WELCOME
The Lubec Memorial Library is free and open to all. Books, movies, magazines, computers and WiFi are available for public use. Call 207-733-2491 for more information.
If you would like to receive our monthly newsletter please email us at contact@lubeclibrary.org
You can watch YouTube videos of Lubec Memorial Library programs on the Library YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@LubecMemorialLibrary
Are you working remotely?
The Library received a Remote Work through Libraries Grant and has purchased privacy panels and tables to assist remote workers. The library also has free Wi-Fi and public computers.
Cards handmade by Gretchen Mead for sale
to benefit The Lubec Memorial Library.
May Art Exhibit
“Color Explosions in Glass” by Alan Majka
Alan Majka
Glass Artist (Whiting, ME)
“When I was a young child, an elderly neighbor who spent his life dredging ship channels in Delaware Bay gave our family a glass bottle. He said he recovered it from a sunken eighteenth century pirate ship. It’s uneven shape, bubbles and history captivated my imagination. From that time on I’ve been fascinated with hand blown glass. To my delight, a community glass blowing studio was founded at Waterfall Arts in Belfast shortly after I retired from a career in public health. I’ve been obsessed with glassblowing ever since.
Quartz, forged 4.6 billion years ago in the furnace of a nascent sun, is Earths’s most abundant mineral. It’s crystals erode over eons of time to become sand. With intense heat, quartz is transformed into a molten honey-consistency liquid that I shape and slowly cool to become an amorphous solid glass object.
While some glass artists prefer working with clear glass, or crystal, I love color. First, I pull out a gather of molten glass with layers of color to become a thirty foot long pencil-thick cane. The cooled cane is then cut into six inch lengths. Next, I slowly heat different colors of melted glass to approximately 2,300 degrees Fahrenheit and layer them on the end of a metal rod called a punty. The gob of hot glass is rolled across the heated cane in pieces, adhering layers of them to the gob. This is heated evenly throughout and pulled out to become a one to two inch diameter by six foot long rod that’s slowly cooled in an annealer. After completely cooling, the rod is cut into quarter inch thick coin shaped disks with matching bull’s eye color patterns. These are called murrine. Murrine are then laid out into a pattern that’s heated and squeezed into a solid flat rectangle. The rectangle is rolled into a cylinder shape on the end of a blowpipe. The end of the cylinder is closed and the piece is blown and shaped. The lengthy process results in the colorful intricate patterns found in many of my creations.”