Catching Light: Artist Bob Pozarski’s Creative Journey

For about 50 years, Bob Pozarski has been making glass into art. The medium has always fascinated him.

“As a kid, I would get in trouble for breaking glass. I’d hold it up to see the light refracted and play with lenses and prisms,” recalls the Akron resident and owner of Ohio Art Glass.

He taught himself how to create stained-glass artworks from books. After getting a degree in education from Kent State University, he opened Ohio Art Glass in 1976. He started using traditional decorative glass styles like Tiffany, Art Nouveau and more modern types of glass.

“I made roses and irises, peacocks, parrots and countless cardinals,” Pozarski says. “I cut colored glass into shapes that fit like a puzzle, wrap each piece with copper tape and solder all the edges together.”

In the 1990s, he taught himself glass fusing from books. Then in 2000, he accepted an invite to a glassblowing class in Kent. His first piece was a small cup. He has learned more intricate glass skills and now teaches beginning and advanced glassblowing at Peninsula Art Academy. All these new techniques had the goal of using the new handmade glass in his leaded art glass windows.

Today, his windows incorporate myriad pieces of original blown and fused glass. Each year he makes a special window from the best homemade pieces.

His most recent, “Sun Worship 31,” features a beveled sun focal point. Having learned pottery at Cuyahoga Valley Art Center, Pozarski created a mold out of stoneware clay for the sun’s face. He then filled it with gold glasses and fired it. A 1-inch-thick diamond is made from cast glass that’s been ground and polished into a jewel. A long piece of glass features a twisted, pulled cranberry-colored helix.

A disc-shaped rondel features swirly orange-inside-purple Murrini, which is a challenging method that results in intricate patterns. To create it, three people worked with molten glass and stretched it out into 50-foot rods.

“For Murrini, we drip one color over another and pull it into long rods. We cut the rods into discs to reveal the colored patterns inside,” Pozarski says.

Another feature in the window has yellow, white and purple flowers fused to clear glass. Pozarski makes these pieces with his sisters at art therapy classes at his home. A three-dimensional raindrop has swirls of purple, green and white.

“That started out as a chunk of fused glass. I blew it into a bubble, sliced it in half with a diamond saw,” he says.

These Sun Worship windows are his favorite pieces, as they showcase the scope of his skills that have taken five decades to perfect.

“I like the optical effects of thick glass,” Pozarski says, “the colors you get from lenses and prisms.”

Stop by his booth at Hudson’s Art on the Green Aug. 29 and 30, Stan Hywet Hall & Gardens’ Ohio Mart Oct. 1 to 4 and E.J. Thomas Hall’s Christmas Arts & Crafts Show Dec. 4 to 6. Find blown cups, bowls, vases and more. A recent tulip vase featured fused glass butterflies, Murrini tulips and a 3D glass vine wrapped around it. He also sells popular glass orbs.

“You gather a blob of molten glass, roll it in crushed colored glass called frit, melt it all together and blow,” Pozarski says. “Twist it against the steel table to make it spiral.”

He loves to interact with festivalgoers and customers and may ask them to send a picture of their piece in its forever home.

“A lady called me up once, and said, Bob, I got up this morning, and there’s a big rainbow across my refrigerator,” he recalls of a leaded art glass piece in a kitchen. “It brings some joy.”

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