Meet Prentice Hicks

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Prentice Hicks. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Prentice below.

Prentice , so good to have you with us today. We’ve always been impressed with folks who have a very clear sense of purpose and so maybe we can jump right in and talk about how you found your purpose?

I found clay in high school art class. It allowed me to turn fantasy into reality in the shape and hue of native American water vessels. At least that what what my imagination told me they were. I realized I was on to something, summer jobs were work, parking lot attendant, trash can emptier, yard work, and I knew I didn’t want to work a regular living, why not make art or craft and connect it to people who appreciated such. So I looked for colleges with clay programs, two at either ends of the US, as far away from home as continentally possible, and three more in the South. The best outcomes I saw at Newcomb College in New Orleans. The grad student making larger than life hand built rabbits did it for me. So there I got a BFA in clay. The last year Gene Koss, the clay professor, opened a hot glass studio in a shed outside the art building and I joined 11 other students in that first session as an elective. I did the next semester and then a summer session helping Gene make his work and graduated. I was pretty much dead last in ability and competence but I found a connection when the outcome could live long enough to enter an annealer and survive. That about a tenth of what survived had quality was no matter, I knew I could work with this stuff and make results that people would want. It was just a matter of time. Work out of college was as a mariner, a grad student friend had his captain’s license and he made good sense that I could work on a boat two weeks, go home the other two and slowly put a studio together. I very much remember the first morning mopping mud from the cabin from 60 guys coming on board the night before during a rainstorm. That turned into seven years off and on a mariner, two captain’s licenses, passport and three different countries working on oilfield and sailing vessels. I knew as a mariner if I put in the focus, the work with responsible competent input would create the result I wanted which was more income in the time I invested by more leadership in that occupation. All the while my eye was set on having my own place with my own glass studio to go back to that original reality I could make, work 40-60 hours a week and charge folks for honest outcome.

Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?

I make my living blowing glass drinking vessels, they are a bit my own off kilter design, a bit the same as has been for millennia, a cylinder or jug that does not leak or spill and holds liquid for consumption. Three friends and I put together a traditional post and beam studio frame in May of 1983. The previous six months I worked off Trinidad and Tobago skippering a boat on an offshore pipeline construction job to pay for material and labor. The whole of business buildout, tools, facility, utility setup came together on a cash basis, when I had the money I got raw material or tools and went to work. The melt furnace I have today is a copy of the original one I built which is a takeoff of one at Penland School I saw in 1987 in the studio Kenny Carder was in as an emerging professional artist. Visits to multiple artists’ studios including Harvey Littleton and Mark Peiser showed me if they had the vision and drive to make their way, so could I. The refractory knowledge I acquired in part from that time in Penland and from other hot shops and refractory suppliers. I found a refractory engineer willing to run diagnostic of my furnace design with my thicknesses and compositions of hot face and cold face refractories and he told me my heat input would make the inside 2400F and the outside 150F. His work was spot on, I could pay my propane bill with job I had as carpenter and that major part of the studio was in place. I had a fifth grader skill with welding, used that where the outcome wasn’t as visible as work I wanted to look professional and got furnace, reheat furnace, bench, marver, yoke and so on made and ready to go. Form wise, I picked up a form I liked during the elective in college and worked on refinement along with a number of other container designs that I didn’t mind doing a lot of. One major way I kept myself from going off in design tangents was a break I got in a street fair in 1993. A jeweler there did a wholesale show in Baltimore the next February, she’d been doing that event for several years and was the producer. I asked did she need a glass artist. She let me in. I had a focus then, three to four low to mid range price drinking and dessert vessels and a couple of high end containers. My color palate was minimal but it worked. I had two gallery consignment accounts then, that income was sporadic, art shows were okay to pitiful. Potatoes were a steady food source in spite of nutritional questions. Come February I drove to Baltimore, I had friends there from Newcomb Art, they hosted me, and I set up at the Hyatt Harborplace for a 4’ by 8’ display of my work, with price sheet and bio ready. I had an invoice book and pen to take orders, stomach issues from the stress, and there was snow everywhere, so bad I had to leave the apartment early to get downtown. I knew it was bad, I didn’t know fully, the whole Eastern seaboard was digging out of a blizzard and the wholesale show the prior weekend in Philadelphia was bad, really bad, attendance such you could bowl in the aisles and hit no buyers. So that opening morning in Baltimore with me hoping to get a month of sales for the show, I got writer’s cramp taking orders, had to leave at noon and get another invoice book, that one was full. I still almost cry reliving it, three months work in the first morning, six months for the whole two and a half day show. It was wild, I sold the stock from the show to one buyer, he needed it for a new store he was opening. I could afford to go home too! That week and the run up were catalyst to an occupational focus, make a decent living selling to galleries, make a hopefully better one selling at street fairs. Doing both takes a serious level of responsibility and good cash flow. The business plan was working, plan being make some more than what it costs to operate. No banker or credit card was involved, credit was something I did not have and risk was more what I learned as a mariner, be vigilant, make or have good tools you can afford, and turn out first rate product you are excited to sign your name to. Also I learned good skills just like I did on boats, when something doesn’t go to plan, have skills and or replacement parts to resolve what ails and move on. I also learned very well when asked difficult questions about my work to look people in the eye and be honest no matter what, people value real more than artifice especially when the seller is the maker. One totally has to be able and willing to do that as a craftsman, at the end of the day a major part of our income is the integrity with which we transact. The best part of the interaction is getting to know the folks that like the work enough to take it home and enjoy it themselves. A valuable lesson gifted me by my maritime mentor is that once we make it, it’s no longer ours, it belongs to the rest of the world.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

