The artistry and wizardry of the Trabucco Studio
By Bob Davis
Photography by Jim Bush.
Victor is, in fact, a sleight-of-hand artist as well as a glass artist, and equates the passion and persistence required to perfect the manipulation of playing cards to the discipline required to perfect the manipulation of glass.
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The Trabucco team in action.
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A year later, the same author in the same publication writes of two other influential glass artists: Victor’s sons David and Jon. Together, the Trabucco team creates some of the most beautiful, most ambitious, and most sought after glass sculpture in the world. Their works are prized by collectors worldwide, and owned by presidents, heads of state, popular film and television entertainers, professional athletes, major corporations and the most respected museums.
Not bad for a one-time ironworker who, inspired by an artisan making novelties at the Boulevard Mall, went home to pound pop bottles, fire up a torch, and try his hand at this glass sculpting stuff.
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Trabucco's Lizard paperweight.
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Trabucco's Lizard paperweight.
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Victor is, in fact, a sleight-of-hand artist as well as a glass artist, and equates the passion and persistence required to perfect the manipulation of playing cards to the discipline required to perfect the manipulation of glass. He created a magical effect performed by David Copperfield on one of his television specials in which a borrowed ring appears around the center of an hourglass, while the sand still flows through the glass. It’s a secret he guards as closely as he guards many of the specialized glass sculpting methods and machinery he and his sons developed to create unique works of uncompromising quality and beauty.
Vic, say his contemporaries, is the glass artist’s glass artist.
Not that he’d say so himself. Ask the Trabuccos—artists who raise the bar so high that their contemporaries ask them to consider leaving a flaw or two in their work just to give them a break, artists who are asked to teach in Italy because they’d be “like gods over there”—how they can be major global influences in their specialty and not let it go to their heads, and they’ll quickly put their life’s work in perspective:
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Trabuccos in the studio.
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They laugh, and Victor says that even though, “it’s nice that people think of your work like that, you’ve still got to sell it.”
Jon agrees. You go to a convention, get a lot of adulation, “but then you go months and you’re just in here working. Still, it makes you feel pretty good. When you’re tired and working on a piece and it’s really frustrating and you just want to give up, it pops in your head that there are collectors out there who really appreciate it. It gives you that energy to put that much more back into the piece.”
“It pushes you,” says Dave.
“You can never let down.” adds Victor “It has to be right.”
The Trabuccos assert that—as innovative as they are—they’re merely carrying on in the tradition of those who went before them. They are keenly yet modestly aware of their position on the glass sculpting timeline and of the honor and responsibility that brings.
As an illustration, consider the prized Pantin lizard paperweights, of which about a dozen were created in the nineteen century. “The technique was dormant all those years,” Victor explains. “No one could recreate it. If you look at the ones in the Corning Museum you’ll notice a lot of technical problems—like breaking, distortion, bubbles—that we were able to solve.”
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Trabuccos in the studio.
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Jon adds, “It’s picking up where other craftsmen left off. You’re taking their life’s work and expanding it. The first time I saw one of those Pantin lizards, my brother and I were about eleven years old. A dealer handed it to us, and everybody in the room froze. We handed it back and my dad asked ‘Do you know how much that paperweight cost that you just held?’ It was about $150,000! But to create something and have that kind of appeal?—to have people have that kind of reverence for the work pushes you. You know, as time goes on, this is a piece that somebody’s going to feel the same way about. And they do today, which is unusual for an artist to get some of that feedback during their lifetime. Not waiting for years down the road when they’re gone.”
When the Trabucco sons look at their lizards, as if gazing into a crystal ball, they see centuries past and centuries in the future. They are carrying on not only the work of the old masters, but also the work of their father. Yet when they started out, they questioned their talent.
“Dad’s pieces were so realistic, and at such a high level. How could we start at that level? How could we produce something in this studio that would be up to that caliber? We’d watch him and take notes. We’d make a section and give it to him and watch him refine it. He’d take a little off this area, he’d stretch that area. Next time I’d make it better, closer.”
As a teacher, Victor’s approach was both hands-on and hands-off. “I just let them make things. Like a leaf or a little branch. I wouldn’t be critical of it; I’d put those pieces away. Then maybe six months later?—Remember when I brought out some of the branches and said ‘look at them’ and you said ‘oh, wow, this looks kind of stiff?’ Then they could see it for themselves. ...They stayed on one thing and got the bugs worked out of it. David and John are second to none in this country; I’d put them against anybody.”
Getting to this level involved incredible discipline, but, according to Dave, it’s a family trait. “My son’s exactly the same way. He’s nine. Everything he does is the same way, over and over. Real repetitive. Which is good when you really want to excel in something.”
Victor equates the discipline to magic, his other avocation. “A lot of the enjoyment is just rehearsing a move. For me, a lot of times I actually like practicing even more than performing. I’ve put so much time into this one particular technique; you obsess about it. It’s the millions of times you think about it; sitting there for hours a day doing the same move over and over for years and years. It’s crazy, but it’s the only way you get good at it.”
Though the pursuit of perfection may be solitary, it’s not solo for the Trabucco trio. They work the way they converse, almost as a single-minded, three-headed entity:
“I remember Dad would come over with the hot glass. We’d just stare at it, watch the whole time to see exactly what the glass is doing. How it reacts.”
“It’s giving you information.”
“I’m finding out how if I take a raspberry and it’s really big and I have a big flower right next to it, and I see that glass coming down and see how it reacts, then the next time I’ll move that around, change the spacing and see how that reacts…”
“You know what you can do.”
“You know how the glass is gonna react…”
“But you’re pushing at the same time to see how far you can go.”
“When I was young I used to make models and stuff. Everybody asks you ‘What do you wanna do?’ I was twelve or thirteen and thinking I really like making stuff. At the time I was helping dad working on some of those marble bases. I used to sand the tops and clean them for him. And I looked over at him at the torch and thought, ‘oh, my God. He’s making models. He’s doing it for a living and he’s right here.’ And I’m thinking that would be pretty cool.”
Victor smiles. He remembers that man at the mall, making those novelties out of glass. “I said this is just like close-up magic. It’s really so refined, you can develop surgical skills on it. And you can do such detail that you couldn’t do in furnace work.”
Another Trabucco enters the family room/gallery. Bev—Victor’s wife, who assisted him in the studio before the boys joined Dad, and who now manages the business—offers lunch. It’s time to go, but first Victor Trabucco shares a gift of glass he created for a fellow conjurer. It’s a magic wand, crafted of crystal. Quite a prize, to be sure, from the Vernon of glassworkers.
Work from the Trabucco Studio may be seen at Jenss Décor, and at www.buffalocrystal.com.
Bob Davis is President of Wizard Creative, Inc. and a full-time business writer.
William Castle
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