How an artist becomes an artist

By Kathleen Stocking
Sun contributor

Sometimes someone notices something, and out of that noticing and the inspiration it provides, makes something no one’s ever seen before. It’s called “making art”. Becky Thatcher does it all the time.

Her inspiration is nature and her art form is jewelry. It started back in the 1970s with stones from the Lake Michigan shore, and gradually through the 1980s and ’90s, involved world travel and gem-buying trips, incorporating carved jade from Thailand, pearls from Tahiti, turquoise from the southwest, and opals from Australia.

A lot of people notice beauty and are inspired to make art, but only a few people do it every day in a way that leaves others in awe. The artist is the intermediary between nature and art, between the stones in the water — we’re talking Thatcher’s jewelry here — and the piece of jewelry a person can’t get out of her mind after she leaves the jewelry store. The artist has to see, with an extraordinary kind of seeing, and then she has to make something with an extraordinary kind of skill.

Vision is a gift one is born with, like perfect pitch, and if acknowledged and cultivated, over time can be developed to a high level. Craft is acquired through years of application to the work. Vision without craft is nice but can’t be easily shared. Craft without vision is simply craft. Only when vision and craft combine does something, in this case a piece of jewelry, become art. Art is what the artist creates out of love and offers up to others out of love. Art and love are the same.

The French have an expression for how this coming together of what’s in a person and what’s in the world occurs. It’s called “lorsque le travail entre l’homme” or, loosely translated, “when the work enters the man,” or, “when a person and their work become one.” Thatcher is one with her work.

Along with her artistry, Thatcher has two other gifts: a lot of common sense about making money and a ferocious work ethic. Anyone who’s been around for a while can remember her first studio, where her Glen Arbor store is now on Lake Street, between M-22 and Lake Michigan. It had gray asphalt shingles over old, weathered-board walls. It was the kind of house that in the ’50s would have had fish nets drying in front of it. She went in on it with two other people, Tim Nichols who now has the Riverfront Pizza on Western Avenue and Rob Rader, known for the history of Glen Arbor Township he wrote in 1977 and whose parents started the landmark Totem Shoppe in the late 1930s. The trio bought the place for $32,000 on a land contract in 1983, and remodeled it together. Rader slept there at night in one of the initial phases and during the daytime Thatcher sold Rader’s antiques and her jewelry out of the house. It was heated with a woodstove in such a way that when the fire was hot it felt dangerous. Eventually Thatcher bought out her partners and the place became her home, studio and store. It’s still there. It’s her flagship store. Now she has three others.

Thatcher’s story begins in Maumee, Ohio, where she grew up, and continues with summers up north on Sleeping Bear Bay, looking out at the Manitou Islands. Artist Midge Obata, a Glen Arbor neighbor, says, “Becky’s work is fabulous, always has been. She looks around, she appreciates what she sees: the shapes in the water, the flowing design of the dunes, the brilliant changing colors.” Thatcher’s color sense is second to none. Obata goes on to describe the way the land influences an artist, Becky’s ability to connect to the sky, the waves, the healing beauty of nature and how she was able to bring that into her work. “She knows a lot about semi-precious gems, too,” Obata says, “and I think that helps.”

Thatcher no longer sleeps in her studio. She designs the jewelry but has a staff to polish and make it. Her store in Glen Arbor is not quite as down-home as it once was, but it’s low key, as she is. She treats everyone — the fabulously wealthy and the waitress from next door — the same. Thatcher herself was once a waitress.

Thatcher worked in Virginia as hostess at the elegant, upscale Red Fox Inn — the oldest continuously operated inn in the country — where she really wanted to be a waitress because that’s where the most money could be made. One Mother’s Day event, while still in her hostess job at the Red Fox, she was wearing the requisite high heels, as every hostess at a fancy restaurant would have in the 1970s. “It wasn’t a dress code,” she explains. “No one told me to wear high heels. It was just what you knew you had to do.” That day she moved tables for hours in those high heels and says she “lost the feeling in my toes for a year.” Thatcher also was the one who did the flower arrangements for the private dining room. C.Z. Guest, the socialite and horse woman somehow related to English royalty and Winston Churchill, who sometimes hosted large events at the Red Fox, had advised Thatcher that all bouquets should have roadside flowers in order to avoid a stiff, funereal look. Thatcher, good at her job, obliged. One day the manager’s brother came into the dining room and said, “The tables look nice, Becky. Are you allergic to poison ivy?” Every bouquet had poison ivy in it. Thatcher says, “It was the perfect color, too, just turning red.” But she took it all out; it might have sent the wrong message to the guests. “He probably saved my job,” she says of the manager’s brother.” She later moved on to a waitress job in metropolitan Washington D.C., at The Magic Pan, which allowed more time to attend craft shows, and left days free for making jewelry.

