Local artist creates stained glass boxes, sculptures

Retirement, for many, means more time to spend doing what you love. And that’s just how artist Ronnie Seitel views it.

Seitel, a former Mountain Brook High School teacher, started making stained glass art in the early 1980s and developed a fondness for the craft after taking a class in downtown Birmingham. 

His first project was to put together a window, but it was something that required homework. 

“I came back, with the window finished, and the lady said, ‘Why are you here?’” said Seitel. He told the teacher he didn’t know what he was doing, but the teacher — looking at the finished window — assured him he did.

Seitel said he has always been an artist in some way — a painter, a sculptor, a photographer, a musician. He got started with his glass work through woodworking. After that initial class, he was able to add stained glass to his repertoire.

 It’s something that has always stuck with him, even though teaching limited the amount of time he could dedicate to the craft. 

When he entered retirement and was ready to pick the craft back up, it was right there waiting for him. But he doesn’t create flat stained glass pieces — his work is functional and three dimensional.

“Most of the people who do glass … it seems to me, they do flat pieces. But this,” Seitel said, gesturing toward a box constructed with stained glass, “is more challenging.”

Seitel spends time sketching out plans for new projects, taking ideas from both architecture and nature. He said some artists might spend time looking for ideas and inspiration based on other pieces online, but he prefers to start from scratch.

“I would much rather be ignorant to all of that and just come up with it myself,” he said. “So when you’re sitting around playing with stuff, ideas come in some cases just by messing around.”

To put the boxes together, he cuts the glass to size and then wraps each edge in foil tape. From there, everything is soldered together and hinges are added so parts of the box can open and close. Everything is done in his basement, and he estimated a standard box would take about three hours to build after finalizing a pattern.

Some pieces may have been designed with a purpose in mind, such as a guitar pick holder, but they can be much more than that. 

“Physically, it is a box, but also it can be a piece of sculpture,” he said. It’s all up to the person holding it.

“This is all up close and personal, and I like the tactile part of it,” he said. The selection of textures, colors and patterns he uses lend themselves to catching light in different ways depending on how they are set up. And unlike many examples of stained glass art, people can pick it up, hold it and feel the glass and the solder between their fingers.

“And people don’t usually do that with stained glass,” he said. “You’re invited to touch it, you can look at it and go, ‘Wow, that’s really neat.’” 

He thinks it’s that feature, in addition to the three-dimensional aspect of his pieces, that led him to be invited to be part of Artists, Inc. in Vestavia Hills. The organization is a full-service fine art gallery, and Seitel was part of a show there in March. He said it helps serve as another avenue to sell his work, in addition to Alabama Designer Craftsmen. 

Eventually, Seitel would like to begin working with warm glass to create rounded, more curved pieces.

He doesn’t currently have a website to sell what he makes, but instead relies on the annual Alabama Designer Craftsmen show at the Birmingham Botanical Gardens and, now, exposure at Artists, Inc. But for those who are interested in his work or would like to see more samples, Seitel can be reached at rlseitel@gmail.com.