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Pennsylvania nature artist packs his ‘second life’
Published: Sunday, August 22, 2010, 8:55 AM Updated: Sunday, August 22, 2010, 9:04 AM
Camp Hill watercolor artist Thom Glacein September will have work in the Daily Painters of Pennsylvania exhibit in the East Wing Rotunda of the State Capitol Building and the Art Association of Harrisburg “Green Zone” exhibit, and will stage a one-man show at Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church in Camp Hill.
Not bad for a man who died of a massive heart attack, which his doctors described as a “catastrophic event,” in February 2006.
“At age 54 I dropped over dead,” he recalled. “They brought me back twice,” but with only 27 percent of a heart and two arteries working. Glace continues to battle with limited energy and balance issues, among other concerns, but he’s back in a life his doctors never expected for him.
“I feel blessed,” he said. “I feel like the luckiest guy in the world because of what didn’t happen to me. Instead of waking up depressed every morning, I wake up happy. I’m enjoying my second life.”
And, as it turned out, that heart attack transformed the former globe-hopping owner of a advertising agency in the Caribbean and marketing manager for companies like the former AMP into the nature artist he is today.
The 59-year-old Harrisburg native’s artistic side had begun to develop while he was working for AMP in New Hampshire, but a 1995 transfer back to Central Pennsylvania and the international marketing division put much of his active artwork on hold.
That phase of his life ended with the heart attack and more than six months of convalescence in bed, during which time he gradually returned to his watercolors.
“I would put a card table up next to the bed and dabble away,” he explained.
“I would put a card table up next to the bed and dabble away,” he explained.
Today his work hangs in four Central Pennsylvania galleries and one in New England. He has shows and exhibits booked through next March. He’s on the board of directors of the Mechanicsburg Art Center and on the committee for Camp Hill’s new Planarian.
Glace also has a book project – watercolor studies of selected fish species of the Susquehanna River – and a couple 2011 calendar projects – trout and dragonflies – in progress.
He admits to possibly pushing himself a bit harder than he should, how he does allow for his medical condition. For example, he limits himself to shows of short duration, like the recent one-day Ned Smith Festival for Nature and Art in Millersburg, from which he would have withdrawn if the weather had been too warm or humid.
However, Glace explained, overall “painting is relaxing to me, and basically I’m just enjoying the heck out of myself.”
He describes his work as biological studies in watercolor, which require advance study of the subject prior to touching paint to canvass.
“I will spend as much time researching a fish as painting it, and the same with dragonflies,” he explained.
For example, he’s learned that with trout “when you pull it right out of the water and take a photo in a few seconds, before returning it to the water, you get the true colors of the fish.”
Glace credits his choice of watercolor as his medium to advice his father, the late Ivan (Jack) Glace Jr., once gave him. “He said oils stink and are terrible to clean up,” Glace recalled.
He noted that watercolors are not particularly well adapted to the current subject focus of his art, trout and dragonflies, “but I like the challenge.”
Glace works with transparent watercolors, which allow him to apply glaze over glaze, often as many as 20 glazes, to achieve the lifelike studies he produces, and then go back with a miniature brush to add speckling and similar touches.
The medium allows him to come up with “a totally different affect. I can’t get the shimmering,” look that much fish art enjoys. “But there are things I gain, such as a light, airiness.”
He commented, “It also works very well with me. I have to rest a lot. I can walk away from watercolors very easily. I just put a cover over the water, so the cats don’t drink it, and come back to it later.”
The current focus of his art – trout and dragonflies – comes in part from his pre-heart attack life, in which he was “an avid, avid scuba diver. I had a love of fish, the ocean and anything to do with it.”
That interest turned toward trout after moving back to central Pennsylvania and receiving, as a gift from his wife Mary, a slot in an Orvis fly fishing school at Yellow Breeches Outfitters in Boiling Springs.
Dragonflies came into the mix when Glace produced a painting of a butterfly, which the owner of one of his galleries said was nice enough, but recommended dragonflies as subject that even more art buyers seemed to appreciate.
“Now I’m absolutely hooked on dragonflies. They’re absolutely beautiful. The wings of dragonflies are incredible,” he said. “But I got into them at first because I thought they would be a big seller.”