"If you like juxtapositions, you will love Ed Kirshner. His resume exemplifies things that don't normally go together. Glass artist and Vice President of an investment firm is one odd pairing. Working with the geographically, ethnically, and socially disparate communities of Santa Barbara, California, and Oakland, California, as an affordable housing consultant is another. But the most visually interesting juxtaposition in Kirshner's life is the two elements of tension evident in his artistic work: control and chaos. Many artists subjected to pop-culture psychoanalysis are said to be attempting to exert control through their art: Control over the chaos they see in society or feel in their often-tortured souls. Kirshner's psyche doesn't fit on that couch. His altruistic instincts seek control over the kind of economic chaos that forces some people to live in cardboard boxes. But when it comes to his art, Kirshner says "I like to straddle the line between randomness and chaos."

If that sounds like a clichéd pretension, it's not. Kirshner knows what he likes, what he doesn't, and why. His manner of describing those things employs the directness you would expect to find in a scientist rather than in an artist."