Q and A with Danny Camp

INTERVIEWED BY CHRIS BLAKE PHOTOGRAPHED BY MATT BOURGEOIS

MCC sat down with Danny Camp at his Freeport home studio to talk glass.

MCC: Let’s start off with some basic bio stuff. So first off, how old are you, Danny? Danny: I am 33 years old.

MCC: Nice. Danny: It’s my boro (borosilicate) year, so they say.

MCC: What does that mean? Danny: Thirty-three refers to the expansion of the sea of glass, and the glass we use is a 33 COE rating. I’ve heard it before. I remember when MTP turned 33, that was the first time I heard it. Boro year. What’s cool is this lathe I got is 33 years old, and now I have to do something interesting in my 33rd year.

MCC: That’s cool, I like that. I’m a numbers person, it’s like your golden birthday. Danny: Yeah, yeah!

MCC: Yeah and where are you from? Danny: I grew up in Hudson Falls, New York. It was a nice little town, village, houses all around. I grew up in town riding bikes. It is right next to Glen Falls, which is how I probably got into learning how to blow glass. Tammy Baller and Glass Manifest were around at that time. MCC: It’s like near Saratoga, right? Danny: Yeah, two exits north of Saratoga.

MCC: So how long have you been up here? Danny: I moved up around 2010. We moved right into Portland on Deering Street for four years, until 2014. We moved to the west side when we bought our first house. We lived there for four years and then moved to Freeport. We’ve been here nine years, going on 10. It was a great move. I didn’t expect anything besides possibly a driveway and more grass.

MCC: It’s funny to hear that everyone is leaving. Danny: We both grew up in upstate New York but both worked in the city. I was like a third- generation tile, marble mechanic, and we did a lot of high rises, pools, and a lot of stuff in the city. In 2010, basically all the work dried up. The work pretty much stopped. I think that was the depression, recession, or whatever. Work slowed down, and Beth was like, “Let’s do more things with beach options or a parking space.” Beth had some friends here who were going through medical school. We visited in July, and it was perfect. From where we lived in New York City, it was about four hours from where we grew up. It’s about the same distance from our hometowns.

but we were interested in Portland because Beth had some friends here but also we were attending the Easy Street glass shows in Brooklyn.

MCC: I remember those actually. Danny: And that was the coolest thing I’ve seen because I was into glass, and I never really saw it in a gallery. And we met Dough and Nicky from Hitman, and they told us about up here. They were like you should definitely work at the Royal River. Here’s Ukiah’s phone number. So when we moved here, we made it a point to stop in and say hi to them.

MCC: Looking back at it now, is there any collab or favorite artists or a couple of people you liked working with? Danny: Yeah, Brian KGB, it’s cool he’s nearby. That makes it fun. Also, nowadays you want to make sure there’s some interest in it. I’m really motivated to use my time wisely, and I don’t have a lot of time to just explore and make things for fun. It has to have an end destination. It sucks because it holds you back, but I’m so motivated to have something to sell at the end of the day or end of the week. It’s too bad but it’s also really nice that our collabs sell well together. People like them; they come together nicely. If it’s a donut inside a coffee cup or a donut inside a bong or whatever we’ve done. They always sorta made sense. People have been really excited about them, and they sell. That’s the other half of the fun part is being able to collect and pay your bills.

MCC: Do you do a lot of glass shows? Danny: Yeah, so about the glass shows, I tried to back out of them. Because I don’t feel like I have the time to really dedicate to them. My time is just being a dad and maintaining the house and all those things. So when it comes down to blow glass, I always feel like I need to make the shit that I have to sell. What was the question again? Favorite person?

PHOTOGRAPHED BY Matthew Bourgeois