The Glass Alchemist

It all started with a seemingly endless stream of eighth graders who swarmed his studio every Wednesday for the glass-blowing demonstrations he’d agreed to do. “They weren’t the least bit interested in me or goblets,” Simpson says. But who wasn’t astounded by the recent Apollo 8 mission photos of Earth rising behind the moon, like a little blue marble with white swirls? So, he says, “One day l decided to make a planet for them, just a simple clear glass sphere with a little blue world inside, to show the kids some of the mechanics of how glass is made, but also to give them something more to think about.”

His first little planets were a big hit. Moreover, Simpson had landed on a potent creative direction, one that would meld interests discovered in childhood with his adult propensity for experimentation with chemistry, materials, and technique. “Over time, the planets became larger and more complex,” says Simpson, a master of understatement.

Now, more than 50 years after the artist took his first gather of glass from a furnace he had built in 1971 with a fellow student at Goddard College, he recalls the events of an ordinary childhood that somehow led to his extraordinary present: Sitting on the back porch of his home in South Salem, New York, with his father, gazing at the moon and stars, pointing out constellations. Family trips to the Hayden Planetarium in the American Museum of Natural History, where he marveled at meteorites and a lunar panorama. Watching the fish tank in his bedroom, a self-contained water world between earth and sky. Mountains of sci-fi novels he “consumed” as a kid, he says. Talk of building a telescope, and attempting to grind a lens for one as an early experiment in glasswork.

Simpson’s first major success began one day while he was experimenting with melting silver on the surface of amethyst glass and—almost by chance—created a unique new kind of glass, a cerulean blue he called “New Mexico.” A client who’d purchased a set of New Mexico goblets told Simpson that “drinking out of them was like drinking from the sky.” Simpson marveled at “how something as utilitarian as a wine goblet could conceptually represent so much more.”

With the income from selling these hand-blown goblets, in 1976 Simpson purchased the farm outside Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts, that would become his permanent studio. There, walking from his house to the barn almost every night to check on his glass furnaces, he is often inspired by thunderstorms, the night sky, falling meteors, or a rare aurora borealis.

Today, Simpson is revered as a pioneer in the studio-glass movement, having spent the past five decades inventing new color formulas and creating singular glass objects. Pieces in the Planets series are as small as marbles or as large as the 107-pound work from the Megaplanets series that resides at the Corning Museum of Glass. His platters, bowls, vases, “tektites,” “portals,” and other sculptural objects integrate his fascination with the astrophysical with ever more complex explorations into intricately layered colors, forms, and patterns.

One collector, smitten by Simpson’s paperweight-sized planets in a gallery 30 years ago, describes them as impressionistic. “They’re endlessly fascinating, a combination of serendipity and randomness and precision all in exquisite balance, and every time you look at them there’s something more to see.”

Diplomacy and Archaeology

One of Simpson’s megaplanets has served as “a terrific icebreaker, especially when I have challenging meetings,” says Sarah-Ann Lynch, US ambassador to Guyana. In her Georgetown, Guyana, residence, Lynch has exhibited several of Simpson’s pieces, including New Mexico and corona disks—curved platters a-swirl with Simpson’s experiments in color chemistry. The megaplanet, however, sits on a coffee table in the room where Lynch meets with business leaders and local politicians.

“It’s nice to start off talking about Josh’s planet, as everyone sees something different in its awe-inspiring details,” she says.

Lynch first met Simpson 40 years ago at a craft fair, where she purchased an early planet. She’s also held events featuring work by Simpson and local artists. “These are teachable moments for talking about craft and the value of local art and artists,” she says, “after which everyone is inspired and passionate about craft.”

Simpson’s work is held in the collections of the Corning Museum of Glass, the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague, and the Glass Museum in Lviv, Ukraine, among many others.

Simpson’s planets also live surreptitiously in the wild. Since the 1980s, the artist has been hiding them in places he’s visited throughout the world. He invites others to do the same. Through his Infinity Project, he has provided thousands of marble-sized planets to people around the globe who’ve hidden them in riverbeds, fields, forests, and graveyards; next to castles and nestled in schoolyards; on mountaintops and in ocean depths. Each of these orbs is marked with an infinity symbol. While some may be discovered quickly, others may remain hidden for centuries. Simpson considers each one an anonymous future gift to a complete stranger.

“I hope archaeologists hundreds of years from now will be confused about the meaning and purpose of the little spheres, wondering what they are and how they got there,” Simpson told Scientific American. There’s little question, however, how his planets ended up in space.