Before the restaurant jobs Thatcher had worked in a tack shop. She’d essentially run away from high school in Ohio, “I had enough credits to graduate, so I just left,” she says. She did receive her diploma. Thatcher loved horses and worked her way through a six-month riding school course by grooming horses and mucking out stalls. She still loves horses. Her Icelandic pony, Uggi, is ensconced behind her Glen Arbor studio every summer.

On Thatcher’s lucky, exhilarating and sometimes rocky road to success, there were a lot of part-time jobs, and more than a few times when she travelled to craft shows and couldn’t afford a motel and had to sleep in the parking lot of a safe-looking marina or a well-lit Denny’s. During her first attempt to live in Glen Arbor, Thatcher baby-sat for Bette Bach, wife of Richard Bach, best-selling author of one of the first self-help books, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, while Mrs. Bach made art. Richard Bach, right after he’d personally delivered his sixth child at home, left because he said marriage wasn’t spiritually fulfilling for him, unwittingly providing Thatcher with a cautionary tale about spiritual fulfillment and self-help authors. Richard Bach became very rich and very famous and married three more times. “Bette was an inspiration,” Thatcher says, because in the teeth of marital shipwreck she just kept making art. Thatcher also worked making stained glass in Suttons Bay during this first, failed attempt to live in Glen Arbor when, she says, “I starved out.”

Somewhere along the way Thatcher got in a semester of summer school at Bowling Green, receiving excellent grades in art and psychology. “My SAT scores weren’t high enough for the regular fall and winter semesters,” she says ruefully. She confides that she only passed high school Algebra because her teacher was kind, and without that wouldn’t have qualified even for summer school. She says, “I’ve always wanted to find him and thank him.” She adds that she was good at geometry, however, because geometry, unlike algebra, was three-dimensional, like jewelry.

While in high school, Thatcher took several classes at the Toledo Artists’ Club. “Fine instruction,” she says, from a teaching assistant from Bowling Green University. Her brother took her to an art fair in Ann Arbor, long before they were ubiquitous, and she “had the first inkling” of the possibilities for her own work. One summer up north she learned how to make macramé from Midge Obata’s daughter, Nori, now a ceramicist and glass bead maker with a studio in the Lake Street Gallery in Glen Arbor. That fall when Thatcher returned to high school in Ohio, she made macramé plant holders and sold them at school. “I could make one macramé plant holder a night,” she says, “and so could make $25 a week,” and finance more jewelry classes. She entered a few small craft shows in Toledo while in high school.

Thatcher entered her big first craft show in Maryland in 1974, still living hand-to mouth, she says, “just going full-time with my jewelry-making.” Meanwhile, she says, “There was a craft Renaissance in Washington, D.C.,” as there was in scattered places across the nation, places like San Francisco, Ann Arbor and Asheville, N.C. Each time it happened, in each place, there was a shocked ‘this can’t be happening here’ kind of response, followed very quickly by a ripple effect. Remember Ben and Jerry’s ice cream and their 1970s start in an old abandoned gas station in Brattleboro, Vt.? The same Ben and Jerry’s that now has stores in Copenhagen and Singapore?

“Rosalynn Carter went out and got hand-woven cloth for chairs in the Whitehouse and she found people who made hand-thrown plates [for state dinners].” As a result of Rosalynn Carter’s influence, all of Washington and the surrounding area became fascinated with handmade American crafts. “I rode the wave [of this Renaissance], right into the Philadelphia Museum Craft Show,” one of her first juried shows, a benchmark in her career because it was an honor to be accepted. If it hadn’t been for that Renaissance, she says she doesn’t know where she’d be now. She acknowledges that there’s a mysterious bit of synergy between the artist and her society. The artist has her pulse on what’s happening and, albeit unconsciously, responds.

Craft shows began to be lucrative, allowing Thatcher to give up waitressing and mucking out stalls, and eventually she saved enough to move back to Glen Arbor and buy the gray-shingled house and become a full-time artist. The house was in a quiet place with swaying pines against a backdrop of the ever-changing colors of Lake Michigan. In those days, Le Bear and all the other new developments were non-existent.

In June of 1983 she began to sell jewelry out of the front room. In l984 she was able to hire someone part-time to help with the jewelry making. Thatcher continued to attend craft shows and at one of them met and fell in love with a gem dealer from Atlanta, married in 1985 and had her son, Devin. The marriage didn’t last; as a single mom, she continued to live in Glen Arbor and make jewelry.

