the circle of life turned

Our world got a little smaller last Saturday morning. If you’ve been reading here since before covid you likely remember me talking about our glass blowing friends Kathy Poeppel and Dick Moiel and how every November was spent getting organized and working out my display for the open house they sponsored at their studio the first weekend of December. It is with great sadness that I report Dick passed away peacefully last Saturday morning at home. His health had been deteriorating for the past several years and his bout with aspirated pneumonia a few months ago depleted his already tenuous strength. 

We first met Dick and Kathy one year when they called the studio and asked if they could come visit. That was sometime in the mid 90s I think after we had started doing personal work in the pate de verre cast glass technique (the whole precise timeline is lost to the past). Dick, a neurosurgeon, and Kathy, his surgical assistant, had retired to reduce the stress in their lives and were looking for a new activity to fill their days. They were avid art collectors with a focus on glass art and were visiting the few art glass studios in town. They took their first glass blowing class in 1994 and built their glass blowing studio in 1995, Houston Studio Glass. We started getting a postcard in November about a glass blowing open house in December. Who the hell is this and tossed it aside. Maybe the third time we decided to check it out. When we walked in Kathy was demonstrating and Dick was explaining what she was doing to the crowd and when he saw us he stopped and introduced us to the audience as fellow glass artists. We stayed a short while and then left. In the year 2000, Dick called and invited us to participate in a hot glass casting workshop by an artist from New Orleans he and Kathy were sponsoring at their studio, inviting not just us but non glass artists whom they knew as well. It was a fun three days and that was really the beginning of our friendship with Dick and Kathy. As art collectors they participated in the Houston art scene, inviting visiting artists to stay with them, gave dinner parties, had visiting glass artists give demonstrations at their studio and included us in these events and so we started to become known locally; inviting us and other budding glass artists in Houston to participate in their open house every year. While we had a gallery in Houston and Oliver sold a lot of work for us, it was Dick and Kathy who, as Marc put it, made us popular. My joke was that they dragged us kicking and screaming out of our cave and into the light.

They were big promoters of glass art, took classes and workshops every summer at all the prestigious glass and craft schools; Pilchuck, Penland, the Corning Museum of Glass to name a few, and then worked in their studio in the fall and winter perfecting the skills they learned over the summer and were friends with many of the big names in glass art. On a state level Dick worked to arrange exhibitions showing their work and the work of the local glass community in which we were included.

The last open house was the first weekend in December 2019 and then covid shut everything down for two years. Dick started having health problems though not from covid and they worked in the studio less and less. We last saw Dick and Kathy in November. He was looking a bit frail but in good spirits. Dick went on hospice care Tuesday, September 9th at home and took his last breath the following Saturday in his 90th year. 

We owe Dick a lot, not only for his friendship but for his generous support and all the work he did to promote not only his and Kathy's work but our work and that of other local glass artists as well.

Fly high Dick. You will be missed.