Monday, August 13, 2012

Artist Profile: Jim Gleason


Jim Gleason has worn many hats in his life -- Marine, musician, instrument repair technician -- but he had never been an artist.

That changed last year.

While looking around his instrument repair work space one day – Gleason has contracts to repair musical instruments from a number of Pee Dee-area school systems – an idea popped into Gleason’s head: What if he took some of the old discarded pieces and put them together in a different way. He went to work designing and building lamps, sculptures and other ... objects using parts and pieces retired from the instruments he has repaired over the years.

It was a natural fit. Gleason had the “natural resources” he needed at his finger tips. Inside his Old World Music repair shop on Pamplico Highway, damaged trumpets hang on the bright blue walls, shinny brass and silver pieces are kept neatly in drawers, and about a million other parts and pieces from tubas, clarinets and an assortment of wind instruments that have seen better days are ready for whatever Gleason’s fertile mind can cook up.

“A lot of this stuff, even though they are no longer musical instruments, they are just made so well; it’s a shame to let them sit in a closet somewhere,” Gleason said. “So we dust ‘em off, give them a little personality, and stick them on a shelf.”

The little personality comes in the form of a Granadilla clarinet perfectly made into a sculpture of a dachshund, or a delicate crane, dipping its head, crafted from a former oboe.

Many of Gleason’s creations are made from pieces that are more than 100 years old, like the lamp he made for his wife, Val, crafted from an ancient silver coronet. Others are newer. A bright pink clarinet, made in the 1980s, inspired (naturally) a pink flamingo sculpture.

Gleason says the inspiration for the sculptures was really boredom. He tinkered to fill his time.

“But what happened is the people in my life, my wife … and Dr. Jane Madden (director of the Art Trail Gallery in Florence), they saw what I was doing and they thought that I should share it,” said Gleason.

Says Madden, “His imagination is wonderful. His work makes you stop and say what? It wakes you up a bit.”

A self-described “behind the scenes” man, Gleason is fast growing accustoms to the attention that his unusual creations bring.

“They (family and friends) seem to be going out of their way to push me out of my comfort zone,” he said laughing.

In just the few months he has showed his work publicly he’s won several awards and was accepted to several juried shows. He will be a featured artist at the Cheraw Jazz Festival in October and his work is in the Art and Soul Gallery in Myrtle Beach.

“I really expected the little ones to like them best,” Gleason said, meaning the children who saw his art. But it’s the adults who have been charmed by the whimsical creations.

Now many of the adults who see his work are commissioning him to make custom pieces, and as the public interest continues to grow, the list of things to create on Gleason’s shop wall gets longer.

The attention is exciting.

“Jim is such a great guy,” Madden said. “He has done so much -- he served our country, has helped dozens of children, and now he’s doing this. It’s so nice to see the good guys step out.”


This article was written by Rebecca Drucker 
and originally appeared on scnow.com.  

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