But catch him at work and he's spending most of his time bent over a hot torch, holding pieces of glass in scorching flames and working his magic on them. Roff is an up-and-coming glass artist whose beautifully molded pink strawberries with golden hues are the rage among glass collectors this season.

Roff is part of a growing community of professional glass artists in the Bay Area. Over the past few years, creative renditions in glass have virtually exploded onto the market.

Glass art, from figurines to huge sculptures, have come to symbolize the latest fad in collectibles, and they're seemingly everywhere--local stores, specialized galleries, even theme parks.

It's quite a switch from a decade ago, when glass art was shunned as mere craft. Photography, ceramics and glassworks were poor cousins to fine art until sometime in the 1990s. One by one these art forms became more acceptable to the hoity-toity circles in the art community, and today glass is officially in.

Traditionally, Seattle has been the mecca for glass art professionals in the United States. But the San Francisco Bay Area is fast turning into a haven for these creative artists. There are an estimated 150 to 200 glass professionals in the area, and the numbers are increasing.

In the South Bay especially, interest in glass art has peaked over the past several years, mainly because of the efforts of a small nonprofit organization in San Jose called the Bay Area Glass Institute, commonly referred to in art circles as BAGI.

The institute was started in 1996 as a studio space for emerging glass artists, providing them with furnaces and glory holes (a tiny furnace for melting glass), which are essential for melting glass and blowing it into pieces of art. Four former glass art students from San Jose State University, Mike Binnard, Bobby Bowes, Mariko Takada and Jonathan Tepperman, started the studio when they found themselves stranded without a place to work after graduation. The foursome ended up creating Silicon Valley's very own retreat for glass artists.

And it is at this glass institute that one finds Mike Roff making his strawberries.

In his own little corner, Roff has a special glass torch mounted on a worktable. There he dons his protective infrared glasses and prepares for creative blastoff. In a fraction of a second, his torch comes alive, spewing red-hot fire that can reach a temperature of 3,000 Fahrenheit.

Roff begins most of his creations with a long glass pipette. He holds the hollow glass tube on either side, with his bare hands over the flames. As the glass begins to soften at the center, he twists and turns and pulls and bends and shapes the pliant glass until the simple pipette looks like the base of a goblet.

He then places a tiny piece of 24-karat gold on the tip of one of his metal stirrers and holds it over the fire. As the gold piece begins to melt and vaporize, the gold oxide vapors form a pinkish golden sheen on the glass piece. Roff then dots the piece with clear molten glass to give a dot effect for his strawberries. Once this is done, the twisting and turning and gentle molding starts again until the base of the goblet begins to fold over and resemble a beautiful strawberry.

Roff explains that he is able to work the glass with his bare hands because "glass is a very bad conductor of heat--but a good insulator. Only when you touch the portion of glass that has been directly over the fire will you feel the heat."

But it's not only the glass artists' flame that creates heat. There is the all-important monetary dimension and the question of whether the sweat and the long hours an artist puts into each piece is worth it financially. Initially artists make only what they manage to sell at art shows or through word of mouth. "But when you move to the next level, the money is very, very good," says Roff. He says his wife, a biologist, is looking forward to the day when he makes it big so that she can quit her job and manage his business.

Photograph by Jacqueline Ramseyer The Bay Area Glass Institute is known for its signature glass pumpkins. Artists, both amateurs and professionals, come to the institute from all around the South Bay to work with glass.

When the glass institute held its first annual Great Glass Farmer's Market last month, Roff's glass strawberries were a hit. At $40 apiece, these berries are considered worth their weight in gold. Roff also makes exotic glass blueberries that are more expensive and can range in price between $100 and $150.

In addition to creating their pieces, most artists have to market them, too. Until an artist is in a position to hire an agent, it is his or her responsibility to look out for shows and galleries where their pieces can be displayed and possibly sold. And this puts tremendous pressure on a budding artist.

But one person who pursues glass art solely as a passion, rather than a serious profession, is Cupertino's Zoe Adorno, an accomplished glass artist. After Adorno retired from her secretarial job at Hewlett-Packard in 1990, she went back to her lifelong passion for art.

Even as a child growing up in the country in Southern California, Adorno would make little clay pots and dolls and bake them in her family's backyard incinerator, which was used in those days for burning trash.

As she meandered through life, juggling marriage and motherhood and tough times, Adorno always remained true to her artistic soul, dabbling in various art forms. During the 1970s and 1980s, Adorno specialized in mosaic art, creating huge canvases that were a reflection of her life and philosophy at every stage.

It was only in the late '80s that Adorno found her calling in glass. She had taken a few courses in fused glass art in Sacramento and was hooked. By then she had decided to take a voluntary retirement from HP and set up a studio in her Cupertino home.

Today Adorno is one of the most respected dichoric fused glass artists in the Bay Area. And some of her works fetch up to a few thousand dollars. As she talks about her art and shows off her creations, Adorno's eyes light up. She says she continues to be fascinated by the ability of dichoric glass to reflect two different colors.

These days Adorno is working on a "cosmos" theme. Her creations have spiral galaxies, meteors, stars and supernovas fused into them. "How can one not be amazed by the mysteries of the universe and beyond?" Adorno says.

It takes her at least two days and quite a bit of dexterity to complete one piece. Over a plain sheet of glass that is used for windowpanes she lays cut designs of dichoric glass. She then places this basic two-sheet glass design inside a kiln in a studio at home that is programmed to reach a maximum temperature of 1,450 Fahrenheit in nine hours.

After the two glass sheets have fused together, Adorno lets the piece gradually cool down to room temperature. The next day she sets a curvy mold of stainless steel in the kiln. To give her final design a wavy look, she places her fused dichoric glass on the mold and closes the kiln and fires the kiln again.

But when the kiln temperature reaches 1,450 Fahrenheit again, she dons a special suit and headgear that protect her from the intense heat when she opens the kiln at this temperature. She barely has a minute to play with her design as she shapes and coaxes the pliant fused glass to give it its final shape. If she lets more time elapse the glass can become brittle and break.

Finally she closes the kiln and lets the gradual cooling process begin.

Adorno is an ardent supporter of the Bay Area Glass Institute and has donated several of her works to the institute's annual auctions and other events. She is thrilled at the direction the organization is now taking in creating more awareness and educating the masses about the art of glass.

"BAGI has had these wonderful classes and workshops for beginners and advanced glass artists for some time now, and I feel this, along with the other programs they hold, has been funneling the interest of the public in glass art," says Adorno.

The institute has in fact redefined its mission and has made education one of its primary objectives. The organization already offers workshop courses on different glass art techniques and is accepting enrollment for its summer glassblowing classes.

"The first year we had about 10 students enrolling in our classes," says Bobby Bowes, artistic director. "But this year we have already had 200 to 300 students. The problem is, we now have to be selective in the number of people we take in. We prefer to have small working groups of six students and would like to keep it that way."

BAGI is also adding a new kind of training: team building for the corporate world. Sometime next month the institute will host a workshop for a group of 10 Silicon Valley professionals, who will spend their time melting and blowing glass and working as a team. Surely there can be no better place to build team spirit and cohesion than at a glass studio, where the heat is on!

For more information about BAGI, call 408.993.2244 or visit http://www.bagi.org. Zoe Adorno's work can be viewed online at http://www.svcn.com/archives/cupertinocourier/20030521/index.html.