IT was the smell of ‘burning pork’ which first warned Peter Layton that a magical new way of making art, which he’d just discovered, had its dangers.
“At first I thought, ‘what is cooking?’ but then I realised it was the back of my hand,” recalls the veteran glassmaker. “And for a snap second I thought about struggling on because I had this precious thing I was making and I was loving it. But then I realised that was quite mad, so I threw it into a bin and ran somewhere to put some burns spray on my hand.”
The scar of that first attempt may have faded but Layton’s passion for glass hasn’t waned. Now 84 and the UK’s oldest glassblower, he recently celebrated the 45th birthday of his pioneering studio London Glassblowing. During that time, he has made pieces for everyone from Elton John to Jeremy Paxman and mentored a growing family of huge talents making the world glisten in this very specialised form of art.
“There is something magical about working with glass,” he says. “When it’s hot and flowing you have to make decisions rapidly. I love the feel of the heat when you are working with molten glass at about 1100 degrees centigrade — it has infinite possibilities when it comes to colour and form.
“It cools as you work and you can keep repeating and perfecting until you have created exactly what you want. It is seductive.”
Born in Prague — one of the world’s centres of glassmaking — ironically enough his non-artistic father was working in the admin side of a glass factory when the family was forced to flee the Nazis.
He was just two when his parents, who had both been born in Austria but had moved to Prague for work, got the last train out of Czechoslovakia in 1939. “I was so young that I don’t have much memory of it,” he says. “But even now I have stress dreams that involve trains. My parents never really liked to talk about what had happened and I regret that I didn’t ask more questions.
“All I know is that they left with one suitcase, one hat, one pair of trousers. My grandfather had been a well-known doctor in Vienna and, after being arrested once, had managed to escape to Bradford where he became the city pathologist. He sent my parents a coded message to get out of Prague while they could and a few days after we joined him in Bradford, war was declared.”
He grew up heavily involved in the Bradford and Leeds Habonim movement and it was on a kibbutz in Israel that he started to think about art as a career. “When I was there a well-known artist called Yona Mach took me under his wing for some reason and I became fascinated by art,” he recalls. He won a place at the prestigious Central School of Art and Design in London where he fell in love with creating ceramic pieces.
It was while he was working as a university lecturer in America that he first encountered glass art. Until the 1960s it was still very much a closed trade. “It was an ancient, ancient craft that was passed from father to son behind closed doors,” he says. “The Venetian glass artists would be so intent on no one spoiling their secrets that they would have assassins sent out to stop anyone they thought might give them away.”
In 1962 the artist Harvey Littleton, whose physicist father worked for a glass company and is remembered as the developer of Pyrex glassware, started what became known as the ‘studio glass movement’. He had eschewed following his father into physics but maintained his love of the extraordinary possibilities of glass. He loved art and decided to find a way to create glass in artists’ studios outside of the secret world of the traditional industry.
He started to show fellow artists how to work with glass. Layton was working at the University of Iowa at the time and had his first memorable attempt at glass making with Littleton. “People like me would never have had the chance to access glass until Littleton came along,” he recalls.
“He worked with a glass scientist to work out how to work a small furnace which could work in a studio in the same way that potters’ studios worked. He turned it into a global phenomenon.”
Back in in England, the word about glass art was being spread by the American Jewish artist Sam Herman who had trained with Littleton. Together, they created the British glass art scene.
Peter, a father of four, established his London glass blowing studio in 1976 and from the start it has been the opposite of the former closed-door world once enjoyed by glass artists. Anyone can walk into the studio in the shadow of the Shard and he is planning to reopen his glass blowing workshops which were a hit before the pandemic.
He is inspired by everything around him; his work includes tiny pieces with Van Gogh sunflowers to a huge 2.5m high pyramid in Novy Bor in the Czech Republic, a memorial to those who have died in a terrorist attack. His work sells for between hundreds of pounds and tens of thousands.
He has also served as mentor to several generations of award-winning glass artists. One of his latest protegés, Elliot Walker, and the recent subject of an exhibition was recently seen starring in the second series of Netflix’s Blown Away – the streaming giant’s glass version of Celebrity Masterchef.
“Part of my ethos has always been to train up and nurture the younger generation, or even a few generations,” says Layton. “Some of the work they have created is extraordinary. Glass isn’t an easy material to work with but everyone who comes into the studio is blown away by what we can do.
“I’m not sure if many of us will make a fortune but there’s something quite addictive about feeling that heat on your face.”
For more information on Peter Layton’s work and his studio
www.londonglassblowing.co.uk
