Until now, in fact, the very idea of using globby molten glass to "paint" a representational scene of nature would seem as absurd as trying to light a candle with a flamethrower. But that perception is changing as one glass artist -a lampwork glass bead artist- is turning her talents to depicting the natural world.

With the determination and perseverance of a mountain climber, Pati Walton is making a name for herself in the centuries-old craft of shaping glass over a flame. The result is a collection of one-of-a-kind glass beads so breathtakingly realistic they redefine the notion of what hot glass can be persuaded to do.

Like postcard panoramas folded in on themselves into glowing globes of color, depth, and detail, her meticulously crafted masterpieces each of which take up to three hours to make are like no other beads you have seen. From fish-eye views of frolicking dolphins in azure seas to birds'-eye views of waterfalls tumbling from turquoise peaks, they show a skill and originality that matches the epic scale of their subject.

That Pati's best-selling beads have also struck a chord with collectors and designers is no accident. With a history in stained glass, pressed wildflowers, and savoir-faire that reaches back to her early childhood, the self-taught artist with the golden hair and steady hands is reaching deeper, climbing higher, and working closer to the creative flame than others dare.

Pati Walton's home sits high on a rolling plateau, just south of Denver. The Highlands Ranch subdivision, as its name implies, was once a sprawling ranch with acres of fat cattle and expansive mountain views. Now, the views are expensive ones, thanks to Denver's real-estate boom, and the cattle have been replaced by fat suburban ranch homes.

This complete multi-strand necklace
incorporates a variety of Walton's beads.

It is a bright summer day when Pati greets me at the door of her home, wearing blue jeans and a plum-colored top. Her striking blond hair is done up in a style known as "big," and she looks like she could be a country-western singer.

"I'm sorry about the mess," she says, inviting me in. "I like to work but I hate to clean. I'm in the process of moving my studio to the basement, and everything's a mess.

An animal lover who grew up in southern California drawing Disneyland horses in fairy-tale settings, Pati has an equal passion for animals, glass, and art, as her pleasantly cluttered home shows. Max and Andy, two Lhasa Apsos, leap to greet visitors with licks and wags. In the living room, a white baby grand staggers under the load of her glass paperweight collection.

"The paperweights are a big inspiration for my beads," she says, showing me a favorite, purchased in Venice, with a goldfish swimming inside. "I get a lot of ideas about color combinations from them. I could get lost for hours looking into them and never get bored."

Nothing about Pati is boring either. At 46 years old, five-foot-six, and 120 pounds, she has Ann Margaret looks, a Jenny Craig figure, and a no-nonsense personality all her own. Pati says her husband, Dan, describes her as "driven" when it comes to beadmaking, and she describes herself as "a compulsive workaholic." The burn scars on her hand support them both.

"I remember when I first started making beads, I would work all day, sleep three hours, and get up to go out to the garage again to work," she says. "I was so obsessed, I couldn't get enough. I still feel that way when I get excited about a new bead."

Pati shares her studio with a white Mitsubishi Montero and a small television permanently tuned to Court TV. A space heater and ski coat are handy for cold weather, and two mountain bikes hang overhead. It's hard to imagine, when you see her world-class beads, that they were made in the comer of her garage with the O.J. Simpson trial droning on in the background. But lampworking, Pati says, is well suited to the home workshop.

"I feel like I was really lucky to get into beadmaking when I did," says Pati, firing up her modern torch with its giant custom head. "I knew that if I was ever going to have the opportunity of doing something big, that this was my chance."

"Beads have just gone crazy the past two years," she adds, as the torch belches a giant lick of orange flame. "I wish there were two of me so I could make more beads. I sell everything I can make at the bead shows and come back with custom orders.

"I had a customer who wanted me to make a frog paperweight for his frog collection," she explains, "I told him I only made beads, so he said, 'Well, just make a bead and leave out the hole.' I practiced and practiced making frogs until I came up with a smiling Kermit-like frog I liked. He was thrilled with it and now I sell every one I make."

Adjusting the propane and oxygen mixture of her torch with the knowing touch of a professional welder, Pati dons her protective didymium glasses and tweaks the lamp into a roaring solid blue jet of flame. Pulling a mandrel from her bench top, she warms it in the flame. The thick sparkler-shaped wire is like a lollipop stick onto which Pati will wind a gumdrop of molten glass. The mandrel will also form the hole when the bead is finished, and is coated with bead separator, a claylike substance, to keep the bead from sticking to it.

Choosing from a vivid array of glass rods, Pati shuns the pure saturated colors like cadmium yellow, cobalt blue, and carmine red for the pale lavenders and cool pastels. This will be a freeform "gypsy bead," as Pati calls them. But the first step, as with most of her beads, is the core, which will be dichroic glass, an expensive and captivating glass with a flashy metallic coating that gives it the sheen of opal.

