As Groove Armada’s “Tuning In” plays on a record player behind him, Jason Mack plays with a blue flame in his workshop in Champaign. Six months after moving to Champaign from Bloomington, Ill., glass blower Mack is finding himself as hot of a commodity as the glass that he blows.

After moving shop from the 19th-century warehouse he worked out of in Bloomington, Mack began to notice the absence of glass blowing institutions in the C-U area and a widespread interest from members of the community to learn the trade.

That’s what inspired Mack to begin teaching glass blowing classes out of his garage.

Today, he has as many as 25 students ranging from ages 17 to 60. His designs range from large scale installation projects and small pendants to traditional vases and other mixed-media designs.

“In Champaign, there was just not really anybody else doing it, and there was a lot of interest,” he said. “People would find out that I was doing it through mutual friends and stuff.

I had all of the equipment, extra torches and yeah, it’s just fun getting people together and forming a little community.”

Robert Essex, a current student of Mack’s who has been taking his courses for four months, had been in search of a glass blowing instructor for the past four years before discovering Mack’s courses.

“He’s great,” Essex said. “He’s probably one of the best teachers of what he teaches that I’ve ever come across. He makes things really easy, and like I said, he’s a cool guy and his teaching style is very direct and easy.”

For Mack, what started off as a whim turned into a livelihood.

As someone who was interested in the arts, a 17-year-old Mack began taking Saturday afternoon glass blowing classes in his hometown of Downers Grove, Illinois, in 2000.

Fifteen years and thousands of pounds of glass later, glass blowing has become his niche.

Self-taught for the first couple years, Mack took a course with renowned Italian glass blowing master Emilio Santini before going on to graduate from Illinois State University’s glass blowing program in 2007.

Moving away early on from the traditional standards set by his trade, mixed media art has been at the fulcrum of Mack’s artistic pursuits with large scale installation projects becoming his favorite pieces to make, erecting several sculptures over the years from Grand Rapids, Michigan, to Chillicothe, Illinois.

“I was always interested in nontraditional glass blowing. Glass blowing is kind of steep in tradition with vases and platters and bowls and goblets and pipes so there’s this very established glass blowing culture and I wasn’t really interested in that,” he said. “It was more about the process, and the performance as opposed to just a lone artist sitting in their studio trying to craft some masterpiece then bring it out into the world.”

Over the years, Mack has acquired many skills through his direct dealings with glass blowing, which, on top of teaching, include website design, welding and handy work.

“If you want to blow glass you have to be able to maintain a shop. If you can’t afford a $20,000 furnace, you better learn how to weld, how to run electricity, (and) how to run gas systems so I’ve just learned tons and tons of skills,” Mack said.

Community involvement has also played in important role in the creation of some of Mack’s installation pieces.

Over the past 10 years, he has promoted community involvement in making his large installations with people donating recycled glass to be melted down by Mack.

“I really like being in front of an audience and creating and kind of involving the community in the whole process,” he said. “You have an open call out to the community to contribute their glass to the sculpture so everybody kind of contributes to the art and when they see it being made, they know that they contributed some of that glass that’s being used to make the sculpture, so it kind of makes them feel a part of it and that’s kind of a cool thing to be a part of.”

Now with his classes growing in popularity, Mack will be teaching his courses beginning April 1 at the Institute 4 Creativity in Champaign, where anyone interested will be able to sign up through Parkland Community College’s Community Education Program.

Also in April, Mack will be taking part in the 2015 Boneyard Arts Festival, along with glassblower Jeffrey Richards of Big Shed Glass Studio, a glassblowing studio located just outside of Urbana. 

“Everybody should go take this class; it’s a really affordable class,” Essex said. “You don’t really ever see this particular thing with this kind of price at this kind of level, and it makes for a good date too.”

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