ABOUT 4,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, some masochistic visionary had the crazy idea of blowing into a hollow metal pole, on the other end of which was affixed a dan gerously hot, glowing yellow blob of mol ten glass.
Insane people, impervious to heat or reason, are still doing this, as I learned while taking a private glass-blowing lesson at one of the country’s oldest and largest glass studios: Brooklyn’s UrbanGlass, which celebrates its 30th anniversary this year.
There, on a recent 90-degree day – as floor fans chased the heat from the studio’s infernal furnaces – perspiring glass-blowers were still, in accordance with tradition, bare-handedly dipping metal poles into pools of liquefied glass. Then they’d carefully carry their poles around the Fulton Street studio, from bench to bench, shaping the glass with ancient wood and metal tools, reheating it with blowtorches, and breathing it into shape.
“Coming through,” they warn as they move around with this diabolical substance, which comes out of the furnace at around 2,800 degrees Fahrenheit – more than hot enough to melt steel.
“The first and only time my wife tried this, it was so hot, she dropped the pole into the furnace,” my instructor, John West, told me. “Then she turned around, told me I’m crazy, and never came back.”
It’s hot, it’s dangerous, it’s difficult and it’s expensive. The glass often rebels – sagging when molten, cracking or exploding when cooling. So why have people been doing this for 4,000 years?
Because the results of these Vulcan efforts are startlingly beautiful. Hand-blown glass in any form – a vessel, a sculpture, even to some clumsy degree the crooked drinking glass I made – is simply a stunning substance. It’s seductive to touch and hypnotic to look at, like heaven following hell, though never at a comfortable distance.
UrbanGlass offers classes for pros and amateurs in glass blowing, bead making, lamp work, mosaics, neon, stained glass and glass casting. Visit urbanglass.org, or call (718) 625-3685 for info or to request a course catalog.