One financial guru I listened to with the radio on while working said of self employed, “there are two kinds, those who are doctors, lawyers, or accountants or engineers, that is, professionally trained, and those who have the passion, attitude, and determination to take their idea and make it work.” My dad shared that a job worth doing is a deed worth doing well. I learned the basics of carpentry from him and saw his engineer’s attention to quality outcome. I learned working on a traditional rigged schooner that the best way to learn competent process was to watch others do it and learn those dance moves like the natural flow they were. I’ve gotten better at glass incorporating what knowledgable assistants do that makes the process go more smoothly. Playing football, with the foot, not hands, in high school showed me how teamwork can coherently produce better results with less sweat as long as all the minds and bodies work together to get to the result. Ego has to sit on the sidelines. That is probably the most difficult lesson to absorb, to acknowledge the greatest tool we have is our mind, and that we need to know when to not allow it to be in charge but be in process. And to be honest and true to one’s self, with the trash can as the most valuable tool in the studio. Maryon, my wife, has been the greatest asset to this trade, finding, blending and using glass color to create a vibrant palette from which people love to have.

Alright, so before we go we want to ask you to take a moment to reflect and share what you think you would do if you somehow knew you only had a decade of life left?

Yes, I put a roof on the garage I built 16 years ago. It’s the third post and beam structure we have on the place, current studio was the second. I put the 5 v screwed on metal roof on wrong in 2008 and had to replace it. I’ve had a fascination with traditional standing seam roofing and decided to pay someone to do their version of it with good quality materials. I wrested a fair part of the job from them, the skill and tools needed to do it did not exist in their inventory. I had neither as well, so I got basic tools needed and self taught/learned the skill. It is not perfect, there are a couple of buckets of parts I made and then snip cut away to redo it right. I have a glimpse at an old trade I have always admired and wondered about and now have rudimentary knowledge of. The outcome does depend on the input and I totally see that I get better with more practice, push past the failures, and work on to the successes. Experiential knowledge is everything it is cracked up to be no matter the avocation, I always thank the flight crew for the trip, and the nurse for the stick when drawing blood. One can spot a practiced person who is thoughtful and thinking on their feet well.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://prenticehicks.com
• Instagram: wauhatchie_glassworks