Through the Looking Glass With Glass Artist and Teacher Bud Spindt

“You guys should come check out the sunset,” Bud Spindt calls from the doorway of his classroom at the Glass Fusion Collective in Nu‘uanu. “It’s pretty spectacular.”

Like everything about Spindt, a tall, soft-spoken man with a white beard, it’s a gentle beckoning. Blown glass, sandcast glass, mixed media sculpture​s​: For 15 years, while crafting pieces for commissions and exhibits around Honolulu, he’s taught novices the basics of fused glass.

For Spindt, glass holds boundless possibilities—capturing or refracting light, layering patterns, accommodating infinite shapes, colors, techniques. He studied at Washington’s Pilchuck Glass School, co-founded by iconic glass master Dale Chihuly, and has fine arts degrees from UH Mānoa. Commissioned by the state, he created for Mōkapu Elementary School Ae‘o, a 12-foot-tall stainless steel and glass tribute to the Hawaiian stilt. Other installations are at the Ritz-Carlton Kapalua and Windward Community College.

Why is a master artist teaching beginners? “There’s something that’s just really satisfying about being able to share all this knowledge I’ve accumulated so people can create art,” says Spindt, 80. “Most of them never came to art before. What I enjoy most is the fun people have with it.”

In his class, Spindt circulates. He shows one group how to lay glass stringers—colorful strands as straight and skinny as vermicelli—to create linear patterns. Another student holds up a perfect glass sphere she’s ​achieved​ with the tricky circular cutter. Spindt’s arms shoot up. “Woo-hoo​!​” he cheers. At the end of the night, he’ll lay their work in kilns that will fuse them into glossy compositions; a second firing later will slump them into finished shapes.

But first, the sunset. Spindt and his students watch the sun’s last rays paint the sky above the city in soft strokes of lavender and peach. “Pretty great, huh​?​” he says.

glassfusioncollective.com

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Mari Taketa is the dining editor of HONOLULU Magazine and editor of Frolic Hawai‘i.