California Halloween

About


I build stained glass windows. My shop’s in the middle of nowhere, I thrive on isolation like a troll. I’ve inhaled flux and lead fumes, shed blood, and nearly sanded my fingerprints off. For such a beautiful end result it’s filthy work, my shop can look like a crime scene. It’s also wrenching to give them up, they mean more to me than money.

At less than a week old, I was drenched in the hyper sensuous environment of Latin prayers, Gregorian chants, red votive candles flickering in dark alcoves, the sweet, spicy haze of incense, Italian marble, thunderous pipe organ, the towering, sometimes gory statues of Christ and the Saints, all wrapped in a cocoon of world class German windows vaulting upwards of 100 feet. The circa 1900 Catholic Parish of Bradford, Illinois had built an amazing gem in the middle of the prairie, it was my good luck to be born there.

 

California Halloween

 

A mix of Mayberry and Something Wicked This Way Comes, Bradford was a tomboy’s paradise. I dressed in rags, pretended I had a tail, and ran the fields with my dog until dusk. My bedroom had stained glass in repeating, geometric patterns, they looked like marching nuns. They came alive at night and filtered my dreams and nightmares. When I turned 13, my brother shot my front teeth out with a BB gun and we moved to California.

Art classes at my all girls Catholic high school in Orange were taught by a sour pussed nun who would, if she thought your uniform skirt too short, poke you in the ribs with her crucifix, wielding it like a shank. After graduation, I worked at Disneyland. Giant power lines that fed “The Happiest Place On Earth” were planted in an orange grove right behind our Brady Bunch ranch, they would buzz and pop from misty overcasts spreading in from the beach.


Christ

Midnights, floating in our kidney shaped pool through air bewitched by orange blossoms, I would watch bats pollinate our avocados and the lights from planes over John Wayne Airport and wonder if it was true — could living under power lines really make you crazy?

After Disneyland, I apprenticed at Braccini’s Stained Glass in Tustin, California and learned glass painting from Bill Rundstrom in Oceanside. Bill was trained in the traditional method of apprenticeship at Judson Studios in LA. Among other things, he had me boil tin canfuls of beeswax on a hot plate, torturous, old school stained glass stuff I thought at the time. His generosity in sharing 50 years of arcane, mysterious knowledge rocked my stained glass world.

I moved back to the Midwest, worked with Spectrum Neon in Homewood, Illinois, and apprenticed at Pat’s Tattoos in Lockport. I am now Curious Art Glass, Yellowstone Leather Art, and Original Neon Tattoo.


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