Meet the Artist
I was recently introduced to a stranger the other day as ‘the artist who did …’, a designation that invariably makes me squirm in my underwear. I don’t go around introducing my friends as Joe the accountant or Wendy the professor or Ralph the serial adulterer. No point in tying them to a preconception, putting them in a neat well-defined box and leaving them to futile extrications. The person I was introduced to said, “Oh, I saw your glass in the train station….” And then she asked where I’d taken my art studies, expecting, no doubt, some university or salon, possibly an apprenticeship under Chihuly.
“I took a night class at Stanwoodopolis High School,” I said, giving the answer I’ve given since the first time I was asked this. “Went to one class and came home with just enough information to be dangerous.” I lived in the shack I bought in 1977, a place with plastic on window openings that needed to be boarded up or filled with conventional paned glass. But since I didn’t know then how to frame a house or remodel a window opening to make a used window frame fit into the wall, I got this eureka moment when I saw a stained glass class offered in the local night school. Why learn framing when I could make a window that fit exactly the opening where the plastic was?
I know, I know, I could’ve just as easily learned woodworking and carpentry, but I didn’t have much faith in my skills on that front and anyway, I didn’t own tools either. So, like always in my life, I took the easy route instead, rolled into town for a night class, figured one hour was plenty, bought some glass the next day and a glass cutter, then went to work. By the next class I had one window installed and a six foot doorway filled. Why go back? I was practically a pro. So what if it took me decades to learn what I didn’t learn by finishing that class?
But a funny thing happened on the way to my career. I learned how to frame a wall, learned how to build a house and learned how to cut glass. I made a few windows, but being poor, the glass cost a fortune and those windows got smaller and smaller. By then I’d gotten kind of hooked on stained glass, all that color, all that sparkle, all the magic of it, corny as it sounds. And I hated working small. I’m the sort of guy who could never be a clock repairman. Those tiny parts would drive me nuts. Doesn’t help that I have ten thumbs.
So I started selling stained glass windows, much as I hated to given my disdain for all things commercial. Victorian designs, roses, cute iris windows. Do a few of those and you too might venture toward doing your own stuff even if it was odd or bad or semi-weird. The woman I’d been introduced to said ‘you must have a natural talent.’ I replied that she hadn’t seen my first attempts, otherwise, she would know I didn’t.
But … I’m living proof you can learn. All this mumbo-jumbo of right brain, left brain, maybe you buy that. Okay, but keep this in mind: we all got a brain and it has both sides, no assembly required. Doesn’t cost any extra to use both and the funny thing is, they get better the more you do.
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