Just north of Los Angeles, Evan Chambers’ glassblowing studio springs out from a small warehouse district like a scene from “Alice in Wonderland.”
Under the skylight of a 10-foot industrial ceiling is a cold, foreboding blacksmith’s forge — which, on an active day, would heat up to 2,500 degrees — surrounded by uncut, conical metal templates awaiting manipulation. On a workbench nearby, sea mine-shaped lamps stand on metal casts of hawk feet alongside caged bubble glass lanterns that appear as if they might burst from internal pressure. Outside is a serene garden under a canopy of branches weighed down by iridescent copper bells, all handmade.
Sitting on a worn wooden chair in the garden on a cool Tuesday afternoon, Chambers, 43, a professional glass and metalsmith, reflected on his antiquated strain of craftsmanship. He said his medium may have seen its peak during the turn-of-the-century Art Nouveau movement, which saw an embrace of organic forms and a rejection of Industrial Age mass-produced monotony.
“Now all those artists are gone, and all that art is gone,” Chambers said, peering toward his studio, which houses Louis Comfort Tiffany lamps in disrepair. “I feel like I’m trying to recreate this time that I never could quite understand.”
There have been many other times Chambers could not quite grasp: The time his parents sold his childhood home, where he first grew to love art; the time his sister moved away from Altadena, which he called the “perfect place,” to pursue glassblowing; and the time when, as his hometown was consumed by the Eaton fire, he felt authorities did little to help.
But if there is one thing Chambers does understand, it lies somewhere deep in the dark, steel “glory hole” of a forge.
“You see a piece of glass from 120 years ago, when there was real craftsmanship, and you think, ‘You know, this is badass,’” Chambers said. “To be able to hit that and then take it in your own creative direction, I like that challenge. … It’s like a game.”
Growing up in working-class Altadena as the second child of a silversmith mother and metalworker father, both of whom have a master’s degree in art and an aversion to television, Chambers spent much of his life immersed in the robust arts-and-crafts scene of Pasadena in the early 2000s.
“[In Pasadena,] there were Craftsman homes, there’s green homes. … Seeing those homes and all the exterior lanterns with all this beautiful, iridescent glass and copper work, I think that kind of informed my art,” Chambers said. “Altadena more informed the person I wanted to be.”
Unlike some of his artistic peers, who idealized studios and showcases in New York or Europe, Chambers never wanted to leave Altadena. “Altadena has always been a creative place, pretty full of and accepting of eccentrics,” he said. “When my sister went to college, I was sobbing, like, ‘How could you move away?’”
As defiant teenagers tend to do, Chambers departed from the family profession, admitted to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo as an agricultural business major. Self-admittedly, Chambers only got through three years before he switched to English and began working out of an unconventional glassblowing studio.
“Going there, it was like the prettiest place ever; very pastoral, it blew my mind,” Chambers said. “There’s all these glassblowers up there, and they’re doing all this nature-inspired work, and then I ended up five years in.”
Many of Chambers’ projects center on the interaction between the natural and the practical. On one lamp in the studio, tentacles hold up cylindrical copper spires with submarine-style looking glasses to reveal a small bulb inside. Glass vases with metallic finishes of unnatural blue, green and gold are drowned in palm leaf motifs, ready to be flowered.
Theodora Coleman, owner of the Gold Bug independent gallery in Pasadena — which has represented Chambers for nearly two decades — said she feels that Chambers’ metalwork harkens back to epic journeys in literature, fitting appropriately into a world crafted by the likes of French writer Jules Verne. His glasswork, she said, is understood as preeminent by Tiffany historians, who don’t often come by artists who can authentically reproduce the luster of age-worn glass.
“There’s a whimsy to it, but I think there’s also something that can be brought into a more contemporary environment,” Coleman said.
Near the end of college, working out of a glass studio without pay or financial support from his parents, Chambers used his handiwork skills to build a tree house near his campus that he lived in for two years to avoid rising rent costs.
“I wanted to spend more time in nature and I wanted to be able to spend whatever money I was making on renting time at a glass studio,” Chambers said.
He would eventually meet his wife, Caitlin, then an English student at Cal Poly. Not long after, he was able to ditch the cold, insular tree house for a beachside home her family owned in the area.
“I think he was about 24 and I had never met anyone that talked about beauty the way he did,” said Caitlin Chambers, now an English professor at Pasadena’s ArtCenter College of Design. “I don’t think it’s really typical for young men to be like, ‘This is beautiful.’ I remember thinking, ‘Wow, it’s so nice to hear from someone who has that kind of attunement with the world.’”
Around that time, Chambers fully delved into pursuing mastery of an art form buried under a century. As he recounted the odyssey, more than 20 years of practice could be charted through various blotches and burn scars on his arms.
“Everything else fades away,” Chambers said. “All my rage fades away, and I’m just focused on the thing.”
But that dormant rage would eventually return, to the point where his art became secondary. Years after resettling in west Altadena with Caitlin and having two children — Edie, 9, and John, 5 — tragedy struck the quaint family home: the Eaton fire.
The handling of the Eaton fire is the subject of an ongoing civil rights investigation by the California Department of Justice. Fire victims from the historically Black west Altadena community have alleged discrimination by emergency responders that resulted in 14,021 burned acres, 19 deaths and 9,000 destroyed buildings — one being Chambers’ — over the course of the 25-day fire.
Throughout the next year, Chambers hardly worked. He coordinated with neighbors to assist with fundraising projects; searched for art and jewelry for neighbors in charred, empty lots, desperately attempting to restore those pieces; and protested on the lawn of the fire department and sheriff, calling for a thorough autopsy of what went wrong in west Altadena during the fire.
“Accountability is really big with me,” Chambers said. “West Altadenans were literally burning in their homes. … It’s not OK.”
This stubborn defiance is also present in Chambers’ commitment to the “golden age” of decorative art. The turn-of-the-century molds in his studio — which use botanic motifs, blossoming forms with metallic winged and floral attachments — look like desk toppers fit for an early 1900s eccentric obsessed with Darwinism and industrialization.
“The [Art Nouveau] movement was a reaction against the Industrial Revolution and automation,” Caitlin said. “We might be in that kind of time, which, because of AI, is a revival of the handmade. … He’s a part of that.”
On his website, Chambers’ pieces range from $1,550 for the “baby opium gazer” lamp to $12,500 for the “sterling opium gazer.” His organic forms, including a glowing cicada and whale lamp, fall between $2,000 and $4,000.
When Altadena began the slog of a fire recovery effort, Chambers and his wife stumbled upon an opportunity reminiscent of the rent-free tree house he built in college: a 2,400-square-foot Craftsman-style home in Hollywood that was to be demolished. The house was purchased for $1 from the developer, sectioned and transported on flatbed trucks to Altadena. It was cheaper than purchasing a new home, Chambers said.
“It was a time in Altadena where if anybody needed anything, it was very open,” Chambers said. “I never wanted to leave.”
As he sat under a ray of natural light in his studio, his creations staring at his back through a hundred radiant eyes and looking glasses, Chambers sat slouching. He said he didn’t know how close he would come to fully comprehending the era he pursued in his art, but behind him, the decade-old soot on the rim of the inactive forge indicated that another age of artisanship may have passed unnoticed.
The post An Altadena glassblower lost his home to flames. In his studio, he’s forging something new appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
