Sutter artist paints with glass

Paul Boehmke lifts the lid to his working kiln and peers in, like a kid looking for candy.

Inside, brightly colored bits of glass are fusing with one another. The finished products — ruler-shaped objects meant to hang on a wall or in mid-air — are on a deadline.

Boehmke, 63, likes what he sees. Beneath his walrus mustache, he is smiling.

"I'm nailing it now," says the artist of the work he has produced lately in his Sutter studio.

He's not the only one who thinks so.

In August, a solo art show at Solomon Dubnick Gallery in Sacramento introduced his work to a new audience, and introduced Boehmke himself to a deeper network of Northern California art aficionados.

Gallery owner Robert Andersen says he has been showing a variety of Boehmke's glass art pieces for the past year, and that they've made an impression on buyers and artists alike.

"Major collectors are starting to buy his work," Andersen says.

Boehmke's decorative art pieces — the ruler-like "sticks" and others — are a fairly new innovation.

The core of his work involves a delicate application of frit, or powdered glass, to sheets of colored glass to create paintings.

"He's doing something very, very unique with his landscapes and his abstracts," Andersen says of Boehmke's more complex pieces.

"People are just starting to find out that there's this glass guy," says Boehmke, with a shrug of his lanky frame.

On a recent weekday, he was finishing up some decorative pieces and preparing for a busy art show at Solomon Dubnick.

The city's Second Saturday Art Walk brings people in from San Francisco and elsewhere.

While the monthly event has become a rowdy drinkfest in other parts of downtown Sacramento, the converted industrial buildings just south of the Capitol draw a different crowd.

Anderson’s gallery occupies the same building as a custom jewelry store, a popular pub called Fox and Goose and the Art Foundry Gallery. A working foundry still is housed in the block-long series of shops and studios.

Second Saturday brings out the social bug in the usually reclusive Boehmke.

He's grown accustomed to talking about the process of making his art pieces, and of fielding questions from strangers about his approach to shape or color.

Boehmke came to fine art the long way around.

In his early 20s, he joined some artist friends who had moved to the East Bay. He restored old furniture and honed woodworking skills he had developed in his youth.

He hung around the harbors where skilled yachtsmen taught him to sail. There, his compulsive nature showed itself, he says.

Boehmke became an expert sailor and, eventually, a boat builder.

How he came to find glass as a source of artistic expression, and to develop the process he now uses to make pictures out of it is something he can't easily explain.

Neither can he explain aspects of his work that are appealing to others.

He has acquaintances now who write and talk about art for a living, he jokes.

"I was hoping they'd tell me what the hell I was doing," he says.

Between his affiliation with the gallery in Sacramento and his recent involvement with the new cooperative art gallery on D Street in Marysville, Boehmke's world is more of a stage than it's ever been.

Having a new, hometown gallery, he says of the cooperative venture, "is really something special."

The former D Street Mercantile Building — now under the direction of the Yuba-Sutter Regional Arts Council — allows Boehmke to share ideas with local artists who have been without a venue to show their work.

"I'd rather be the a--hole in a good group than the good guy in a lousy group," he says.

CONTACT reporter Nancy Pasternack at 749-4781