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“Art is a strange business because we distill emotions into a form.”
-Harvey Littleton-
At Hillbrook, young Lucas Kernan (Class of ’13) was already known for their creativity and artistic passions. “Even when I was at Hillbrook, people who knew me could tell you I always had more pots than I had hands.” A frequent fixture in Hillbrook’s art rooms at every possible moment, Lucas painted, wrote, drew, and acted in between classes and before and after school. “I loved the experimental and the community aspects of making art. I always felt free to explore whatever side of my artistic self I wanted to in all our classes—the teachers did a great job of starting us all with a project prompt and then just seeing where it would go. At a Hillbrook art show, you might walk past thirty ceramic pandas, but each one would be distinctly different from the other.” Hillbrook parent and teacher Mary Hammers said, “As long as I’ve known Lucas, I’ve been amazed by their drive to create, whether it’s painting, acting, bonsai, cooking, comedy, even duct tape creations.”
“At Hillbrook, art was always meant to be shared,” Lucas added. “I do hope to teach in some capacity one day, so I look forward to giving my students a very similar feeling.”
Just before their final year at the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU, the first wave of the pandemic overtook New York. Lucas found that their artistic passions—already a core piece of their life—became more than just creatively fulfilling. “It was a survival move,” Lucas said. “I’m a super stir-crazy person, so when we all got sent home and separated from the networks we had built up for ourselves––both professionally and personally––my first thought was how am I going to take care of myself? I always turn towards creativity in times like that, so I threw myself into every passion that I had. I started a digital magazine with a few friends, shot and edited a couple of comedy videos, painted—all sorts of stuff. I kind of tripped and fell into the glass opportunity in the wake of all that. The process was an extension of the way I already thought.”
Glassblowing requires a certain amount of natural ability, and an artistic legacy came directly from Lucas’s grandfather, an artist, teacher, and pioneer in American glassblowing. “He studied with Harvey Littleton, who is considered the godfather of the midcentury American glass art movement,” Lucas said. The movement was a leap forward for the American glassblowing industry, establishing artistic possibilities alongside its industrial and practical ones. Lucas’s grandfather was one of the first students in Littleton’s glassblowing introductory class (making him one of the first people to study glassblowing in an American university!) and continued on as a lifelong artist and professor, teaching glass arts at the Institute of Art in Chicago and establishing the glassblowing program at Virginia Commonwealth University. “Glass is absolutely in my genes, and I feel like the way I learned glass is through a bloodline of sorts. That’s my favorite part of the whole thing, especially because the tradition of glass blowing in Europe is a familial one; it’s a trade that is quite literally passed from generation to generation.”
The process was far from easy––learning how to sculpt molten glass is as much a study in heartbreak management as artistic creation. “Glass is equally as fragile when it’s hot as it is when it’s cold. You can do everything right through 90% of the process, have a beautiful piece that is nearly ready, and flub it at the last minute. I’ve spent upwards of an hour on some pieces only to have them die on me right as I’m about to finish them.” Lucas’s early apprenticeship was “pretty hands-off. [My teachers] coached me through the essentials for the first couple months…but beyond that they just kinda put the pipe in my hand and said go forth!” The sandbox approach allowed Lucas the artistic freedom to try again and again, wading through mistakes toward new benchmarks and triumphs as the months went on. “Once you grow accustomed to the indefinite amount of failure you face over and over and over again, blowing glass becomes a lot more like dancing. When you stop worrying about what you look like and just have fun with it, that’s when you really open yourself up to discovery.”
“When you stop worrying about what you look like and just have fun with it, that’s when you really open yourself up to discovery.”
After graduating from NYU in the spring of 2021, Lucas found work as a technician at UrbanGlass, one of the largest art studios in New York City; their sense of art as a joyful community experience has continued to expand in Lucas’s creative life. “Since moving back to New York and getting into the glass scene here, I’ve met all sorts of amazing people who make their living in glass in so many different cool and interesting ways. I was always told in drama school that work begets work, and I didn’t really believe it, because the acting industry is super-tough—but in glass, it’s totally true. The more you work with people, the more people you talk to both personally and on the studio floor, the more it opens doors for you. Glass is a niche industry in its own way, and uniquely connected because of it. The American glass movement is pretty young compared to a lot of other fine arts industries, so we all have to help each other.”
Glassblowing offered a surprising new use for Lucas’s theater training, as well; as their skills developed, Lucas discovered surprising parallels between stage and studio. “I’ve always been super-interested in intersectional practice in the art world––merging disciplines that one might not expect could work together.” Their acting experience had already revealed the extraordinary power of controlled breathing, and the power of a focused breath to create a scene and a sculpture. “Glass is a mysterious, elusive substance, and you have to listen and be observant, and listen to what IT wants to do. On a molecular level, there’s not a lot that behaves the way glass does. I learned something called the Meisner technique in acting, where your attention is on literally everything but yourself—you have to listen with more than just eyes and ears.”
As the simple act of breathing has taken on new meaning over the past two years (getting enough of it; the harm we might do with it) in Lucas’s studio breath has become a transformative force to create stunning works of art. “In glassblowing, all of your power comes from your own lungs,” they said. “When you breathe with intent, you’re creating an expanse within yourself. All of human life is centered on it.”