AURORA | Upon entering Eric Pitts’ newly finished workspace on East Yale Avenue, it’s easy to write him off as a walking cliché.
Or at least the specter of one.
Draped in a black T-shirt with the words “Sour Diesel” splashed across the chest in bold, white font, the 40-year-old glassblower casually talks through the pros and cons of smoking marijuana concentrate — also known as “dabbing” — through a complicated-looking pipe known to most smoking aficionados as an oil rig.
“Dabbing is the big thing — it’s like taking a shot of liquor instead of drinking a beer because it provides a whole bunch of THC at once,” Pitts says while going through the motion of slugging an invisible nip. “That raises your tolerance quite a bit, but for people who need heavy medication, it’s a very effective, very clean way to do it and you don’t have to smoke a lot of flower, which can clog you up.”
In the background of his diffident studio, the bouncy, iconic rhythms of Damian Marley’s “Welcome To Jamrock” careen off the largely blank, recently painted walls. Over the perky, syncopated chords, Pitts recalls his days following the Grateful Dead on the group’s last tour in the early 90s. He then chuckles describing his days living in Santa Cruz, Calif., when he used to sport a mane of plump, vine-like dreadlocks.
“I’ve cleaned up a bit since then,” he says while patting a straightforward head of chestnut hair.
Despite his gentrified scalp, the stories, tunes and pervasive green themes make it difficult not to typecast Pitts as the ultimate “Cheech and Chong” stand-in.
But this isn’t your stereotypical stoner.
Following about five weeks of delays and a prolonged permitting process, Pitts started blowing personalized, hand-blown glass pipes at a fully outfitted facility within Colorado Harvest Company’s new Aurora location last week, making him the studio manager of what is believed to be the world’s first glassblowing studio housed inside of a recreational pot shop.
“It kind of blows my mind when I think about it like that,” he says of his artistic venture’s potential global implications.
Complete with two kilns, a stockpile of graphite tools and several looming tanks of oxygen and propane, Pitts says the space is one of the nicest and most complete he’s ever worked in during his nearly 20-year career of creating glass objects across the western United States.
“It’s just good, clean fun in a good, clean studio,” he says. “This really is a dream job.”
Born in Frankfurt, Germany to parents who worked at several U.S. embassies across Europe, Pitts says he first became enamored with the concept of creating glass art around age 8, when he saw a young boy create a horse out of a glowing, molten orb in Murano, Italy.
“When I saw that I became extremely interested and only a short time after I started collecting glass pieces,” he says.
Shortly after moving to the metro area last year after spending more than a decade blowing glass in Santa Fe, N.M., Pitts says he learned about the opportunity at Colorado Harvest on Craigslist, and that he believes the unprecedented partnership between retail marijuana and art could help break down longstanding stigmas surrounding both glassblowing and weed.
“Pipe-making has always been kind of married to the black market and seen as this grungy thing” he says. “And this is a really great opportunity to make it classy, because there’s so much negativity surrounding the cannabis industry and glass, too.”
Tim Cullen, a former Douglas County biology teacher who founded Colorado Harvest company shortly after medical marijuana was legalized in Denver nearly five years ago, says combatting those labels played a part in wanting to add a glass studio to the retail store.
“We were looking to employ a local glass artist while adding a new feature to the newest Colorado Harvest Company location,” Cullen says. “It’s exciting to watch, and the work that comes out of there is absolutely beautiful.”
In an effort to shirk those shadowy stereotypes and promote transparency, customers at the 3,000-square-foot store on East Yale Avenue are able see Pitts in action through two large windows — something he says is both nerve-racking and motivating.
“This is usually more of a private scene, so there’s a little more anxiety with this setup because people are watching and I don’t want to make a mistake,” he says. “But I want to be a little showy, too, so it pushes me to go a little faster and create something a little more eye-catching — it’s like the difference between snowboarding alone and with a group.”
Observers or not, Pitts says he’s experienced his share of painful mistakes in a medium that involves toasting material using Mad Max-style torches and peaking into 1,100-degree ovens.
“I’ve had some pretty serious injuries, or learning experiences, as I like to say,” he says with a grin. “I’ve cut and burned myself many times, but never enough to keep me away. It’s not easy, and I think it’s the difficulty that has drawn me to the medium for so long; like a moth to the flame — literally.”