As a boy, Bob Kuster could always find
solace in his father’s garage workshop. Amid well-ordered tools and the sweet smell of cut wood, he and his dad spent hours on their model-train layout, creating lifelike villages and undulant landscapes with forested hills and winding rivers. “It was a place I could go where I wasn’t going to do something wrong,” he says. School was the other kind of place. Growing up in Kendall Park, Kuster chafed in the classroom, struggling to maintain focus and even to sit still. When he was around fifteen, he was tested by a psychologist who diagnosed him as having attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder and dyslexia and prescribed medication and therapy. “I found out the hard way, going through nine years of school,” Kuster says, “until someone finally said there was a new...

BUBBLING UP: Kuster's fanciful sculptures and chandeliers fetch up to $25,000

each.

...name for what I had. I needed to be doing something at all times, and I loved making things. I knew there was something inside me; I just didn’t know what.”
Kuster, 53, takes ADHD medication to this day. “I’m a lot more
productive with it than without it,” he says. “I can focus better. It makes my
life so much easier.”

Wearing a Hawaiian shirt aswim with koi, Kuster sits in his garden just outside his glass-making studio in Hillsborough. After a first career as a woodworker building custom furniture and clocks, Kuster in the past fifteen years has become an accomplished glass sculptor. He is best known for his anemone-like chandeliers, which sell for $3,000 to $25,000, depending on size. Each is made of hundreds of twisting, tapering tentacles of colored glass fastened to a steel frame that can’t be seen once the work is fully assembled.
Kuster’s tentacles are reminiscent of one of the shapes that Seattle’s Dale Chihuly
cycled through in the course of becoming probably the most famous contemporary
glass artist working today. “It’s clear where my influence comes from,” Kuster
acknowledges.
But where Chihuly seems driven to create fanciful new shapes and effects,
Kuster has transformed a small vocabulary of shapes (which he refers to
variously as horns, pods, or gourds) into an aesthetic language of
surprising richness and complexity.

KICKING GLASS:
Here, Kuster pain-
stakingly installs the "Burning Cloud" at Restaurant Nicholas.

Kuster’s recognition took a great leap forward in 2004. Ben Salzmann, president and CEO of Acuity, a large insurance company based in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, was vacationing with his wife in a small Wisconsin town when their eyes were drawn to a stunning assemblage of glass icicles in a gallery window. At first glance, the Salzmanns thought it might be a Chihuly, but on closer inspection they discovered it was a Kuster—a name not yet known to them.
As it happened, Salzmann was looking to commission an artist to create a permanent installation in the galleria of Acuity’s new, 450,000-square-foot headquarters. After meeting with Kuster, Salzmann gave him the job and never looked back.
“I met him and just said, ‘This is someone I can count on,’” Salzmann recalls. “We live in a world of risk, but the thing I’ve learned is that when you see a human being you trust, you go with it. He’s an outstanding artist, without the depression and the despair. He’s not a Van Gogh cutting off his ear. He brings joy.”
Kuster created more than 14,000 handblown glass tendrils and assembled them into seven spherical chandeliers, each 12 to 15 feet in diameter. The painstaking process, as well as the striking results, was recorded in a PBS documentary, The Seven Sisters, A Creation in Glass, which aired in 2005. Kuster earned a fee of $1 million for The Seven Sisters, as the project came to be known. Hanging in Acuity’s glass-enclosed galleria with its 50- and 100-foot ceilings, the illuminated globes are visible from a nearby highway. Salzmann says people often pull over and get out of their cars just to look at Kuster’s work.
Last year, Nicholas and Melissa Harary, owners of Restaurant Nicholas in Middletown, commissioned a sprawling, 600-piece Kuster chandelier for their main dining room. Kuster installed it in July, starting on a Monday when the restaurant was closed and working straight through the night and into the next day.
The red and orange tubes conjure contrasting images for Nicholas Harary, who is also the restaurant’s chef. “It’s like something you’d see if you were scuba diving along a coral reef, or something that has just burst into flames,” he says. The Hararys dubbed the chandelier Burning Cloud.

