December 12–19, 1996

critical mass

Blow Man Blow

A studio for glass artists heats up the Old City art scene.

By Daisy Fried

When the ovens are hot enough — one 2,063 F, another 873 F — the dance of the glass begins, accompanied by the murmur of onlookers gathered at the edge of the arena of heat, and by the terse communications between the men working the ovens.

Alex Kamens and his posse — Gateson Recko, Dan Cutrone, Micah Brodsky, all young guys with strong shoulders and chic hair, or chic lack thereof — turn red by the blasting fires. They wipe dripping brows on shirtsleeves as they spin metal rods, pass molten glass inches from bare skin, plunge forming shapes into pits of flame. Their movements are rhythmic, synchronized, economical. They know each other and their craft so well, they barely talk as they move.

Blow... OK... harder... stop...

Occasionally an onlooker steps in to blow into the rolling rod, then fades back into the crowd. Baggy unhemmed jeans, denim clogs, butterfly clips buttressing up raggedy buns, layers of sweaters, hiking boots, bruise-colored lipstick, motorcycle leather, scattered silver pierced mostly through rims of ears, soft cotton blouses, undulant pendants hanging down flanneled chests on black thongs, chunky finger rings... the crowd sips cheap chablis from tiny plastic cups, nibbles pepperoni and purple grapes, watches, fascinated.

Self-described "glass groupies," they're here to celebrate the First Friday opening of Hot Soup, Kamens' new glassblowing studio and gallery at 26 S. Strawberry St. in Old City. They seem to grow more and more hypnotized by the fire, the heat, the spinning, glowing glass.

WHAT-AM talk show host Bill Anderson, Kamens' roommate and ex-schoolmate, sounds like a proud father. "Alex used to make glass roses for girls at school," he says, staring at the gleaming floss on the end of Kamens' pipe. "But you don't know what goes into it until you've seen it."

And people write proud, joking things in the guest book:

Blow On The Pipe You Crackheads

Blow Man... Blow

Hope This Place Makes Lots of Money... So I Can Borrow Some.

***

Actually, Kamens, 26, who also owns an electrical contracting company, says he's not looking to make a profit. Besides offering glassblowing classes (novice to master) and providing a show space for local glass workers — who he says are underrepresented in local galleries — he wants to provide a workshop glass artists can use without spending big money.

"It's such a struggle to make a living from glass," Kamens says. "People who rent glass studios pay so much they can't afford to take risks with their work. I want to keep the cost low enough that artists who come here can take risks, try new things. I see this as a hostel for artists."

He says he also hopes Hot Soup will encourage artists working in other mediums to incorporate glass into their work. What the Fabric Workshop does for cloth and the Clay Studio for wet earth, Kamens hopes to do for glass.

Kamens' own glass addiction began when he was 12, when he and his father, a glass collector, signed up for a glassblowing class at Tyler. Kamens was enchanted, and began blowing any chance he got.

"I was kind of adopted by local artists," he says. Still in his teens, he worked for Dale Chihuly, America's most famous glass artist.

"Glass is very focused," he says. "With everything else, you can walk away. If you're doing a painting and the phone rings you can go answer it. You can come back in an hour or later in the year. With glass, if you start, you have to finish. It has no form when you begin: the form only exists in your own mind, and then you battle the medium to give it form. It's incredibly exciting."

Kamens bought the Strawberry Street building in August. What's now half a spotlit gallery of bright colored glass vessels and sculptures and half a rugged atelier was once a collection of office cubicles. Kamens and several dozen volunteers — students, friends, family — gutted it, pulled down the drop ceiling and up the carpet, built the ovens and the hulking exhaust system.

From primal, roaring fires comes a rainbow of glinting, gleaming, alluring, weird, wonderful forms. Boyertown's Dan Gaumer's tall vases textured with chicken wire. Recko's loopy glass blossoms affixed to airbrushed aluminum. The Hut's Steve Stormer's vases with blitch-blotches of glass in contrasting colors pimpling their surfaces. Kamens' own glass sculpture, like the black-and-clear-glass hand vined with crushed-glass molded leaves attached.

"Glass," says Kamens, wiping his sweating face, "wants to be beautiful."

***

The 2,000-plus degree central oven is a cauldron fed with "batch": silicon sand, ash and lime, which melts to molten glass. Kamens plunges a long blow pipe into it, pulls out a gossamer glob, spinning and spinning the rod. "It's like honey on a dowel," he explains. "You have to keep turning it to keep it from dripping off."

He brings it to a metal table, rolling the bulging blob in the orange powdered glass dye, then sits on a chair bolted to a workbench, and turns the rod back and forth across two supports in front of him. Recko crouches at the cool end and —give it some, says Kamens — blows into the pipe. The bulb grows —OK harder — as Kamens rolls the rod and shapes the bulb with the simplest of tools: gravity, pincers, shears. Stop, says Kamens. Recko moves off to something else.

As the glass hardens to the consistency of chewy taffy Kamens takes a thick pad of folded wet newspaper in his palm, holds it to the rotating glass, to shape it more subtly. The pad steams furiously, the hardening glass squeaks, bits of burning paper fling off and fade out. Kamens plops the pad on the bench beside him, and with his hand, splashes water from a bucket over it to cool it down. Gets up, thrusts the rod, still spinning, into one of the flaming "glory hole" ovens flanking the central furnace. He's softening the glass so he can continue to work it.

Back at the bench he bends the end into a pointed tip, and, still rotating the pipe, uses a tool to mark irregular dents into the orange glass.

It's a carrot! an onlooker squeals.

A half dozen or more trips in and out of the glory hole — one guy blowing, one guy spinning, one guy preparing another molten blob in nearly silent, sweating synch —blow... OK... harder... stop — and then, tap, the glass carrot — the snout of the snowman Kamens and friends are creating in this special demo — is in Recko's now-gloved hands.

Recko dashes over to one of the square annealing ovens (which keep pieces from cracking as they cool by cooling them gradually) bobbling the carrot from hand to hand. It's too hot, even through industrial-strength insulated gloves, to hang onto for long, and so soft, the glove texture would mark the glass if he didn't move it around. Brodsky swings open the door; Recko pops it in. Cutrone has begun the next piece of Frosty's outfit, and walks over with a rod of what'll grow, in minutes, from translucent glob to opaque, shiny black stovepipe hat.

By the end of the night, Frosty will stand, glassily grinning, among the rest of the gallery's merchandise, under spotlights encased in soup pots and College Inn chicken stock cans with the label replaced by the Hot Soup logo.

Which I ask Kamens about. He laughs. Serendipity.

"The industry name for places like this is 'hot shop,' so, originally we were going to be Old City Hot Shop. We sent our registration to the Old City Arts Association under that name, but the letter they sent back said, 'Congratulations Old City Hot Soup.'"

"We were like, perfect!"