Page 45 of Full Tilt
“So…” I rocked back on my heels. “Can I get a sneak peek? Seeing as how I won’t be here in October for the gallery opening, it’s only fair.”
“I’ll show you but it’s not going to look very impressive.”
He led me to the back room. Dim light streamed in from the windows, illuminating dozens and dozens of cardboard boxes, some open and overflowing with packaging bubbles or the little curls of Styrofoam my grandmother called ‘ghost poop.’ Other boxes were sealed up tight and stacked, no more than three feet high, withFRAGILEstamped all over. Other flattened cardboard boxes were stacked in piles or leaned against the cement walls, waiting to be filled. On one long worktable—easily twenty feet long—were pieces of Jonah’s installation.
I moved slowly toward the table, paranoid I would break something even without touching it.
Long curls of yellow and orange glass were laid out next to ribbons of blue and green, infused with gold flecks and dark purple swirls. White, frothy glass took up another section of the table, pearly with incandescence. The last section held glass sculptures that took my breath away: delicate sea horses and sea dragons, glowing white jellyfish suspended in black spheres, and even an octopus, its tentacles curling a good foot and a half long and its skin rippling with ribbons of color.
Carefully, I let my fingers trace the blunt edge of a piece of glass that looked like a large ice cube with coral fronds. Within swam a sea turtle—perfectly rendered.
I looked at Jonah, so many questions trying to pour out of my open mouth that none did.
He jammed his hands down the front pockets of his jeans. “Not much to look at right now. Most of it is already packed away.”
I shook my head. “These are amazing. I’ve never seen anything like this in my life.”
“Thanks.”
“The rest is in the boxes? To send to the gallery?”
He nodded. “I won’t be able to wire them together until I’min the gallery space itself.”
“But how do you know what to work on if you can’t see the whole thing? That’s like…writing a song but never playing it through until show time.”
Jonah shrugged and tapped his temple. “I have it up here.”
I think he mistook my shocked expression because he waved his hand like he was getting rid of a bad smell. “God, that sounds pretentious as hell.”
“No, I think I get it.” I gestured to the table. “This looks like an archaeological dig of Atlantis. Like you’re finding the pieces one at a time and can’t put them all together yet.”
“Yeah, I like to think so.” His eyes roved over the scattered pieces of his art. “I think part of working with glass is that you don’t know exactly how it will turn out. The shape and flow of it… The fire dictates so much of what the glass does, how it changes the color and form. With some pieces, like the sea life, I design it from top to bottom, obviously. But for the installation as a whole, I try to follow it, instead of forcing it to be what it doesn’t want to be.”
A short silence fell. He glanced down at me and the eyebrow went up. Laughter burst out of me and I elbowed his side. I loved hearing him talk about his art. Art I knew nothing about, but was so incredibly beautiful, even strewn all over a table in pieces.
“Okay, show me,” I said. “I’m dying to see how you do this. You can work and entertain me at the same time.”
He looked thoughtful for a minute, then nodded, as if answering a private thought.
We went back to the main floor of the hot shop. Jonah grabbed one of the stainless-steel pipes from a rack on the wall and I took a seat on the bench with the two rails.
“I’m going to need that,” he told me. He pulled a chair from the opposite wall and set it up for me near the bench.
“Are you going to make something for the installation?”
“No,” he said. “A small piece. To sell at the gallery. I think a perfume bottle.”
“I love pretty perfume bottles.”
“Do you?” he asked, his face turned away, as he put one end of the pipe into the larger of the two furnaces, spinning it in his hands, back and forth, all the while. When he pulled the pipe from the furnace, a small molten sphere clung to the end, about the size of a tennis ball. He went to the stainless-steel table and rolled the glass over it, back and forth until it resembled a thick arrowhead, then put it into the smaller furnace, like he was roasting a marshmallow over a campfire. The fire inside this smaller furnace glowed ten times as hot as the larger one that held all the melted glass.
Jonah rolled the pipe in his palms over and over. Sweat had broken out over his neck and biceps, and I watched those muscles move as he worked.
“Kacey?”
I tore my eyes from his arms. “I’m sorry, what?”
“Color?” He carried the pipe with its glowing arrow of glass to a shelf full of trays. I kept a safe distance from the torch in his hands and saw that each tray was filled with crushed bits of glass in various colors.
