Toss a sheet of paper towards the furnace that keeps Kimberly Erickson’s glass in a liquid state, and the paper will disappear in a poof of smoke when it gets about six inches from the mouth of the glowing orange heat.

When she’s in town and blowing glass, Erickson runs the furnace at about 2,000A1 Fahrenheit 24-7. “It’s about 130A1 where I’m working in front of the glory hole,” she says.

One thing’s proven: Erickson can take the heat. But don’t even ask about her studio’s heating bill.
Fortunately, this artist has met with enough success to pay the bills. For the last eight years, her work has been represented by Pismo in Denver and Beaver Creek. Pismo, a top-tier glass gallery, also represents such luminaries as Italy’s Lino and American glass guru Dale Chihuly.

“Kim’s work has very nice and vibrant color, very nice form. Her style is different from anything else we carry,” says the gallery’s owner, Sandy Sardella, who also appreciates Erickson’s ability to mix clear glass with colored. “Most don’t combine them, and with Kim’s work, the clear really magnifies the colored.”

The color in Erickson’s work typically draws from murrini, a glass also known as mille fiore, Italian for a thousand flowers. By layering glass and allowing fluid hues to blend and overlap almost like watercolors, Erickson creates an infinite palette of tertiary colors all her own.

Along with color, weightiness distinguishes her work. Though some of her lamps and plates are more delicate, many of her vessels are substantial as bowling balls.

In addition to exhibiting in half a dozen other galleries around the nation, Erickson also shows her work in about 15 arts festivals per year. When she and her husband, Cliff, set up their tent at the Cherry Creek Arts Festival in July, they’ll be putting down stakes of a groundbreaking sort.

Sardella applauds Erickson’s Cherry Creek Arts Festival coup: “It’s very exciting. There are about 200 participants and 2,400 applicants. Some artists who have won in various categories are invited back, but otherwise they have to be juried back in each year. For Kim, it’s definitely quite a feat. A lot of glass artists apply who haven’t gotten in. It’s one of the top-rated outdoor shows in the country.”

The Ericksons’ arts festival kiosk will exhibit a variety of pieces. Amazon perfume bottles, totems, goblets with columns — there’s something vaguely mythical about the labels Erickson loosely uses to categorize her works.

Given her hypnotically repeating patterns and her signature bubbles added to create reflections and refraction — a cosmos and a microcosm in each paperweight — there’s something enchanting, indeed, about Erickson’s art.

“The first thing, aside from the look, is that it’s beyond one’s reach. Anyone can play with a clump of clay or paints, but with glass — there’s something magical to it,” she says, touching one of the vessels she nicknamed an Amazon perfume bottle.

At 6’1”, the artist is tall enough to qualify as one of the mythical warrior women. Erickson takes her art seriously, but she doesn’t take herself too seriously. She giggled like a schoolgirl when she told a tale about some clients who purchased a pair of her plates.

“They said they keep them on display in the steel stand most of the time, but they do take them down for Thanksgiving and use them for the potatoes and gravy,” she laughs. “I said, ‘It’s glass. It won’t hurt them. Just don’t put them in the dishwasher.’ I really don’t care if people use them for fruit salad. I just want them to enjoy the pieces.”

Part of what’s so enjoyable about Erickson’s pieces is their singularity, a quality she cultivates. She explains, “One reason my work is different is that I didn’t learn glassblowing in the usual way.”

That’s putting it mildly.

Erickson took a circuitous route to glass art. She began her career as an interior designer, but soon found her hopes threadbare. “I viewed it as an artistic form,” she says, “but I knew I didn’t want to do it forever.”

Still living in her native California, she went to graduate school and got a master’s degree in fibers. As a girl, she’d made clothes for her trolls, and she’d done a lot of needlepoint and other stitchery. But more than the medium, Erickson was attracted to the color.

“It was mainly about the dyeing of the colors and combining them,” she says, “which is similar to what I do now.”

Erickson went on to earn a Master of Fine Arts degree. She credits Frank Cummings, then associate dean of the art department at Cal State-Fullerton, for helping her find her own range.

“It was very important to him that students develop a program unique to them,” she says. “I worked in mixed media. I was casting and anodizing aluminum and did an independent study in the glass department. I was using wood and clay and all these media, and it was wonderful because I wasn’t conforming to what a crafts degree had to be.”

At the same time, Erickson taught part time at local colleges, instructing art students in jewelry making, three-dimensional design and art field studies.

“I hadn’t decided my passion,” she says. “But education is never wasted, and art education definitely is never wasted. I still think the medium is secondary to what you’re doing; you can create wonderful art with whatever.”

Before she picked up a glassblowing pipe for the first time, Erickson had been collecting contemporary blown glass for years. “I liked the heavy stuff,” she says, “and it always had something going on inside it.”

