opened in Baton Rouge in November 2012, which he runs while Todd oversees the Bossier City store.
Perhaps the only full-time glass blower in Baton Rouge, Nicko began blowing glass at the end of 2004 in New Orleans.
He had always been involved in art but went to college to study petroleum engineering, he said. He hated it and “ended up doing other people’s art projects,” he joked.
Nicko worked jobs in ceramics and construction until he decided to quit his day job because he “needed to try one more time.”
One phone call to a friend began his glass blowing journey.
“[My friend] said, ‘So you’ve got no job. You’ve got nothing to do. It’s Friday. Want to blow glass?’” Nicko explained. “I had never considered making glass pipes or anything out of glass really.”
He made a bunch of $5 pipes and sold them on a French Quarter street corner, which paid for the night’s beer. He woke up the next day and the next and the next to blow glass. It started paying the bills.
“It intrigued me that I got to do a new form of art, and I just wanted to see if I was good at it,” Nicko said. “It immediately satisfied me artistically and kept me going with it because it would actually pay.”
Nicko sells his pieces to local shops, such as The Lotus, for anywhere from $10 to thousands of dollars. Travis said he met Nicko about a year-and-a-half ago and jumped at the opportunity to promote a local artist, which supports the country’s economy.
When someone buys or sells American glass, he or she helps the artist pay his or her bills, buy groceries and continue driving the American economy, Travis said — just like any small business.
Shopping for domestic glass also means taking a stand against child labor, Travis said.
Though it’s illegal to import foreign glass pipes, Travis said about 60 to 70 percent of pipe shops sell mostly foreign glass, typically blown in the poor areas of countries such as India and China, where children are hired to work in “the worst conditions.”
Unlike the safer, stronger borosilicate glass in the United States, cheap foreign glass contains lethal metals such as mercury and lead, which overseas blowers — including child laborers — breathe in during the building process because of poor ventilation, Nicko said.
“The average lifespan for a glass blower in China or India that does this stuff is about eight years after they start,” Travis said. “They don’t have the same safety equipment that the artists use here. They’re looking at torches and
going blind. Their teeth are falling out because of all the silver they’re inhaling because there isn’t proper ventilation.”
The Lotus wanted to be a shop that stood against those actions, he said. Therefore, the shops provide affordable pieces that are still aesthetically beautiful and of superb quality, he added.
But of course there are the water pipes priced at $2,000 to $4,000. These are the pieces, like some of Nicko’s, that show off an artist’s ability and leave people speechless as they walk out the door, Travis said.
These are the pieces like the oversized lifelike tarantula that doubles as a pipe, or the water pipe disguised as a waterfall nestled in a mountainside.
Nicko said he only sees lampworking progressing from this point forward as the culture and technology behind it continue to evolve. He plans to spend his entire life refining his art and will probably never reach full satisfaction — but that’s OK because he’s learning and loving his job, he said.
And the Aaron brothers have never looked back.
“There’s an overall sense of accomplishment and well-being and fulfillment once you have art in your life,” Travis said. “It just enriches your day-to-day living so much. We love this stuff as much as any of our customers, and we get to share it with them.”
“What makes something art is you get an emotional response out of it when you look at it or see it or touch it, whatever it might be,” Nicko said. “I like glass because it kind of controls itself to some degree,”
Nicko said. “It wants to be something, so you have to work with it.”
