Art glass bowls are exclusively used for decorating homes and commercial premises to make them look like a million dollars.
This is the complete opposite of utilitarian glassware, such as the ones you use to make salads or the glasses that you drink with. For these to be used in interior design, they need to be enhanced with rocks, plants, or sea shells.
A decorative glass bowl can be made in many ways, but the main thing they have in common is that they are handmade rather than being pressed out in a factory somewhere in mainland Asia.
So let’s take a quick look at some of these methods so as to get a better appreciation of your glass bowl centrepiece.
There are three ways to create art glass bowls: moulding, blowing, and hot working.
The moulding method, also called pressed glass, is most oftentimes made by machines. There are some who do not consider moulded glass to be art glass, while others consider that it still qualifies as long as the end product is artistic and of high quality.
If the moulding is done using the cast glass method or the lost wax method, then these pieces tend to be very high-end, as the whole process is painstaking and a labour of love.
Hand-blowing is by far the most common method of making art glass in most professional glass studios. This means that each object, even though it might be very similar to a previous one, is a unique creation of the artist, and up until 1977, only blown glass was considered to be art glass.
The artist stands at the entrance to the hot furnace (called the glory hole) and gathers and twists the glass on the end of their pipe until it is just right to be taken out and blown. They then work the glass until the perfect piece has been created.
Hot working implies the glass being manipulated with tools like pincers and shears while the glass is still hot and elastic; this is how many of the decorative accents are added, such as curved handles and ornate rims.
Nowadays, art glass doesn’t include only art glass bowls, vases, and paperweights; some artists have built architectural works as well.
And since we mentioned artists, it should be known that your glass bowl centrepieces may not have been made by a single artist. Of course, they have, if you know it for a fact or know the artist, but some pieces of art glass are created by a team of artists, with some studios working more in the spirit of a factory, creating lots of unique, while still very similar, products.
The artist will sign all the pieces but may not have created each piece. This collaboration enables well-known artists to create large installations, which would not be possible if they were solely working alone.
We should also mention that art glass products, such as art glass bowls, are different from other sorts of glass art, glassware, stained glass, and architectural glass.