A love for creating and appreciating art has always run deep through Paul “Bead” Spencer’s life. Entranced and inspired by the art and writings of post-Impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh, he works to infuse that kind of sensitivity to energy, color, and movement in his own paintings and glasswork.

Paul’s work as a psychotherapist was enriched by his work as a painter. “I supported myself as an artist with my work as a clinician,” he says. He often encouraged patients to express their inner landscapes by drawing and painting them. Art could be a “creative, kinesthetic, experiential form of therapy,” he observes, quickly adding that he is not an art therapist but a lifelong painter whose art has given him much joy.

Twenty years ago he began taking glassmaking classes in Glen Mills, Pennsylvania. When he retired, he moved from Philadelphia to Corning to become part of the glassmaking community here.

“I fell in love with it,” he says of glassmaking. “It was the color and energy and the medium of fire.” He set up a home-based glass studio and began creating those small works of portable art known as beads. But Paul’s beads aren’t simple. They often contain worlds of meaning and symbolism in a tiny space. Sometimes they’re commissioned in colors with particular significance to the wearer, perhaps representing that individual’s subtle aspirations. Glass beads can also sometimes be the repository of fragments of the cremated remains of a pet or loved one the wearer wants to keep close. Objects that can be strung on a chain of precious metal and worn have long been treasured in a variety of cultures.

“I wanted to work small, wanted to create things people could wear. I wanted the art, the color of the glass, to be something that could be close to their pulse points, to make them feel good, when it was a part of them.”

For nearly two decades, most of his beads have been sold online and at museum shops, including at the Corning Museum of Glass. His work was well received and sold well until he abruptly reached his own inner impasse. Having neglected painting in favor of his fascination with glass, he abruptly found himself dissatisfied with his work, particularly the traditional methods of glassmaking at a torch. He returned to painting, and suddenly, “I felt I was either going to have to give up glass or turn it into more of a plastic medium, something freer, something less predetermined, something more akin to painting,” he says now. But how to do it? The idea worried him, even in his sleep, until the strands came together in his mind and he woke in the small hours one morning knowing what he had to do.

He needed to “paint” with glass, to use its properties in the way of the highly textured and layered impasto painting technique. Some of his beads have raised trails of applied glass. For others, the complexity is encased within the fire-polished sphere of a bead. The point is not simply to have a single bead but rather several of them, strung together, to tell a story the way a painting does.

“I thought originally it was [meant to be] a single bead, to take a painting and turn it into a bead,” he says now of his inspiration to make beads more like painting. “No—it’s as if you would lay the strand of glass beads onto the painting. You’d find each part of the painting would be one of the beads. Imagine taking a picture of painting and cutting a strand of circles around the painting. That’s what I did. The strand could lie atop a painting and blend in. So you wouldn’t see where the glass strand of beads ended and the painting would begin.”

To do this, he worked on creating a painterly method of mixing colors in glass, based on the glassmaker’s tradition of adding frit (tiny shards of colored glass) to a bead in progress, sometimes melting several colors together, blowing it into a thin-walled bubble and smashing it to create his own complex shards.

“Then I’ll layer colors,” he explains. “When I’m working, my table is full of colored shards.” Metals might also be combined with the colors before the whole is encased in clear glass.

To see the end result as jewelry is to see only a fragment of his meaning. These are not simply pretty beads. The whole is intended to deepen the wearer’s connections to their inner being and the natural world in the way of prayer and meditation. In a variety of cultural traditions around the world, these practices are enhanced with beads intended specifically for spiritual practice.

Two years ago, Paul visited the Netherlands for the first time, immersing himself in art museums and eventually meeting other artists, including glass artists, and eventually finding a second home in Amsterdam. “I’d been wanting to come all my life,” he says. “It’s heartbreakingly beautiful with canals and beautiful canal houses, little bridges that go across everywhere. A wonderful atmosphere for anyone who really loves history. And it’s filled with art, and they so appreciate it. For me, it’s like being in a dream.”

Invited to use a studio space at NDSM, a neighborhood in a former Amsterdam shipyard whose warehouses have been converted into artists’ workspaces, he set up a second glassmaking studio and found a warm welcome. There he works at both painting and glassmaking, his work further influenced by cultural, climate, and practical differences. “The propane there is more expensive and purer,” he says. This means he can run his torch on lower heat with less danger of thermal shock. The beads he makes in his studio at NDSM weigh a little less and are more translucent, he notes.

Paul plans to divide his time between the Netherlands and upstate New York, soaking up the unique colors and light in each for part of the year, painting from nature, and making glass he describes as more personal art, easily portable in times of change. “Gone are the days when people moving around will carry large canvases in frames,” he says.

Besides, unlike painted canvas, glass can last, and outlast, millennia. Perhaps several thousand years from now someone will discover some of his beads and find their own inspiration and meaning there. Paul intends it to be worth the wait.