Glass Masters at Work: William Gudenrath Traile

Who is Bill? Now, that's one of those deceptively simple questions that are almost impossible to answer. Bill is many people all rolled into one. Bill's an accomplished musician. Bill is a very accomplished glassmaker, as we all know. But Bill is also a considerable scholar of the history of glass. And what intrigues me about his kind of scholarship is that it's rather different from the way most of us curators approach studying some period of glass history. It sounds stereotypical, but Bill Gudenrath is a scholar and a gentleman, which is kind of rare in the modern world. And he's very erudite, and he can mix with anybody anywhere. And he's so knowledgeable about music and glass and many, many things that I don't even know about. When Bill looks at an object, he's looking at it with a lifetime of experience working with glass. It's amazing. It looks good upside down. It looks good horizontally. It looks good vertically. It's quite an accomplishment for a design, isn't it?