When walking into O’Neil Rocky Mountain Art, LLC, a stained glass art shop, you’ll meet Kay O’Neil. Sketches line the walls the precise lines and block color schemes imitating the swooping lines of glass, the final products shining in the window.
O’Neil wastes no time in showing The Mountain-Ear the pieces she’s sold today, laying out a delicate scene of aspen trees and a valley that a woman from North Carolina just purchased. On one table, half-constructed hummingbirds and eagle feathers overlay her carefully drawn lines. Other tables hold pictures of a kitchen O’Neil is commissioned to decorate.
The contained chaos of her creative process as represented by her store feels representative of O’Neil’s journey to her shop in the Caribou Shopping Center: a bit winding but extremely intentional. O’Neil herself is bursting with pieces of casual wisdom that would be pompous if it were not so genuine.
O’Neil spent the beginning of her professional artistic life in Springfield, Missouri, where she made her first connections with executives at Bass Pro Shops, an outdoor and hunting retail store, which currently features O’Neil’s work in its headquarters. Despite impressive business connections, O’Neil was unhappy in Missouri so when her mother died, leaving O’Neil and her sister some money, she packed her bags.
“We had one chance in life to do something different,” O’Neil said of that time. O’Neil trekked cross country, camping in her car, heading to the state she’d order her glass from: Colorado.
While O’Neil maintained strong connections with her old partners in Missouri, she struggled to find a place to practice her craft in Colorado. She made her first studio in a two-door garage in Nederland. Then rising rent prices chased her out of town. She continued her craft in an unused barn 14 miles outside of town.
She loved working in the barn on her landlord’s property and being able to look just out her front doors for inspiration. But the cold winters and an increasingly difficult relationship with her landlords forced O’Neil to relocate again. “I didn’t know what to do,” she said.
While scouting locations in Boulder, O’Neil came across a stained glass shop on Arapaho that had been in Boulder for years. She discovered the landlord was Stephen Tebo of Tebo Properties and promptly reached out to him to broker a deal. While space in Boulder was beyond her price range, O’Neil outlined payment plans for a space in Nederland. “If you don’t ask, you don’t get,” O’Neil said slyly.
Tebo accepted her offer and for the past three years, O’Neil has been working out of the space that used to be The Candyman on Lakeview Drive. “I just tell everybody, I have the sweet spot now. And for me, it has turned out to be the sweet spot,” she said.
And it really has been. Business is the best it’s ever been for O’Neil. “I used to spend 80% of my time trying to let people know I was available,” O’Neil said. “Now, I spend 100% of my time just trying to keep up.”
“I want to thank Nederland for being so nice to me,” O’Neil said, continuing to say that Nederland is the first place where she’s been treated like she’s always belonged.
She hopes to continue to contribute to the community she loves, offering $20 flat rate glass-working classes, offering detailed explanations of her work if ever asked, and hoping to continue “saving lives” by encouraging creativity in a world that often undervalues it.
O’Neil Rocky Mountain Art is located at 20 Lakeview Dr, Nederland, Colorado, 80466, in the Caribou Village Shopping Center. For more information visit their website at oneilrockymountainart.com, call 303-717-5794, or catch up with Kay on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ONeil-Rocky-Mountain- Art-LLC-149099085213934.
Sponsored by the Town of Nederland, with funds from the American Rescue Plan Act.