Remnants of recent projects fill Kuster’s garden. Suspended on fishing line are hundreds of bubble-like spheres that he produced in 2006 for Quark Park, an exhibit on the Princeton campus in which artists interpreted the work of university scientists—in Kuster’s case, a robotics expert. There’s a milky-white jellyfish left over from an installation he did for Sea World in Orlando over the summer. Lying near the garden wall are numerous surplus tendrils from The Seven Sisters.
Kuster’s installations require certain engineering know-how, which he comes by naturally. His father, Jack, was an electrical and chemical engineer who designed medical packaging for Johnson & Johnson. In his spare time Jack built furniture, a skill he passed on to his son.
As a boy Kuster built model airplanes and model cars in the garage. At around fifteen he started making wooden chess and backgammon boards. At nineteen he started his own furniture business and moved to New York City. Later he started Kuster Manufacturing, designing and building sanding equipment for woodworkers

In 1990 he and his sister, Bonnie, enrolled in a glass-fusing class at Bucks County Community College, mostly so they could spend time together. But an hour into the first class, Kuster realized he had discovered his calling. To learn his craft, he took workshops at places like Wheaton Village in New Jersey and Urban Glass in Brooklyn. He also made annual pilgrimages to Murano, Italy, to study the masters of Venice’s ancient glass-blowing industry.

“He always educated himself,” recalls Sheila Kuster, Robert’s ex-wife. “He’d go to Italy and watch something and come home and figure it out.” After the births of their daughters, Caroline, now 12, and Jennifer, 9, Sheila began managing Kuster’s glass business (bellemeadhotglass.com) full-time, a job she continues to do.
But glass is a material that surrenders its secrets slowly. “It wasn’t that easy,” Kuster says. “It made me realize that I needed to learn the fundamentals. It’s only through an intimate knowledge of the materials and techniques that it can become intuitive. It’s like watching a dancer—it looks easy, but when you try it, it’s not.”
To start the process that Kuster has perfected over the years, two assistants shovel a standard mix of silica, soda ash, and lime into a gas-fired furnace heated to more than 2,300 degrees F. The ingredients melt and cook overnight. The next day the temperature is lowered to 2,000 degrees, and as the liquid glass cools, it takes on a honey-like consistency.

The assistants then begin “gathering” layers of glass by rolling the end of a long pipe across the surface of the soft mass. The bigger the piece to be made, the more layers are needed.
Rolling the pliant glass in various powders imparts color (copper oxide, for example, produces a blue-green).The pipe is passed to Kuster, who may press the soft glass into a mold to give it a ribbed surface. To develop the shape, he blows air into the pipe through an extension hose. The air helps cool the glass, turning it taffy-like so it stretches, yet holds its form. The air does not inflate the glass in the balloon-like way one might expect, but it helps the material cooperate with the glassmaker as he bends and pulls and twists, coaxing the final product into being.

“There are a lot of critical moments in glassmaking,” Kuster says. “There are times when it’s too hot, too cold, and just right. Usually people’s frustration comes from thinking they need to move too quickly. You really need to wait and let it happen.”

When the glass is cool enough, he gently taps the piece off the end of the pipe onto an insulated blanket.
New ideas are always simmering. Kuster was inspired by The Gates, the serpentine parade of orange vinyl gateways that the Belgian artist Christo and his wife Jeanne-Claude installed in New York City’s Central Park in 2005. It started him thinking about creating a large-scale project of his own. Kuster wants to build a 120-foot-long dragon out of purple glass supported by a giant steel frame. He hopes to find a patron for the project before he begins work. The dragon will call for many new shapes to replicate scales, teeth, eyes, and so on.

“If you’re really going to call yourself an artist,” he says, “somewhere along the way you should do something that’s you and not about somebody you’ve been influenced by. The dragon kind of represents my struggle, and everybody’s struggle, to move forward and conquer your fears and your doubts.”

Brooklyn-based journalist Emily Brady
is a frequent contributor to New Jersey Monthly.

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