How to stay warm creatively

In case you haven’t heard or noticed, it’s cold.

Fortunately, in New York City, there is no shortage of ways to thaw out when the mercury dips below the freezing mark. Though Starbucks has pretty much taken over the city, there are still plenty of cool independent coffee shops downtown, serving up steaming hot beverages. Theaters are great places to cuddle up. And if you’re really, really cold, you can try to do what I did yesterday, which is to sit in front of a 2,000-degree furnace full of molten glass.

Yesterday was open house day at UrbanGlass, which is a very large glassworking studio in an unassuming building on Fulton Street in downtown Brooklyn. During open houses, staff members take the public on free guided tours of the facility, which includes areas for making glass beads, neon signs, lamps, mosaics, fused pieces, stained glass panels, sandblasted pieces, and, of course, blown and kilnworked glass. Each tour concludes with a glassblowing demonstration by professional artists in the very toasty “hot shop,” where the furnaces and glory holes (or superheated gas chambers, used to keep the glass hot while manipulating it) are located.

The tour was a very warm, and yet very cool, way to spend a Saturday afternoon. I learned so much about glassworking, and the studio environment made me feel creative; I sort of want to take a class at some point in the future, though UrbanGlass’s education programs are, at least for the time being, pretty far from fitting into my budget. Maybe I’ll return sometime for a weekend workshop when I have a little money to spend, and make a paperweight or a mug. There’s something so appealing about the idea of making a functional object completely from scratch, from raw — and super-hot — materials.

UrbanGlass also has a few objects for sale from its resident artists — also out of my price range, but certainly beautiful. I browsed the selection before the tour.

The tour began in a small room with a few tables and propane burners, like the ones that I used in high school chemistry class. The burners are used for crafting small pieces of glass into beads. The molten glass is wrapped around a stick-like tool and rotated in a gas flame until surface tension causes it to adopt a spherical shape. After only a few seconds away from the flame, the glass cools and stiffens enough to be removed from the tool (which leaves a hole in the center, for stringing the bead). Color can be added to a bead by using small tools to attach blobs of differently colored molten glass to the outside of the bead, then returning it to the flame, where surface tension again comes into play as the blobs melt seamlessly into the surface of the existing bead, creating spots of color. Highly experienced glassworkers can create very elaborate, precise beads using these and other techniques.

Our next stop was the “flat shop,” where we lingered for only a minute because a stained glass workshop was in session. We saw students hammering out precisely shaped pieces of glass to fit the designs that they had sketched out for their panels. The tour guide also showed us curved glass sushi plates (one of which was unfinished), created by the processes of fusing and slumping. Fusing is the process of heating multiple pieces of glass in a kiln until they bond, which allows the artist to create depth. Slumping involves placing a superheated piece of glass into a mold and letting gravity take over, which creates curves like those found in bowls and plates. Edges can then be filed down and made smooth with a grinder. The finished sushi plate featured an elegant curve, smooth edges, and layers of color in the foreground and background.

From the flat shop, we headed off to the hot shop, where we were seated in rows and given safety goggles to protect us from the heat of the furnaces, in which the molten glass is stored until ready to use.

Our tour guide narrated while two professional artists created a vase, with one serving as the other’s assistant. The lead artist shaped the piece and regularly returned it to the glory hole to keep it hot and malleable, and his assistant (who had taken the lead on the vase that the two had created just prior to our arrival) followed his instructions to inflate the glass by blowing into the pipe onto which it had been gathered, or to smooth it out with a wooden paddle. The two worked together to perforate the glass at the point where it needed to be broken off the pipe, to widen the opening in the vase, and to catch it with heavy firefighters’ mitts when it was ready to be struck off.

The glass is shaped by blowing into the pipe, tilting the glass towards the floor to let gravity elongate it, and rolling and squashing it on a cool sheet of steel called a marver:

(These photos are slightly blurry, due in part to my sitting on the third row and having to shoot through people’s heads, and in part to the motion of the glassworkers and the intense light from the white-hot furnaces.)

The glass has to be kept above 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit, to keep it from stiffening and cracking while being worked on, so the lead artist (with the help of a heat shield) frequently returns it to the glory hole to keep it white-hot and fluid. A handheld blowtorch occasionally serves in a pinch.

On the few occasions when the pipe becomes too hot to handle, the artists douse it with water and immediately resume working with it.

The whole process of creating the vase took no more than fifteen or twenty minutes, but the artists did not have a moment to rest during that whole time; molten glass has to be kept in constant motion to prevent the effects of gravity from distorting the piece, so the artists kept rolling the vase back and forth while they were shaping it with tools, in between trips to the glory hole. Here you can see the red-hot, flared opening of the smoky-gray vase, as the lead artist rolled it to maintain its symmetry:

At the end of the process of creating a vase or another blown glass item, the artist doesn’t have long to admire his handiwork; the object has to be rushed off to a 1,000-degree oven, which, once full, is slowly cooled over a period of 25-30 hours to prevent the objects within from cracking under the stress of sudden temperature changes. But for the sake of comparing the nearly-finished vase to the glowing, gooey lump it had been at the beginning of its life, here’s a very blurry shot of the shaped glass coming out of the glory hole for some finishing touches:

At the end of the guided tour and demonstration, we returned to the reception area, where a completely darkened room currently houses a small exhibition, Matsukaze, by the Japanese-born artist and architect Yumi Kori. The exhibition consists of glass objects flickering with electricity (or at least the illusion of it), and it produced one of my new favorite photos.

It looks like some kind of luminous sea creature in one of those darkened rooms of an aquarium meant to simulate the bottom of the ocean.

Now, when I’m beginning to feel gloomy about the state of New York City’s art scene, I can remember that we still have lively, functioning glassworking studios in Brooklyn, and I’ll feel just a little better.

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