After almost fifteen years as a development level machinist in the aerospace industry, involved in projects such as the Viking Landers, now to be found on Mars, and the B1 bomber, I became intimately involved in a relationship with glass and glass carving, working for and with Kelsey Murphy at her glass decorating factory (Glass Expectations, Inc.) in Ohio. As our decorating evolved from architectural glass to 3 dimensional shapes and vessels, I had to develop some machinery to make the vessels possible to decorate in a production that was both controllable and cost effective. Once finished with that, my interest began to wander towards the cameo glass of 1800s English artists. When Glass Expectations was contracted by Pilgrim to decorate some of their vessels, we took advantage of their tremendous facility to try to develop the historically ill fated process. With the help of some very talented people working there, I overcame many of the problems, both in the chemistry and the annealing process, that historically netted losses of over 90% of every piece ever made, reducing the losses to under 3%. During that time I produced many pieces, some of which can be seen in museums, like the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Broadfield House Glass Museum, Stourbridge, England, and many private collections.

After a ten year hiatus, delving into wood carving and other mediums, I am excited to be back carving cameo glass. Glass, especially cameo glass, is extremely addicting! Once it's in your blood, you never want to give it up! Now, living in West Virginia, the peaceful and natural surroundings here at the studio are so wonderfully inspiring, allowing for both the realist and the fantasy sides of my person.

Working in cameo glass makes finding inspiration not so much like searching for a needle in a haystack but more like seeing the forest for the trees as virtually anything is possible and I, now, think of myself as an artist."

Kelsey Murphy

                             Artist owned and operated,

                                     Studios of Heaven 

                  specializes in the carving of cameo glass.

Robert P. Bomkamp

Meet the artists...

                         Cameo glass is a hand-blown, hand carved, multiple colored, layered glass. The    

                         more colored layers, the more rare and more precious the glass.  Please check out

                         our glass page to find out more about the glass we work with.

We carve quality cameo glass items ranging from beautiful ornaments to incredibly rare and unique, multi-layered Pilgrim Super Cameo glass art pieces that are impossible to find anywhere else in the world.

Each Studio of Heaven art piece is created from an original pencil drawing, the design is then fully developed for glass before it can then be carefully sand-carved by hand to bring out the natural beauty of the cameo glass, layer by layer.