A hobby revisited: Robert Parsons makes stained-glass artwork from his Cape Girardeau home

Robert Parsons poses for a photo at his Cape Girardeau home on May 24.

Laura Simon ~ lsimon@semissourian.com

Stained-glass work was a hobby before it was a business for Cape Girardeau resident Robert Parsons. Now that he's retired, it's back to being a hobby again.

"I wasn't trained in art," he says.

Instead, he worked in the public schools for 20 years in his native Detroit, teaching science and math and counseling.

"I've probably done this for 40 years," he says of his glass work.

He was first introduced to glass while taking a factory tour in West Virginia.

"Then I thought, 'Maybe I could do this myself,'" he says.

What most people think of when they hear the words "stained glass" are the typical church-window pieces that usually use cut glass, wrapped in lead and soldered at the seams, but Parsons says there are other methods.

Sometimes he wraps his glass pieces in copper or other malleable metals.

In his sunroom, a large pane with a white horse inlaid hangs over one window.

"That took me an awful long time," Parsons says. "Probably 50 hours in my shop in Cape."

Through the looking glass of one of the kaleidoscopes Robert Parsons has made.

Each piece has to be cut just so, and then fit together, which Parsons says is deceptively time-consuming.

He moved with his wife to Jackson in 1984 and opened up a shop. He says he thought about teaching, but he would have had to start all over again, essentially, in the new school district. But the move turned out to be an opportunity, he says.

"I thought, well, I might as well make a go of this now," he says.

So he started small, attending craft shows and local art fairs.

"If you have a store, you do a little bit of everything," he says. "Smaller churches in the area, give classes, selling supplies, making small things."

But it's not always small things, he says.

The largest piece he ever did is also the one of which he is most proud. It's Christ in sunlight, 16 feet high and 8 feet wide, made of panels that he transported himself to a church in Michigan.

His work also be seen around Cape Girardeau at Centenary Church United Methodist Church, Grace United Methodist Church and Southeast Hospital.

In a way, he's simply enamored with glass as a medium; he even has a collection of glass pieces from around the world, including China and Sweden.

"I think [stained-glass art] is declining over the years," he says. "It's very time-consuming."

Robert Parsons' cat, Goldie, looks through one of the kaleidoscopes he has made in Cape Girardeau.

But even in retirement, he says, he still enjoys the process. And the results.

"It's the color and the way the look changes when the light comes through," he says.

It's not only art that changes throughout the day -- it's art that changes the lighting and mood of its environment, as well, he explains.

"Making something yourself and then seeing something change as the light comes through as time goes by, that's really special," he says.

One of Robert Parsons' stained glass pieces hangs in a window at his Cape Girardeau home.