Local glassblower featured on Season 4 of Netflix’s ‘Blown Away’

Experimental glass artist Robert Burch likes to break the rules.

“I work a lot with stone and glass and steel and wood, and that is sort of rare in the glassblowing field,” he said. “That makes me stand out in some ways, and in others, it sort of ostracizes you from the community because we all know that all fields have rules that they construct for each other to follow. And when you don’t follow them, it throws people off. I focus on mixing mediums with glass because that’s my wheelhouse.”

The artist began his creative journey as a student at the Colorado Rocky Mountain School (CRMS) in Carbondale. He initially planned to pursue photography but was turned off by the amount of manipulation and editing that came with the medium.

“Like everyone here (in this valley), my background included a lot of skateboarding, skiing, and snowboarding,” he said. “As soon as I started working with glass, it felt like the closest I could get to the adrenaline junkie stuff was in a glass studio, so that’s how that transition transpired.”

He said since he was 16, the excitement of glasswork has been a constant. It has taken him from apprenticing in a factory setting and attending the Pilchuck Glass School to relocating to Seattle and working with renowned artist Martin Blank for five years. During that time, he learned about the art-making process, including shipping, metal fabrication, and cold working, which led to collaborating on the color design team for Chihuly Inc.

The desire to pursue his work brought him back to the Roaring Fork Valley.

“I slowly started pushing my gallery work because being an artist assistant can be sort of a road to nowhere,” he said. “It’s a pretty hard way to make a living, and it’s very physically demanding, very hard on your body. So I moved back to the valley, and I taught at CRMS for a year. My aunt lives in Missouri Heights, and I built a tiny house to lower my overhead. I call that like my grad school time where it was sort of on me to start making my creative work and focus less on income from other people.”

The leap of faith is starting to pay off. These days Burch’s work is exhibited at Raven Gallery in Aspen, and he is working on an exhibition at The Launchpad in Carbondale on June 7.

“I would say it’s a slow Sisyphus-like walk uphill; every year interest in my work goes up,” he said. “I just got picked up by a place in Brussels, and I have a piece in this fancy show north of Tokyo. So it’s like a steady walk uphill.”

Additionally, after a couple of tries to join Netflix’s glassblowing competition show “Blown Away,” he was cast for Season 4, in which 10 artists are competing for a chance to win a $100,000 prize package.

He said he learned a lot about branding himself as an artist, and that there is no better way to get awareness of your brand and work out to a larger audience than appearing on a television show. But it’s the small community of fellow glass artists that was the highlight of the experience for him.

“The best part was interacting with the other contestants because it’s a really small community,” he said. “I knew about half of them, and we’ve all been checking in with each other to make sure the internet hate is not too much or checking in to make sure everyone is okay. There are a lot of opinions that swirl around, both hate and love. So that part was nice.”

Sarah Girgis is the Arts and Entertainment Editor for The Aspen Times. She can be reached at 970-429-9151 or sgirgis@aspentimes.com.