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82 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 1.15 ire extinguishers lie throughout Sherman Blankenship's blacksmith workshop, just in case. It gets hot in here: 2,600-degrees- in-12-minutes hot. And that's Blankenship's "small" forge. Takes about half an hour to get the big one up to 3,200 degrees. Got to keep it hot to manipulate the metal. Blankenship uses mechanical power hammers to bang and clang the iron for texture and shape. "You get smashed and cut and burned and everything else all day long, every day," the 38-year-old says. "It's a lost art." Blankenship studied metal sculpture at Murray State and went to Germany for a semester and a half, obsessively visiting European churches to ogle old ironwork. For the past 13 years he's had Iron Touch, on Bardstown Road past the Watterson. The building sort of resembles a giant green tin can on its side. Inside it's a cave. Four tiny windows, a little dirt, grime. Various shades of brown and gray — copper, iron, bronze. "You walk in, the sun's barely up, and you get going," Blankenship says. He has stenciled red and yellow lizards onto his equipment as a loose trademark. An overhead hoist from his uncles' old construction company acts as the room's centerpiece. On it: an interior railing for a job in Newburg. Blankenship mainly produces railings, drapery rods and gates (like the entrance to a Sacred Heart Academy sports feld). For Blankenship, it's about shifting metal's nature. "I really enjoy making it not look so hard and heavy, making it comfortable to look at," he says. For a customer in St. Matthews, Blankenship once made a gate that mimicked the root system and branches of an Asian maple. He worked for 460 hours (well, that's when he stopped counting) to make the metal look organic, to make the seemingly untamable tamable. STUDIO SHOT He can't bend steel in his bare hands, but give him a fre and a hammer and, yeah. Sherman Blankenship By Emily Markanich Photos by Aaron Kingsbury F