Back in my early 20’s, I would come down to Arizona to spend the holidays with my family. My brother, who is ten years older than me, let me stay in this cramped little duplex with he and his girlfriend. One morning I was awakened by the most terrible of screaming sounds. After ascertaining that I was not being chopped up with a rusty chain saw, I dressed and made my way out to the drive way. There, my brother was busy using a router to dado plexiglass.
What the hell are you doing?
I’m building an aquarium.
And with that one sentence, my life trajectory changed. The bread was cast on the water, and this duck spent a lot of time waddling around snapping up the crumbs of ideas that preoccupied me for the next ten years. I learned to draw in CAD. I sketched. I daydreamed. I schemed. I was driven to accomplish this idea that I grew, sacrificed and worked in ways I didn’t think I was capable of.
After years of school and work, I had enough tools that I felt I could make one of my ideas from start to finish. The wood you see here was from a cabin that I remodeled up in Crow Wing County, Minnesota. The homeowner thought the blues and greys in some of the wood was ugly, and I was not it install it. OK. I thought it was amazing stuff, especially when I planed or sanded it back to raw wood. It was Norwegian #1 Knotty Pine that had a fungus in the wood, giving it vibrant reds and blues. So, I hung on to it for years until I could use it. It’s faded now. But at one point my cousins wife put it perfectly that it was Van Gogh’s Starry Night Wood. This was the one aquarium I was not willing to sell. Now It rests in my brothers living room/art studio. Kinda appropriate, dontcha think?
I’ve gone on to other things. It was satisfying to accomplish something that I put so much of myself into, even if it didn’t make me the money that I wanted. My brother still is one his path, experimenting with methods and materials I wouldn’t have thought of. Lately, he is melting down scrap aluminum to make sculptures that decorate his aquariums. I found out that I do not know how to photograph aquariums this weekend. But here’s one decent photo of something we cast last Halloween instead of going out to a party. Not our best effort.
And to finish the tour off in the basement, here’s a photo of an insert that he is making in his Kitchen/art studio. It will divide a 55 gallon tank into a terrarium side and full pool side with a couple water falls for circulation.
Next time I will tell you more about my brothers art. I kind of equate it to Delia Deetz’s art in Beetlejuice.