Cover artist Elliott Italiano of Jamestown is a self-made glass artist. As a young adult, Italiano’s interests centered on fashion, inspiring thoughts of pursuing a degree in luxury marketing and design.
He relates to his past self by being “very particular about how I look,” the artist explains. “I believe that how you present yourself is very important. And if you carry yourself a certain way, that shows confidence in who you are.”
As his interests shifted, he found himself drawn to the world of glass. “I had bought a lot of glass pieces, and I wanted to find out how to make them,” he recalls. After serving a six-month apprenticeship, he opened a private studio with his girlfriend Franki eight years ago. It’s located in a workshop bay in an industrial park in Saunderstown.
There, the glass blower crafts such smoking and vaping items as slides, puffco glass attachments, dab rigs, recyclers, and bongs, along with ornamental pieces such as pendants, marbles, and homeware.
For Motif’s Cannabis cover, Italiano made a ten-millimeter rig for smoking concentrates. It stands six-and-a-half inches tall. The base is a trapezoidesque shape where two tubes attach to a sculptured head of the Lovecraftian creature Cthulhu. Another tube, which runs from the back of the head, attaches to a funnel. Water goes up, hits the funnel, and tornados back down. “You won’t lose water level,” he says.
Italiano says the rig is a collaboration with his friend Al, a sculpture artist, who made the head. “He’s eccentric. He makes space aliens, and Cthulhu of course, and is working in claymation right now.”
In crafting the piece, Italiano used eleven layers of color. “There’s a sparkle to it, and I used some uranium glass. It takes time to do something like that, but it’s well worth the effect,” he comments.
Italiano says it takes a lot of dedication and time to be a glass artisan, and a lot of struggle, too. And he relishes every minute of it.
“I’m most comfortable when I’m not comfortable. I want to be challenged every time. I look at it this way: There is no ceiling, and you can always get better,” he explains.
Perseverance is important, he points out. Working with glass tests you all the time. That’s because the glass might break during the process. And when that happens, you have to be prepared to move on, he advises.
“Once, I was on the last step in building a rig, with layered tubing. Then I heard a tink. When reheating, the seam had opened up.” That made the material unusable. “I had to start all over,” he relates.
Italiano has always been around art. His Mom is a potter, and he recalls growing up in Newport Art Museum’s Coleman Center. “I was raised in the art scene. And I always saw that my Mom was hard on herself in critiquing her own pottery work. I picked up some of that from her,” he says. He made ceramic pieces back then.
After graduating North Kingstown High School, Italiano attended Community College of Rhode Island for a bit. He had his sights set on the fashion world, but turned to glassblowing instead.
“I want to be the best that I can be. I do not want to just take up space,” he says. “Every piece I make reflects back on me. And I want to do ten percent better every time. It’s a matter of refine, refine, refine. I ask myself: What can I do better? And it will show.”
He’s driven by the desire to excel, to fight against complacency, and to make his work clean and correct. He tries to make a new piece every week, with preparation taking two days, usually.
And his favorite piece?
“My favorite piece is the next piece, because I always want it to be a bit better than the last,” he concludes.
–John Picinich
Italiano’s work can be viewed on Instagram @elliottsglass.