January is Manitou Art Center Month in the Pikes Peak Bulletin
Manitou Arts Center. A local staple for nearly four decades, the MAC offers classes, workshops and creative spaces to the community along with a series of galleries to house the works of creatives across the Pikes Peak Region and beyond.
When I moved to Colorado Springs now three years back, I yearned for a space like the Manitou Arts Center. Instead, I created alone, isolated in my apartment. When I finally discovered the space a year into living in the region, I kicked myself for not discovering the power of its community-binding nature sooner. In the spirit of ensuring no one makes the same mistake I did when I was new to our ever-growing city, each week of January the Pikes Peak Bulletin will highlight a MAC artist and their respective makerspace, kicking the series off with a profile of glass artist Jannine Scott, and one of the MAC’s longest running gallery spaces, the First Amendment Gallery.
Abbey Soukup
MAC Month: Jannine Scott teaches ‘real-life magic’ through glass making
At the Manitou Art Center, local artist Jannine Scott can teach you a skill that she describes as “real-life magic.”
A lifelong artist and Denver native, Scott of J9 Glass has practiced glass art for approximately 25 years. Selling her goods in many boutiques across Manitou Springs, she’s the only glass bead teacher offering classes in the Pikes Peak Region.
“I’ve been an artist my whole life. I’ve always been completely in love with color and whimsy and creativity in general,” Scott told the Bulletin.
“I’ve been doing it for so long and I’m absolutely in love with it. It feels like real-life magic,” Scott said.
As a glass artist and lampworker, Scott’s craft involves warping and manipulating glass rods into whatever shape she desires with a stationary blow torch. Introduced to the medium by a glass beadmaker in Dillon in 1999, Scott has had glass studios across the country from Oregon to New Mexico. She’s landed at the Manitou Art Center in Colorado where she has lived on and off for the past 15 years.
Scott said she fell in love with the art form due to the attributes of the craft’s uniqueness, its rarity of skill and the whimsy involved with creating through fire.
You get to play with fire – Jannine Scott
She said while many artists span their craft across a variety of mediums, glass is one people often find too intimidating to try for themselves.
“It’s a beautiful and unique medium. I’ve found a lot of artists I’ve known through the years have tried every medium except glass. It was the first thing I tried to do because it was so magical. You get to turn a liquid to solid to liquid to solid; you feel like a dragon,” Scott said.
“It requires finesse and complete concentration with an immense payoff – it’s worth it because it’s such a rare artform, not a lot of people do it,” Scott continued.
The glass bead-making classes Scott teaches at the MAC are one-on-one, 1.5-hour sessions, and she said she loves to teach beginners. She continued saying the impacts of learning glass artmaking go past the tangible result; oftentimes, people leave her lessons having overcome a fear.
“Every single person that takes this class is terrified, by the time the hour-and-a-half is up people leave with a sense of gratification,” she said. “You get a sense of accomplishment getting over a fear of fire. Creatively, you leave with proof of overcoming a fear, and the proof is beautiful and lasts for generations. That, and you get to play with fire.”
While there are many misconceptions in the world of art and creating, Scott said the biggest misconception she’s noticed within the realm of glassmaking is people’s reaction that they couldn’t do it themselves.
“Glass is a pretty different medium. It’s an elusive thing to most people, and most people think it’s really hard and they could never do it,” Scott said. “I think the main misconception is, ‘I can’t do it.’ I’m here to tell you that you can.”
While there are no concrete dates set for Scott’s classes in the new year, she said she will be offering her one-on-one glass beadmaking class, along with the one-hour certification to use the torch and other glassmaking equipment at the MAC in the coming months.
Scott said she will be offering a new class teaching participants how to mold plastic with comparable methods to glassmaking in a more accessible medium. In that class, Scott said she’ll
be guiding participants in creating a sandworm reminiscent of the Beetlejuice film series that can be used to decorate a potted plant.
Additionally, Scott’s work will be on display locally at the Commonwheel Artists Co-op during a group showing scheduled for March.
While Scott’s attitude carries a spirit of magic and whimsy, she said her classes are also meant to help others find a way to fight for good through art and creating during our current time that carries bouts of pain and suffering around the world.
“The reason I started doing art at all is to process the world creatively. At this point and more recently, art is going to need to become our battle cry. Art is a playful way to speak without language. People need to know how they can share their creativity and it’s time we art harder. If we don’t live within an artistic world, it’s going to be a miserable world for everyone,” Scott said.
Scott’s online marketplace and information regarding current shows and classes offered can be found on her website, J9Glass.art.
For more information on the MAC, visit ManitouArtCenter.org.