The difference between an artist and a business person is that the business person makes art in order to make money and the artist makes money in order to keep making art. Thatcher is the latter, a genuine artist. Not only does she have vision and skill, she has guts, an ability to take risks, confidence, courage and absolute indifference to public opinion when it comes to her jewelry. She doesn’t set out to make what she hopes people will buy; she makes what she loves and believes when people see it, they will love it, too.

Photographer Kathleen Dodge Buhler, known for her model-good looks — tall, patrician, gracious, prepossessing — says that one dull winter day when she was living in Glen Arbor, Thatcher called and said, “Do you want to go to Bangkok?” She needed someone to accompany her on a gem-buying trip across Asia. “So, there we were at the lapidary company in Bangkok because the order they had sent to the U.S. had many broken pieces. Then we’re having lunch with these five, 30-year-old Chinese executives, impressing them with our expert use of chopsticks. We were so good with the chopsticks we could pick up a peanut.”

It was all very social and friendly, Dodge-Buhler says, “but they did not want to credit Becky for the damaged pieces.” Unofficially Dodge-Buhler was there as the kind of ersatz female companion Agatha Christie’s heroines always had to buy train tickets and double-check the security of the luggage and notice the number of spoonfuls of something other than sugar going into the tea. “Everything was very smiley and happy and I said to them, with a big smile on my face, showing them my big, white American teeth, perfectly straight from braces, ‘You don’t want to mess with Becky.’” She laughs. “They corrected their error.” These days Thatcher attends the winter gem shows in Tucson, Ariz., the world’s largest international show, held in 40 locations all over the city, accompanied by several members of her staff.

In 1993, after 10 years in business in her Glen Arbor studio, Thatcher began to host her now-famous Tuesday teas, “Tea at 3 in the garden.” One day a chemistry professor, David Watt, showed up escorted by his sister who was trying to get him a date, stayed for tea, and by the end of the summer they were married. Watt now does the gem talks at the garden teas on Tuesdays.

In retrospect Thatcher sees that her jewelry-making may have begun as early as her first jewelry-making class at Camp Kohahna when, too young to work with metal, she sat mesmerized for hours watching an older camper, Julia Flowers, make a silver apple with a worm, enthralled with the sawing, filing, soldering and polishing that produced a piece of jewelry. Flowers, now retired from management with Neiman Marcus’ fine jewelry department, says that, “In my early years all the camp awards were silver charms made by the counselors and older campers. It was a very special part of Camp Kohahna,”and for a young Thatcher, would have made indelible the connection between the bonds of friendship and jewelry, between community and keepsake.

Thatcher also thinks that two Glen Arbor neighbors she knew as a young girl, Mary and Franke Schimpff, a mother and daughter who made jewelry and won prizes at the DeBeers’ diamond competition, were also early mentors, unawares. The Schimff studio was behind the old general store, next to where Cherry Republic is now, in a refurbished train depot that had been moved there from Copemish, and Thatcher visited often. It was owned by Virginia Hinton, a teacher at the Leelanau School, the first woman to graduate from the Gemological Institute of America, an institute established in 1931 to teach jewelers how to evaluate gems and semi-precious stones. Hinton was “an amazing woman,” Thatcher says, a leader and path maker for women, another influence. But a lot of us have made jewelry at a summer camp when we were kids, and most of us have met one or two amazing path finders, and a few of us have met prize-winning jewelers as well, and we didn’t become jewelers, so there’s got to be more.

Jewelry is ancient, as old as humanity. We know this because beads of jade and jasper and other indestructible substances are found with the bones of cave dwellers, in the dust where their necks would have been. Jewelry lasts. Jewelry is worn for decoration, for status, to commemorate a major life event, and as keepsakes. Thatcher’s jewelry is unusual in that, in addition to all of the above, it’s talismanic of nature. It gives the wearer a special connection to a place, so that when she wears those gold and opal and tourmaline and turquoise dangling earrings, while she works in a cubicle in some infinite office complex, for example, or as a volunteer in the children’s intensive care unit, reading stories, she can be thinking about the blue-green waters of Lake Michigan, and the dark green islands, and the golden-rose dunes, and the sparkling light above the Manitou Passage, images that stay with the wearer wherever she goes, like an aura. And the other office workers and the children love to see the colors, too.

On the plane home from their Asian adventure, Dodge-Buhler asked Thatcher if she wasn’t worried about people stealing her design ideas. Thatcher said, “No, I’ll just come up with more.” Nature is infinite and so, for Thatcher, for whom nature is a vital source of inspiration, she’ll never need to worry about running out of ideas.