Erickson spotted an advertisement placed by a Southern California man with a mobile studio. He traveled around the country giving two-week primers in glassblowing. “The guy who taught me was really good. He was this 50-year-old hippie, a roly-poly guy totally bald except for this braid hanging out the back. He wore Jerry Garcia tie-dyed T-shirts,” Erickson recalls. “And other than that, I’m self-taught.”

Erickson remembers her first blown glass project: “We made a fish. There was no color. I hated it at first,” she says. “I thought, ‘Oh, great, I love glass, but I can’t do this.’ I was so frustrated. It just takes a while for it to click, even for somebody with all my art training.”

What her art training had not prepared her for was the fluidity of the glass. “You have to be so facile with the techniques and the materials,” she comments. “It’s a dance, and you have to learn the glass is moving all the time. Everything I do is in counts of 10.”

But once Erickson had learned the basic steps, she was off and waltzing with the glass. She rented studio space with one of the other three students in the glass class. “I knew what I wanted to do and started at it and just practiced,” she says. “I saw that you need to work more than four hours a week to make it click.”

She began blowing glass four days a week. “You end up throwing a lot away at first, and things don’t work out, but you get better at it,” she explains. Before she knew it, she was throwing away fewer pieces and saving more and eventually participating in art shows.

“After a couple of years, you have this stuff piling up. You can only give so much to your family for Christmas,” she says. “I had to do something with the stuff, and the sales help pay the bills. This is an expensive medium.”

And a medium fraught with uncertainties. She explains, “There are lots of surprises — some positive, some negative. The fire can send things in a whole different direction. It’s like Christmas every time you open the kiln. You don’t know what to expect. You have an educated guess, but you don’t know for sure.” The thicker pieces take three days to cool, gradually chilling six degrees per hour lest they crack in the process.

Some like it hot. And Erickson is one of them. She prefers the heat to the cold work — the cutting and polishing and fusing of the glass once cooled. “I hate the cold work,” she says. “It’s messy; it’s tedious; it’s heavy.”
So she did what any self-respecting woman would do: She turned it over to her husband of 28 years, Cliff Erickson, who had been downsized about a year and a half ago after more than 20 years with Snap-on-Tools. He has been forging the steel holders for his wife’s plates, as well as parts for her lamps and wall-hung pieces.

“Cliff is training himself to do cold work,” she says. “We’re both very independent, and we don’t work on anything at the same time.”

“Kim’s very territorial,” Cliff says with a smile, though it’s clear he’s serious.

Their 800-square-foot studio in an Aurora industrial warehouse includes, along with the furnace and kiln and glassblowing pipes, countless bowls of broken glass shards of all colors, lamp parts, plate stands, enormous Kevlar mittens and vats of pellets and shelves of glass parts for works-in-progress, bicycles and wheelbarrows and guitars and a lifetime supply of drinking straws that fit the 64-ounce mugs they use when working, traveling or hanging around tents at art shows.

Erickson has been blowing glass now for about 10 years. At age 48, she’s still developing new directions for her pieces. She hopes to work larger, though she does not plan to take on anything that requires her to have assistance.

“The direction is still assembled, but I’m heading more toward wall-hung things and working on a larger scale. For me, it’s more about the process,” she says. “I want people to enjoy the pieces. I’d like them to make people happy. Beyond that I don’t have any specific statements. I don’t have messages I want to send out through them like a lot of people do through their work, but I get certain feelings from them.”

What sort of feelings?

“When I sit at a show, waiting for it to start, I think they feel really peaceful,” she says. “The color is a visceral thing for me. They’re pretty, yes, but it goes a little deeper than that.”

That said, Erickson doesn’t make demands of her collectors. “Sometimes at shows, people think it has to match their home, and artists rail against that, but in a market where we’re making art available to live with on a day-to-day basis, that art should live comfortably in the environment,” says Erickson. “That goes back to my design background. The art doesn’t have to match the sofa, but it does have to live comfortably in the space.”

She gathers her inspiration from color sparks she notices in her everyday life. “Maybe it’s a really wild sunset,” she says, her eyes flashing. “Or I’ll be cruising around and see a butterfly. Sometimes it’s something in other people’s work. Or I’ll be watching TV and see a graphic for a local news channel, and the colors strike me. It’s just what I see. It’s all out there.”

Asked what she does for recreation, she sighs, “At this point, I don't have recreation.” She and her husband make the most of their travels, however. They’re renovating an Airstream so they can take their three cats — Emma, Norma and Phoebe — and a cockatoo named Leghorn on their trips to art shows. The couple enjoys stopping off at scenic spots like Yellowstone National Park or the Grand Canyon. “We’re outdoorsy,” she says, “but just being — not anything physical.”

Her work is physical enough. And while Erickson says she does not get sick of it, she does get tired. “It is very physical, and the way I work is I come to work and don’t take breaks. I work ‘til done, and then I go home,” she says.

“It’s just a compulsion. I’m compelled to do it,” she says of blowing glass. “There are times I’d just as soon not — especially in the summer.”

But as long as Erickson continues to face the heat, there’s no sign of her career cooling off.