CREATIVITY HAS LONG FUELED THIS FORMER BUSINESSMAN TURNED ARTIST, WHO FOUND HIS INSPIRATIONAL SWEET SPOT IN LAMP MAKING

BY GILDA ROGERS • PHOTOS BY ROBERT NUZZIE

His working life may have been spent in the mortgage and savings & loan realms, but once he retired, Robert O’Keefe was able to turn full attention to his true passion, stained glass artistry

Early on, he studied at The New Theatre School in New York City, and acted in some 75 local productions and student films. But the Old Bridge, Middlesex County resident, born and raised in the Garden State, ultimately grew disillusioned with the community theater scene. Fate intervened when he literally stumbled upon a calling while strolling a Staten Island Beach.

“I was beachcombing when I found a destroyed church window and picked up the broken pieces of glass,” said O’Keefe. “I made a very primitive and boxy looking stained glass lamp from the fragments.” His artistic appetite was whetted, though this new fascination took more time to be fully realized.

“I didn’t start college until I was 25,” said O’Keefe, who attended Monmouth College (before it became Monmouth University), where he met another artist who visited his apartment and saw O’Keefe’s stained glass lamp hanging over the kitchen table. By the time the pair had reconnected years later, this friend had become a renowned stain glass artist with his own studio making Tiffany style lamps. He taught O’Keefe the basics of working with stained glass using the Louis Comfort Tiffany method of copper foiling. (Louis Comfort was the grandson of Charles Tiffany, founder of Tiffany & Co.) Of the technique, O’Keefe explained that, “You need to have structural lines, but you must work them into a design,” adding that the work is labor intensive, and their detail in part is what sets his creations apart from what might otherwise be characterized as simple crafts; a term he believes diminishes the authenticity that artisans bring to the stained glass market.

“I use the minimal amount of lines to support the structure and [that makes] it more attractive,” he explained. A series of 24″ x 24″ pieces depicting trees, for example, are both remarkable and dimensional pieces of art. The pair of stained glass inserts he made for a door, meanwhile, displays graceful flowers rising from variegated green leaves and a realistic depiction of blue waters. Another piece combines driftwood with stained glass green leaves in a branch like design.

The artist’s sculptures utilize driftwood he finds on New Jersey beaches. He takes the basic shape and fashions it into something meaningful and dramatic, finishing it using various techniques, including sandblasting. One of his wood pieces won a Best in Sculpture award at the Art Alliance in Red Bank.

Coming from a DIY family, O’Keefe loves working with his hands and will cut up to 300 pieces of glass to that a particular lamp design. His work can be found at the Universalist Unitarian Church in Lincroft, at Brook dale Community College, and at the Guild of Creative Art in Shrewsbury. Commissioned pieces have been purchased by clients in Colorado, Florida, and the United Kingdom.

“My lamps are one of a kind,” he said, adding with a laugh that, “My wife says I can’t make any more because I don’t have room for them.” That may be, but the artisan is currently working on a lamp design inspired by a card he received from his wife’s sister.

“I would like to see a greater appreciation of stained glass as an art,” O’Keefe observed. “All of my designs are original. That’s the difference between art and craft.”

Robert O’Keefe
Guild of Creative Art, Shrewsbury / 732.741.1441 /
guildofcreativeart.org