Robert Shield is a master craftsman of a dying art form
It’s kind of an epiphany when glass craftsman Robert Shield matter-of-factly points to a glittering orb in his display case and says, “ ... and that’s a vintage marble I made from dichro glass ...”
Wait. You mean, like the marbles I played with, collected, fawned over as a kid, rapt at how each seemed to contain its own tiny blossoming cosmos? Yes, there it is, a speckled supernova trapped in a gleaming sphere. And he made it!
To the soft-spoken Australian expat, it’s another example of the magical things you can make with glass — and, he says, a delicate token of a dying art form. Shield is the owner of the Hall of Antiquities shop in the Boulevard Mall and Studio Royal Glass Blowing Academy. He’s one of only a few glassblowers in Southern Nevada.
Shield’s attraction to the craft was part romance, part pragmatism. As a kid living in the Gold Coast of Australia, he used to watch with fascination the glassblowers plying their craft in the markets and malls. And, after several years as an apprentice in a glass art factory, upon leaving he was at a career crossroads.
“It was either going from the glassblowing apprenticeship to a studio or becoming the manager of a McDonald’s franchise,” he says. (Noting that most people nowadays would sooner buy cheap, mass-produced glassware from China than a handcrafted piece of art, he jokes that, hm, maybe he should’ve taken the McDonald’s gig.) Which isn’t to say that he didn’t suffer for his art along the way; when Shield first arrived in Las Vegas in 1994, he drove a cab for five years to pay the bills while he built his glassblowing business. “I had a studio in Henderson where I would teach students between rides, or after I finished my shift.”
He’s been at the Boulevard Mall for about a year and a half now, but the majority of his business is from teaching glasscraft to eager new students. His charmingly cluttered shop is full of eye-catching curios and antiques, but it’s his glass creations that inspire double-takes. Here are a few of his favorite things.