The Pigments of Trigs

If you’re looking for a dab rig that will stir memories of your favorite camping trip, Los 1 Glass’s Trigs will definitely bring you back to the mountains.

Carlos Valdovinos — the man behind Los 1 Glass — got his start in the glass game a little over four years ago at the famed borosilicate school, Revere Glass, in Berkeley, California.

“I began working with glass kind of randomly,” he says.  He was going to UC Berkeley and needed a job when he saw a Craigslist ad for maintenance work at a glass studio.

“I didn’t really know about glass culture at the time,” he says. ”I was a cannabis smoker and had my glass pieces, but wasn’t really that informed about the subculture.”

He quickly realized he was interviewing for a job at a pipe making school.

Los 1 Glass is creating his signature Trigs in the entire borosilicate color palette.

“They had all these gorgeous pieces there and I was basically just blown away,” he says. “I had to hold my composure and make sure I had a good interview.”

Dustin Revere ended up hiring him and Valdovinos went to work fixing up stuff around the studio, setting up vacuum lines and completing other maintenance work that needed to be done.

“One day Dustin said, ‘Why don’t you get behind the torch and start playing with some stuff?’” Valdovinos says. “I took a few classes and just tried to soak in everything in from all the awesome glass blowers that come through there.”

As for the now popular Trigs — a mash up of the words ‘tree’ and ‘rig’ — the idea kind of just came to him. They are the pieces he has the most fun making he says “and they seem to have had the most impact on people.”

When Valdovinos started realizing the possibilities of glass he just wanted to create something that stood by itself.

“You just kind of look at it and it kind of brings you somewhere,” he says. “You remember as a little kid when you didn’t know what to buy your aunt or grandma there were these little kinds of ceramic sculptures, with like an eagle sitting on a branch or something like that.”

Valdovinos always was drawn to those miniature figurines. “I thought they were just so cool as a chunk of nature, personified in a little sculpture,” he says. He then sought out to create something that had a similar kind of impact, a piece that brings you back to nature or to a memory of being outdoors, such as a special time you went camping.

Carlos Valdovinos behind the torch working on a Trig.

“[The Trigs] are a piece that evokes something in you even before you even know it’s a pipe,” Valdovinos says. “That’s always what I wanted to create, something that creates a sort of emotion just from looking at it. In all its phases, I think the Trig has done that.”

One might think Valdovinos is a NorCal local, as the trigs very much resemble the famous old growth redwoods of coastal California, but he was actually born in Mexico City and raised in San Diego prior to heading north for school. Weekends in Big Bear had a lasting impression on his love of the outdoors.

“I think nature, we’re all trying to imitate her in everything we do from science to art,” he says. “We’re just trying to find out her secrets, so I just think nature has always been a big part of my life. It’s where I feel the most at peace.”

One technique that Valdovinos uses to get the Trig’s fantastic earth tones is fairly classic.

“Fuming silver and gold or a combination of the two to get that milky look is a classic style you see with a lot of the old school folks,” he says. “I was trying to think of a way to work the pieces a bit more and add more design aspects without taking away from that natural feel. When I did the fume work the colors came out really earthy.”

Valdovinos believes the reds, oranges, and greens he was producing did not take away from the natural look he was pursuing, and sometimes even produced a fantastic sunset effect. From there, he was at the current incarnation of the Trig.

“I just went for it, I liked it, and people liked it and enjoyed it,” Valdovinos says. “With glass, there is this never ending encyclopedia of techniques you can do, so you ask yourself, ‘What can I play with now?’ and it keeps it exciting. You can really do this gig your whole life and still have something new to learn and I appreciate that very much about it.”

His ongoing project is called the Pigments of Trigs.

“I’m exploring the entire borosilicate color pallet and creating Trigs with just one color,” he says, of an extensive pallet that includes somewhere around 300 to 400 colors out there from companies and independent glass makers. “Each piece will be a one of one because I’m only going to use that color once. It’s just a fun way to explore.”

Originally published in Issue 28 of Cannabis Now. LEARN MORE

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