About

Anton Bodor tumbled into the firelit world of lamp working in 2004, landing in Las Cruces, NM, like a man chasing a mirage in the desert.  For years, he’d drifted, hungry for artistic mentorship and the kind of camaraderie that burns brighter than neon.  Then he found Daniel Trilli-a creative outlaw with hands that seemed to bend reality.  It wasn’t long before Trilli leaned back, squinted through the haze, and asked, “Well, what do you really want to make?”

The answer wasn’t immediate—it never is.  But Anton remembered the first time glass warped his brain:  Chihuly’s surrealist jungle at the Bellagio in ‘98.  It was Vegas excess distilled into art.  That memory lit the fuse, research began-wild, obsessive, no sleep til sunrise kind of research.  Before long, he found his compass:  the mind-bending work of John Kobuki, Mike Gong, and Kevin O’Grady to name a few.  Marbles.  Spheres.  Worlds trapped in glass.  “That’s it,” Anton thought.  “That’s what I want to make!”

Trilli, ever the mad scientist, didn’t know much about marbles, but he was fearless.  Anton would toss him ideas—fume vortexes, dot stacks, Snodgrass inspired fume skulls, optical maelstroms—and Trilli would conjure it on the fly, as if plucking secrets from the ether.  The studio hummed with fire, glass, and an unspoken promise of endless creation.

Then, in 2007, the fire went out.  Trilli was gone, and Anton was gutted.  Grief pulled him into a deep, dark spiral.  By 2010, his torch was cold, his studio abandoned, and his last marble shelved—a relic of a life that seemed lost.

Years passed.  Pain lingered like a ghost, but somewhere along the line, Anton made a choice.  He would turn the black hole of loss into a fuel source.  By 2021, in the thin air of the Denver area, he found himself back behind the torch.  The flame roared to life, and with it, Anton’s purpose.  What started as a tribute to Trilli had become something else entirely—a resurrection, a reckoning, a declaration that art and life are two sides of the same molten coin.