There are many practical limitations of working with glass, as can be expected from a medium that must be worked at arm's length. Directing the flow of a semi-molten glass rod with one hand around a turning steel mandrel held in the other is something the self-effacing artist compares to patting your head while rubbing your tummy. Watching her with the torch, though, it seems a little riskier than that - more like throwing a lasso around a longhorn steer while spurring a horse through a cactus patch. Calamity is waiting around every bend.

"Working with glass is hard because once it starts to flow one way it wants to keep going that way," she says. "The key is learning how hot or cool to keep the core, and how to apply layers of glass over a core without smudging what's underneath or breaking the bead separator.

Working now with a plate of dichroic glass about one-inch square, Pati slowly shapes it around the mandrel to form a cylindrical core, like wrapping a slice of warm bread around a hot dog. "I've been experimenting a lot with colors," she says, drawing a rod of pale lavender under her left arm to prewarm it. "I normally use Moretti glass from Italy, which is especially made for lampworking. If I find a color combination that I like, it makes me real happy," she adds. Her latest discovery is periwinkle, purple, and pink, and this combination will undoubtedly show up in a bead or two.

Wrapping the dichroic with a thick coating of almost clear lavender glass, Pati finishes the simple - for her -gypsy bead. She pops it into an annealing oven made out of a giant rural mailbox. It will cool gradually over the next 12 hours to prevent cracking.

IF PATI IS ENJOYING some success after less than three years of lampworking, she has been preparing for it all her life. After the demonstration, she pulls one of her favorite paperweights from the piano top- It is a chipped and scratched weight, with a flower inside, but it is special for another reason.

"I've collected glass paperweights since I was a little girl," she says. "This is one of two that my mother had, that I would stare at for hours. I've always liked three dimensional things that you look into beneath the surface."

Holding the smooth, cool weight brings back memories, which also lie beneath the surface. "My mother told me to learn business . . . oh, but don't write that," she says, recalling a childhood spent running a family-owned hotel in Pismo Beach, California. After a new interstate highway went through a different town, the motel failed. Those were difficult times that forged Pati's independent nature and tempered her business sense.

"I've always been artistic as early as I can remember," she recalls. "When I was eleven or twelve I had some flat glass blobs that I would glue onto goblets and surround with liquid solder. Iput a candle inside and sold them to all my friends."

Another paperweight brings another bubble of memory to the surface. "This one is from my first trip to Venice," she says,holding a fist-sized weight with streaming garlands of pink, white, and blue.

"My sister lives there, and imports beads and designs jewelry. When I went to visit her, she introduced me to some beadmakers in Murano. They're usually very secretive, but they opened up to me when I showed them my beads. I couldn't believe that they worked in what is basically a closet, cranking out about a hundred beads an hour. They couldn't believe that I would spend up to three hours on one of my beads, and it's in the flame the whole time. That's really hard to do."

While relatively new to lampworking, Pati is an old pro in other branches of the glass family. Chatting over coffee and biscotti in her oak-lined kitchen, she explains, "I've been in glass for 17 or 18 years," she says. "I started in stained glass because my first husband owned some restaurants and I made stained-glass panels for them. I liked doing it, but it got really boring after a while. One thing I like about making beads is its almost instant gratification. Instead of working two weeks on a panel, you can finish 10 beads in a good day."

After that, Pati started her own business making stained-glass kaleidoscopes. The beautifully finished scopes with triangular tubes of translucent glass have turntables filled with fragments of broken glass, marbles, crystals, and beads that are -mirrored and reflected through the eyepiece. Never one to leave well enough alone, it was about the same time Pati was learning to make beads -for the kaleidoscopes that she started pressing wildflowers and putting them into beveled glass frames for wall hangings.

"Since each kaleidoscope took about a week to make, I would be lucky to make $5 an hour. So I decided to sell the pressed wildflowers, and I sold them through the Orvis catalog for three years.

"I worked 20 hours a day filling orders for the Orvis catalog," she adds. "I grew the flowers, dyed them, pressed them, and put them in glass. From June to January, that's all I would do. But from January to June, I was starving to death."

For a time, Pati made the pressed flower arrangements, the kaleidoscopes, and a line of stained-glass jewelry boxes, all at the same time. After staying up late at night to finish orders, she would often leave the next morning for a weekend of selling on the road.

"I was at the height of my career with Orvis when I discovered beads," she says. "When I started making beads I just gave up the wildflowers because that's all I wanted to do. With beads it's a more even year-round schedule."

