The State MAKERS
Stained Glass with Meaning
Richard Bohm works individually with clients and students to turn ‘noise into music … chaos into organization.’
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RICHARD BOHM HAS WORKED WITH STAINED GLASS FOR MORE THAN 40 YEARS. PHOTO BY MARC RAINS
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n the more than 40 years that he has worked with stained glass, Richard Bohm has created family and institutional treasures. In 1975, Bohm and his wife started Tulsa Stained Glass, making custom art to display in homes, business and churches. Bohm has designed stained glass for Boone Pickens Stadium at Oklahoma State University, Boston Avenue Methodist Church in downtown Tulsa and the Children’s Hospital at Saint Francis in south Tulsa. “I always encourage the client to think about how to make this stained glass more meaningful to them and have been doing that for years,” Bohm says. “We’ve had customers take windows from house to house to house
OKLAHOMA MAGAZINE | SEPTEMBER 2017
and box it up and they retire and take it to Florida. “It’s kind of nice that people value your work, and when you can put a meaning behind something that … is the highest level of art that you can do. You can go to school, you can increase your skill level and be the best at what you’re going to do, but if you can take that to the next level of making it meaningful, then you’ve achieved success.” In addition to working on commissioned pieces, Bohm helps others get in touch with their creative sides through classes that he teaches. “There’s a whole other process that many have lost, and that’s the creative process of design,” he says. “So what I do is when my students come in to class, before they ever sit down and learn about the glass itself, we do finger painting. They do finger painting based on my guarantee that I’m going to help them turn those finger paintings into a stained glass design. “They’re painting shapes, colors, forms. Through this, what I get to teach is art elements and art principles – all those types of things that people might not normally use in their everyday life.” During these three-hour classes, students create garden spirit sculptures and learn the basics of making stained glass. Bohm says people take the class for a variety of reasons, from date nights and birthday celebrations to coping with grief. He says the process can be therapeutic. Most of the glass used at “I teach them how to Tulsa Stained Glass comes take chaos and turn it from Kokomo, Indiana, as into harmony,” he says. well as some from Germany “Harmony is a repetition of and the Czech Republic. The line, shapes and color. It’s glass has a wide variety turning noise into music of textures, opacities and, and turning chaos into orperhaps most importantly, ganization. When you have colors. organization, it becomes “All glass has some core peaceful. If you can learn ingredients – sand, soda, to do this yourself and have ash, lime. They heat it up, that process in your head and they make glass,” Richof how to do it visually, ard Bohm says. “But, if you maybe someone is going want to make colored glass, to get the idea, ‘You know, you add metallic oxides to I don’t like my life the the dry batch and then mix way it is; maybe if I can it up. Then it goes into the get some organization and furnace [at] 3,000 degrees. apply these same kinds of [The color] is all in the core rules, maybe I can change before it’s ever made. That’s my life.’ That’s the way why it lasts so long. I mean, we’re going to change the you can’t take that color world.” out. It just gets richer.” BETH WEESE
CREATING COLOR