Meet Madeline & Mickey Of Gimmebeads

Meet The wonderful husband and wife team--

Madeline & Mickey Of Gimmebeads

You can visit their Etsy store here:

http://www.etsy.com/shop.php?user_id=5239208

How many years have you been an artist?
Madeline has been an artist all of her life. Her mother was a painter and she started drawing and painting when she was very young and has a B.A. in fine art. Mickey on the other hand has always loved art and surrounded himself with artists, but really never was an artist. Married an artists, raised kids that were artists, but he basically just watched, besides art is a way of living not a thing you do.

How many years have you worked with glass?
We both started in glass about 3 years ago. Madeline started working in design with glass beads and about 2 years ago started making beads herself. Mickey doesn’t know what in the world to do with a piece of glass, but he keeps on making things. Mickey started off working exclusively in so-called soft glass and then started blowing glass using the borosilicate glass a couple of years ago.

What triggers ideas for new projects?
Gosh, I have more projects in mind that I’ll ever be able to complete. I have ideas that range from huge installation sized pieces down to insect sculptures and from purely functional pieces to purely decorative. Almost everything I see out there registers in my head as an interpretive piece in glass. The forms in nature seem to be so closely constructed in the same flowing form that glass takes as it is worked.

When do ideas come to you? How often?
Ideas come to me all of the time. I sometimes find myself waking up with a new idea. Sometimes, I am driving along, spinning imaginary glass in my hands when a new idea for a pattern will come to mind. Sometimes I’ll see someone wearing a shirt or dress and think about how to bring out what they have on. There isn’t a formula for me.

What percentage of the day do you think about or work on your art?
Well, we both do have jobs that we do in the real world, so we have to sign off for that part of the day. We wake up really early for most folks (we live on a farm ya know)…. When we get up, get coffeed and dressed, we start working on our projects and usually spend a couple of hours in the morning and a couple of hours in the late afternoon or night actually working on things. Now, thinking about art…well….I’m not sure we ever really stop.

Do you create daily?
I won’t say that we create EVERY day, but it’s darned close to it. There is the odd and rare day that we don’t work on one of the projects.

How important is it for you to create art?
I think we both feel that living is art, or maybe it’s “art is living.” If we are in touch with the things that are surrounding us, it seems very natural to create things that fit within that. I really can’t imagine not making things that express that relationship.

Do you feel that choosing the artist’s life has been a sacrifice?
Have you given up certain luxuries?
Well, as I’ve indicated, we both have real world jobs so we aren’t really sacrificing that much to do what we love. We live in a very rural area, without neighbors that live in mansions or drive anything but Ford Pick-up trucks. There is very little pressure on us to keep up in any way or to have a bunch of things.

Describe your studio.
Our studio is about one quarter of the garage that has been loaded down with tables, rolling steel tool carts, torches, oxygen tanks, cabinets loaded down with glass, hoses, foot pedals and a godsend in the form of a CD player/radio. We sit on stools or stand in front of our carts and listen to music while we make glass things. There are a couple of buckets around full of water with wooden blocks custom cut that we use as wet forms to shape glass. Most of the time a single blowhose is draped over the knobs that I use to adjust the propane and oxygen that goes into the torches to make the kind of heat we need to melt glass.

Tell me something about you.
Madeline and I started late in life down this particular trail. I think we both would have loved to have started years and years ago, but we look forward to getting better in every way at our glass working. I love the challenge of doing something that can never really be fully understood. When I was a little boy, I used to watch my uncle who was a relatively famous glassblower. He would pull hot globs of glass from his furnace and make the most beautiful things. I never forgot how even after he had been doing that for 40 years, he still loved it like it was the first day.