Paul Stankard, a visionary glass blower who memorialized flora and fauna in hardened and translucent form, died at the age of 83, according to a New York Times obituary that celebrates how his “decades-long obsession with replicating the natural world in glass transformed the American paperweight from tchotchke to fine art.” The cause of his death was cancer, according to his daughter.

As the Times described Stankard’s fateful turn to the the mode of working he made his own, “In 1972, with three young children and a newborn at home, Mr. Stankard skipped out on a steady job blowing glass for chemical laboratories. He was in love—with paperweights.”

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As Stankard himself stated , on his website, “What Walt Whitman did with words, I seek to do in glass on a visual level. My passion is to articulate fresh information celebrating nature through glass art.…