To work with molten glass, you need to be able to walk, chew gum, rub your belly and pat your head at the same time, while reciting the alphabet backwards. In Japanese.

When you watch an experienced glassblower do it, it looks easy: Dip a hollow metal pipe into a vat of liquid glass until you have enough, pull it out, sit at a bench, blow into the pipe a few times, roll it in chips of colored glass, blow a few more times, shape the end with a pair of tweezers big enough to pluck the brow of Paul Bunyan. If the glass cools off, pop it in a glowing round furnace, called a glory hole, and go back to work.

Things go a little differently for the first-timer. Trying to keep the glass centered on the pipe is about as easy as twirling a baton with a broken hand. No matter how fast your fingers move, it’s painfully awkward, and if you stop for even a second, the glass droops toward the floor.

This is what happened when I tried to make a glass flower. It quickly turned into what I like to call “a small, abstract sculpture, representing the unpredictable nature of human activity.” In other words, it was a fluke.

When Richard Remsen makes an abstract sculpture in glass, it’s not a fluke. Well, actually, it could be a fluke, or a squid, or a reef fish. For the last three years, the West Rockport artist has created larger-than-life fishing lures in shimmering, layered glass. Remsen, whose “bread and butter” is his foundry, fits marine-inspired blown glass with gleaming hooks, lines and propellerlike tails that he casts. Though he likes to fish, he was drawn to lures more for their aesthetics and the metaphor they present.

“Lures deal with the issue of temptation,” Remsen said, sitting in an office attached to his studio. “In the case of fishing, you’re trying to tempt the fish to bite. As an artist, you’re trying to deal with stories that speak to people and temptation is something that arises on a daily basis.”

The Maine native has been telling stories in glass since he graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1974. There, he had the opportunity to study glassblowing with Dale Chihuly, a renowned glass artist whose influence can be seen in Remsen’s work. He returned to Maine and turned an old blueberry-processing building on his property into a bronze foundry and established one of the first hot glass studios in Maine. Having the two together in one building has made it easier for Remsen to incorporate metal and glass in his sculpture.

“Sometimes, you’ll have an idea and you’re not sure if it will work or not,” he said. “It’s nice to have that quick response time.”

Remsen said it’s impossible to live on the coast and not be inspired by the ocean, so it’s no surprise that nearly everything he creates – from bowls to lures – has a liquid, organic feel to it, like seaweed swaying in the waves.

“The ocean flows and moves and the glass does the same thing,” Remsen said. “You’re having to move as the piece is moving.”

Once you start moving, you can’t stop until the piece is finished. When you’re dealing with a dozen layers of color, this can take up to two hours of twirling, blowing and shaping a big ball of glass on a heavy pipe in a room heated by a 2,300-degree crucible.

On a recent Saturday morning, the studio is starting to warm up as Remsen begins working on a bowl. He dips a pipe into the crucible, pulls out a honeylike blob of clear glass, glowing neon orange, and twirls it around in one hand while he changes a CD with the other. Barry White’s seductive croon gives way to Laurie Anderson’s edgier, industrial sound as Remsen tilts the pipe toward the ceiling and blows a small bubble into the glass. He walks over to a shiny steel table and rolls the ball of glass into a Q-Tip shape.

“Everything starts from that basic shape,” said Mark Klemperer, a friend and apprentice who has worked along with his partner, Ellen Berry, under Remsen’s tutelage for about a year.

At Remsen’s request, Klemperer spreads out a layer of green glass chips on the table, and Remsen rolls the tip of clear glass in the green like an ice cream cone in jimmies. Remsen walks over to the glory hole, constantly twirling the pipe, and holds the tip in the fire until the green melts into the clear.

“Once he starts that first piece of glass, his fingers never stop moving, because if they do, the gravitational force will pull it down into a blob,” Berry said, sitting in a canvas director’s chair behind the work table. “They won’t stop for an hour and a half. There’s a real technique. You need to be able to use your fingers independently.”

A blue road sign hangs from the side of the glory hole’s ventilation system. It reads, “Glassboro,” named for the New Jersey town’s first industry. The scent of hot glass, which smells a lot like an overheated glue gun, fills the air. Remsen takes the pipe out of the furnace and examines it carefully as it cools. He blows into the pipe a little more and asks Klemperer to spread out a layer of white glass chips on the table, then the whole process repeats again. He adds a layer of red, a layer of blue, some more clear. The colors start to swirl together as the ball gets bigger.

“As the piece is evolving, it takes on this growing character and personality,” Remsen explained the previous day. “One color next to another color yields a different color in between. When you blow, the layers get closer and closer together. Sometimes it works. It’s like baseball – you don’t get a hit every time at bat. Even when you’re batting .400, you’ve failed six out of 10 times.”

This time, he spots a mistake, but he catches it soon enough that it doesn’t become a failure. With a pair of sharp tweezers, he yanks out a black speck from the top layer and tosses it into a bucket next to his work table that looks like it’s filled with upside-down icicles. Some of the glass is from today, some is from the day before, and as it slowly cools, it crackles and pings.

Six layers of glass later, Remsen dips the ball of glass into a ridged mold, and it emerges with indented stripes and a flat bottom. He drizzles a stripe of melted yellow glass over the form in a perfect spiral. When he blows again, the ball swells up like a pumpkin. He heads to his work bench and uses his tweezers to cut a ridge into the edge closer to him. Klemperer dips a solid metal rod into the crucible and emerges with a small daub of glass, called a punty, which he sticks onto the flat end of the bowl. In a swift motion, Remsen taps the pipe and breaks it away, transferring the bowl to the punty rod.

“Glass is not something you work solo in,” Berry said, explaining that in the traditional glass shops in Italy, group work is common. Here in America, glassblowers are generous with their knowledge, she said, and seldom keep “trade secrets” from each other because of the collaborative nature of the craft. “You need to work with someone. Two is a minimum.”

Klemperer stands beside the bench as Remsen sits and uses the giant tweezers to coax the bowl’s vaselike mouth outward. If it cools, he heats the glass with a torch, and slowly, the form unfolds. When it’s ready, he breaks off the punty in a swift, clean motion. It’s a moment of suspense, because even glassblowers can drop things, whether it’s a beautiful bowl, the beginnings of a glass lure, or a little vase.

“We call those floor models,” Klemperer said, laughing. “You can’t get too attached to a piece.”

This piece was a success, which is good, because at the end of the weekend Remsen turned the remaining glass in the crucible blue and cast it in glass molds. The weather is heating up, and soon it will be too warm to work in the same room with a 2,300-degree vat of glass, so the glass work is over until October.

Though the spectacle of glassblowing is on hold for the summer, Remsen’s designs still reel in visitors to his gallery. Especially the lures, which give viewers something to look at – something that looks back.

“The lures are the body, the hooks and the eyes,” he says, and the eyes are the most compelling component. “The eyes really are the mirror or the soul. If somebody’s looking at you, you end up looking back. It’s an interesting way of presenting an abstract shape in glass and giving it a different context. They become alive, even.”

Richard Remsen’s glass lures are on view at The Brass Foundry, 531 Park St., West Rockport, near the junction of Routes 90 and 17. For information, call 236-3200 or visit www.remsen.com.