If Pati's conversation-piece mountain beads are guaranteed to break the ice at a party, her aquarium beads, with their brilliant neon-colored angelfish, are only slightly more modest. On my next visit to Pati's home, she is preparing to jet off to a bead show in Santa Fe, one of two she will attend this and almost every month. Today she is in the studio making the aptly named aquarium beads, the fanciful yet accurately detailed globes that suggest a collision of the worlds of Jacques Cousteau and Walt Disney.

"I like to have as much going in a bead as I can, without it being too much," Pati says, showing me a handful of past and present examples. "Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't"

Originally begun as short and squat beads, it is interesting to see how the aquariums grew taller and taller. In their present form - her beads are always evolving long strands of seaweed, sea creatures, and even a dolphin have appeared. Pati is especially proud of the dolphin, even though a friend recently told her they don't actually have nostrils.

"I worked myself to death trying to make the perfect dolphin, but it seems like there's always a flaw. I may keep the nostrils anyway, I think they look better that way, don't you?"

Firing up the torch, Pati gets into beadmaking mode. As she dons her cloak of total concentration, she narrates to me what she is doing and why. One surprising aspect of the process is its speed and immediacy. Pati thrives on the challenge and meets it with a steady hand and a quick eye. (See other article, "The Undersea World of Pati Walton.")

JUST AS EVERY MOUNTAIN CLIMBER has bagged a highest peak, every artist has also experienced a creative high point. For Pati, that high began with a flash of inspiration to create a new bead; something bigger, bolder, and more demanding than anything she had ever attempted. Its subject matter was inspired by another peak experience, literally: a camping trip to Mount Sneffels and the Yankee Boy Basin, near Ouray, Colorado.

"The mountain bead was a real breakthrough for me," she says, showing me the egg-shaped bead she carried around in her pocket for weeks. "It was the first bead that I said, 'This is really a work of art.' It did exactly what I wanted it to do. It reminded me of the Yankee Boy Basin, my favorite place in the world."

For Pati, who has fantasized about and drawn such places since childhood, finding one that actually existed - a pristine mountain bowl between Ouray and Durango, with wildflowers, waterfalls, and lakes - was like discovering Shangri-La. But being able to paint it in glass was more difficult; the culmination of countless hours of "research and development," as she calls it, the long grueling climb to reach the level of technical abilty that allowed her to pull it off.

"I had been trying to make a mountain bead since I started in beads without much success," she recalls. "I really thought I had hit a wall in my beadwork, but when I came back from the Washington, D.C., show last year, I was determined to do it. When it came out, I was so jazzed. I knew I would never sell it. I carried it around with me everywhere."

Afraid at first that the bead was a fluke, Pati made another to reassure herself she could. Then another, and another, and another. Since then, however, she is reluctant to overproduce the bead, mostly because they are excruciatingly difficult to make, with five layers and dozens of individual steps. "I have to really be 'on' to make them," she says. "My normal routine is to make about 10 beads a day, and maybe two or three major beads. But I only make one or two mountain beads a month. There are certain beads that are fun, but with these you're just holding your breath the whole time."

What makes the mountain beads so breathtaking is, first of all, the technical challenge their five layers present. The fifth layer is a quantum leap above the fourth, the difference between climbing Denali and Mount Everest, or between juggling four balls and five.

Beyond technical proficiency, though, is the style and artistry that goes into the beads, and Pati's work stands alone in that respect as well. "To my knowledge, I'm the only person who is actually painting realistic scenes with glass," she says, pointing out shading techniques borrowed from her stained-glass work.

"The shading, with darker colored glass, gives a three-dimensional look to the rocks, mountains, and clouds," she -says. "The feeling of depth is really important. It's some thing I'm always working on.

Other details include clouds, waterfalls, stars, Pati's initials on a specially made "cane bead," and, of course, wildflowers. As could be expected from someone who once pressed wildflowers for a living, Pati's attention to detail evident in her "botanically correct" columbines, the Colorado state flower, give the beads the authenticity and integrity that she strives for. She wants them to become collectors' items in the manner of antique paperweights or other fine glass art.

"Just to feel glass in my hand is magic," says Pati, waxing philosophical on the contradictory substance. "It's not plastic, it's not rubber. It's going to be here forever. I hope my beads will become something special that jewelers would want to set in gold.

"For Pati, the immediate future holds more research and the development of new beads. Along with perfecting her latest and greatest opus, her mountain bead, she is pioneering a desert bead complete with a saguaro cactus and red sunset that you can almost ride off into.

"I feel like I'm still just learning the craft and there's so much more to know," she says, modestly, "but I also feel like there's nothing that I can't learn to do. I'm always seeking out other aspects of glass to learn, like paperweights, or glassblowing. I want to be the best artist I can be, and to be recognized as a good artist."

"One thing I realized when I found beads is that I was put on earth to make beads," she says seriously. "It is the most satisfying thing I've ever done."

Photos by Michael Bush
Reproduced with permission.