In the glass community of Eugene, artists are extremely protective of their ideas.
Tim Jarvis, glass studio technician at the EMU Craft Center, differs from this trend, exemplifying “open-source” with each and every class he teaches.
He wears prescription-tinted glasses: an emblem of commitment to his passion. He could juggle a pole of 2,250-degree molten glass through paper houses and around hot souffles, keeping them intact while blasting funk tunes. He works with deft and flair, using both the insecurities and attributes of his team to enhance the final product. As he drinks tap water from his homemade glass, he calls out to two of his students who are distracting the group with gossip.
“Did you sign up together?” he inquires with a smile. “Are you going to make the same thing?”
The two students look at each other, embarrassed, but resume their post in the hot-shop with a newfound confidence, eager to push the envelope.
“It’s veiled encouragement,” he comments.
Born in Indiana, Jarvis started out in medical illustration. With hospital-paid tuition and a fat grip of cash to supply the party scene of his circle of friends, he was content for a brief period of his post-adolescence. Yet magnifying microscopic cell walls as a way to release inner creativity did not quite cut it. After dropping his scholarship and trying sculpturing for a hot minute, he stumbled upon a non-profit art school across town.
It was here that Jarvis entered the world of glass blowing.
“I was a complete hack when I moved to Eugene,” Jarvis said. “I knew what I knew from what I broke, which was about 90 percent of what I made. My vision for the possibilities was very confined. But I pretty much knew from the time that I first tried to gather glass in Indiana that it was just something that was going to eat at me until I figured it out.”
The road to glass success was a tad less luxurious than a hotel-lobby chandelier.
His fiancée at the time got him in gear to move out to Oregon. He told her he would look up and down the West Coast for the best glass program, but he was always drawn back to Eugene. He originally got his start with a high-profile glass artist, an abrasive individual he would learn to, in a way, love and loathe.
“I had a production job of holding a cane,” Jarvis said. “I was promised pay but never was. The head of the team didn’t appreciate any of his assistants whatsoever. He was the biggest asshole you’ve ever met in your life. He would burn you on purpose and feed his ego. I have permanent wrist damage from working under him. I learned from the best of how to be an asshole. It ultimately taught me what not to do and how to respect and utilize all members of the collective.”
Jarvis then spent time studying under a glass master in Italy, and when he returned to Eugene there was a job opening at the EMU in the hot shop. His competition was fierce: four contestants holding glass degrees and two displaying Master’s of Fine Arts.
Jarvis had his high school diploma and ten slides of art.
“I am a big proponent of positive visualization,” Jarvis said. “This was my only chance at shifting the tides, of saying how it would go down. It was my only shot at starting a community that would be free of the first individual I worked under. This is a tight glass community, and he had gone on being an asshole for too long.”
Without any credentials, Jarvis beat out his competition. In 2006, he was hired as the head technician and teacher for the EMU Craft Center.
“Working here was a huge paradigm shift in what community meant to me,” Jarvis said. “They said, ‘We don’t care if you have a degree, as long as you don’t care.’ It is completely ironic that it happened at a university. It was then that I started thinking creatively about who I was, am, and where I wanted to go. More importantly, what I could do to make this place better.”
Since Jarvis was hired, he has turned one-dimensional torch workers into multi-faceted professionals. Some of his students have gone on to be high-profile technicians.
“The technicians that come out from under him don’t understand the gift they have,” said Rick Larson, a five-year student of Jarvis. “He can work in one room, all the time, with all the levels. He gave me the freedom to discover myself through the possibilities. He allowed me to play with the gray area.”
Now that freedom is in jeopardy.
Today, Jarvis and his students don’t know how long the craft center community will continue. While hundreds of community members, students and faculty alike, use resources and classes beside one another, the bottom-most corner of the EMU fails to generate the revenue comparable to a ballroom concert. At this point in time, there is no clarity in the EMU expansion plan on whether the craft center will even exist.
“We may be the only entity within the EMU that actually demonstrates the mission statement,” Jarvis said. “Yet people are concerned because we eat funds and nothing but education leaves our doors. Here you have a voice, regardless of your credentials, age or life experience. I don’t know if I get that feeling from many other places in the community.”
I hope that voice isn’t cut away with the blueprint.
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