July 11, 2007

Artist firms up grasp
By VALERIE TAKAHAMA
The Orange County Register

The glass blower had great hands.

Barbara Ritter is a surgical nurse who always notices people's hands.

So glass blower Loren Chapman's caught her attention right away when she went to the Sawdust Art Festival for the first time five years ago.

"The glass blower just grabbed my eye because I'm watching this person take these hands of his and transform this blob of glass into a beautiful piece of art," says Ritter, who lives in Aliso Viejo.

But she detected something else, too. The glass blower's hands shook during critical moments in the process. And over the years, as she joined the ranks of Chapman's devoted fans and bought several of his delicate, vivid vases as one-of-a-kind gifts for friends and relatives, she noticed the tremor growing more severe.

When she finally mustered the tact and courage to ask him about it last summer, he confirmed her suspicions. He has essential tremor, a condition sometimes called familial tremor because it is often inherited. It is more common than better-known Parkinson's disease, but, unlike Parkinson's, grows worse with anxiety or stress.

Chapman, now 62, first showed signs of the disorder in his 20s and had resigned himself to a life with the tremors.

He had another option, although he didn't know it at the time.

And as it turned out, Ritter's vocation not only trained her to notice people's hands, but it also gave her the opportunity to lend one.

• • •

With his thatch of sandy blond hair and his uniform of jeans and T-shirt, Chapman is a Vietnam veteran with a master's degree in fine art from Cal State Fullerton.

Around the eucalyptus-shaded Sawdust Festival grounds, he's known as an artist's artist, a purist who doesn't separate the vases and other glass pieces he creates into categories such as commercial work or serious art.

Put another way, "I've been lucky enough that it's all serious, and it's all fun, and it's all colorful," he says.

He's only deviated from his principles a couple of times. Once, he listened to suggestions that he make gifts for holidays.

"People said: 'Valentine's Day is coming. Why don't you make some hearts?' I made glass heart bowls and little glass hearts," he says.

"They sat there. Didn't sell. That told me: You're not supposed to do that. I sell what I make, what comes out of me, not because of some holiday."

He's also developed an unusual production method. While many exhibitors make work throughout the year for sale during the summer festival, Chapman doesn't. Instead, he works at night or in the early morning during the run of the festival to produce only enough blown glass to fill the shelves in his small corner booth.

"I can't stockpile. I just can't do it. Everything's fresh every day," he says.

And he tries to make everything affordable. Most of the 4 1/2-inch-tall vases he makes cost $40 to $60, with 6-inch pieces priced at $75 to $195.

"I've always had the attitude that art should be for as many people as possible," he says. "You don't want to spend $400 on a wedding gift for some cousin you don't even know."

In his early days at the festival in the '70s, he found glass blowing demonstrations so stressful that he had to down two or three beers to calm his nerves so his hands wouldn't shake. After he gave up drinking in 1989, he began playing music in the demo booth to take his mind off the crowds.

Often his hand shook violently when he tried to transfer a vase off the blowpipe with a rod. He had so little control that he'd stab wildly at the base of the vase with the rod, and hope for the best.

"Blowing glass is a very delicate thing, and I'd be shaking. For so many years, people would ask, 'Is the shaking part of the technique?' " he says.

"It was something I just dealt with and accepted. I'm sure everybody who has something like this thinks: Wouldn't it be nice not to?"

• • •

That thought became a possibility for Chapman after his talk last summer with Ritter, who works with neurosurgeons at Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian in Newport Beach on a breakthrough development in tremor control known as deep brain stimulation.

The method is sometimes described as a pacemaker for the brain. Electrodes are implanted into the thalamus region of the brain, and a generator is implanted under the skin beneath the collarbone. The generator sends electronic pulses to the brain to control the tremors.

When Ritter learned Chapman didn't have medical insurance to cover the cost of the expensive procedure, she set to work lining up the medical resources to help him. First on board was anesthesiologist Dr. Jennifer King, a friend of Ritter's, who offered to perform the surgery free.

She needed a surgeon and had her eye on Dr. Christopher Duma, a neurosurgeon at Hoag who performs about 80 deep brain stimulation procedures a year, more than any other doctor in Orange County. One day in November, she saw her chance and blurted out the request. She says his response brought tears to her eyes.

"He just pulled his card out. 'Here, Barb, just give this to Loren.' He scribbled a note on the back. That easy," Ritter says.

When Duma examined Chapman, he determined the artist's tremor was a Grade 3 on a scale of 1 to 4, with 4 the most intense level of tremor, and that Chapman was a good candidate for the surgery.

Chapman was grateful the surgeon had agreed to perform the operation pro bono but was shocked to learn that fees for the hospital services might run as much as $100,000.

"I said, 'Oh, I'll check with my people on that,' " Chapman says. "I was trying to bow out gracefully."

Meanwhile, Medtronic, the company that makes the deep brain stimulation equipment, agreed to donate one of the $20,000 devices, and Adele Tuttle, a deep brain stimulation therapy consultant from Medtronic, offered her services free.

Ritter arranged a meeting with a Hoag executive, who agreed to help.

Chapman had surgery in March, and the change was nearly instantaneous.

"I would give him an A or an A minus in terms of the success rate," Duma says.

The patient agrees. "Now I know what life is like without the tremors. It's been under such tension. All of a sudden I'm just relaxed."

He appeared relaxed yet alert the other day in the demo booth at the festival, working in front of the blasting 2100-degree Fahrenheit heat of the furnace. With his hair tucked under a white kerchief, he dabbed glass onto a 5-foot-long blowpipe, heated it in the furnace and blew out a molten, glowing orange orb. In less than 15 minutes, he fashioned one of his distinctive pieces, a "bird" vase with an opening "pulled" to resemble a bird's graceful neck and tail feathers.

Later in his booth, he greeted longtime collectors and explained to new ones the origins of his signature "Friendship" vase, one with two small abstract figures and swirls of glass that stand for linked hands.

"He looks so completely different," Ritter says of her friend. "I always thought he was a little grumpy. He's not grumpy at all.

"He was uncomfortable. He was embarrassed for people to see his hands."