![]() ![]() Once the colors were right, Soward made fins from a slightly larger cane of glass, the end of it heated and then crimped with a ridged tool his father, John P. "People just think it's a mold," he said, shaking his head.Īnd don't even ask about burns. For roughly two hours, he seldom took his eyes off the fish or his hands away from the torch, turning and heating and smoothing, every step in order. The process is exacting and entirely freehand. Each joined to the body by the heat of the flame and then slowly smoothed in, sometimes with a clear layer between them to avoid chemical clashes between the metal oxides used to tint the glass. He layered them onto the body: A dark, dark green strip along the back, lighter green, then pink. When the trout's body assumed the correct shape, he began to choose from the assortment of tiny sticks, or "canes," of colored Moretti glass from Italy arrayed on his workbench beside him, some as thick as a strand of spaghetti, others not much wider than a hair. Soward began making his fish and put 220,000 miles on his pickup truck connecting with stores around the country. His brother-in-law, a fishing guide in Wyoming, asked for a little glass rainbow trout he could wear on a necklace. "To succeed you really need something special to catch someone's eye," he said. He couldn't afford a full studio, though, so he bought the torch and some other equipment. He learned everything he could about the business and eventually struck out on his own. He left school after three years and went to work for Vandermark Merritt Glass Studios in New Jersey, which made beautiful perfume bottles, paperweights, and other decorative items. It was not something you could just put a wet rag on and come back to." I was amazed at just the intensity of it. "The pottery studio was right next to the glass studio and I could look through the window and see the seniors blowing glass, and I was just blown away. The New Jersey native started at Hartwick College in Oneonta, N.Y., as a music major but soon switched to art. With his right hand, he used a small graphite paddle to shape the body of the fish. With his left hand, he twirled a small steel rod with the glass on one end, keeping it in the flame, heating it so it was soft enough but not too soft. He hunched over a 2,000-degree-plus propane torch - an oversized classroom-style Bunsen burner. ![]() The thumb-sized rainbow trout he was shaping from a lump of raw glass belied his modesty. "I hate letting glass artists know how I do this," Soward, 33, said at his base ment workbench on a recent afternoon. Now, after a couple of years in Nashville playing drums with a rock band, Soward and his cat, Napoleon, are temporarily living with his family in Newburyport, and he is making fish again. "I am a fisherman to the core," he said, and he has sold his creations wherever anglers gather - the coast of Maine, the Florida Keys, the fly-fishing precincts of Montana and Wyoming. Soward has been making his tiny glass fish on and off for a decade, including bluefish and bonefish, striped bass, and a creel full of trout species. It's the spark of life that suggests they are about to swim away. ![]() NEWBURYPORT - The magic is not that the fish are anatomically correct or the right colors. ![]()
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