Artist-glass maker David Hopman returned to Amador County in CA's Sierra Foothills after many years in the San Francisco Bay Area. A graduate in Zoology from U.C Davis, he was working at Stanford when he focused is artistic interest on glass.
Several years ago he began studying glass blowing at San Jose State.
In 2000, he decided to devote full time to his art as a zoologist and avid scuba diver he is strongly influenced by the natural world. It inspires the color and patterns he utilizes in the class and free form blown shape he creates.
Using a state of the art electric furnace, he melts glass batch brought in from the Netherland.
He then ads colors that come from as far away as New Zealand.
Working the glass at over 2100 degrees, he blows and hand shapes the piece to achieve a wide array of forms.
Many of the color patterns he has devised depend on complex and ever variable interactions
between the compounds used in the different color stocks.
