Nicole Delight Martin
Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin

Nicole Delight Martin does not fit the stereotype of the struggling artist. And her parents are pleased by that.

They were always very clear: Artists struggle, they said; she should prepare herself to make a living. So Martin, born in LaCrosse and raised on a farm in Southwestern Wisconsin, pursued a career in the healthcare field.

 Yet, an artist she has become – maybe. “I’m not sure I qualify as an artist yet,” she says. But the reaction to her work certainly suggests she is well on her way. Martin’s first attempt at exhibiting in a competitive atmosphere, the 2008 Driftless Area Art Festival, was a stunning success.  One of her pieces was selected for auctioning at a Festival fundraiser. In addition, her work won two purchase awards.

 “It’s amazing,” she says. “People really like what I make in my little basement studio.”

Martin, 36, pony-tailed and possessing a dazzling smile, tries not to get carried away about all this, preferring to describe what she creates in the evenings, after putting her children to bed, as a hobby.

 A graduate of the Department of Communicative Disorders at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Martin during the day is a speech therapist based at Prairie du Chien Memorial Hospital. She’s been in the field for 12 years.

 “I love my work and I think I’m good at it,” she says, “but a love of art was born in me very early and it was nurtured by some great teachers I’ve had – both as an adult and a child.”

So, a little over two years ago, she decided to do something about it, turning to a professional colleague, Patti Fowler, for advice. Fowler makes jewelry. Martin asked her how to get started doing something similar.

She began making mosaics, developing her skills at cutting, polishing and creating designs from pieces of colored glass and embedding them in a base. Then came her first attempts at making jewelry and she began experimenting with dichroic (also diachroic) glass, a development of scientists at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. NASA sought a way to protect astronauts and their equipment from the blinding and burning of the bright sunlight in space.

NASA’s dichroic innovations – technically, thin-film filters applied to glass that absorb some colors and reflect others – have become extremely popular in the art world because of their ability to produce stunning iridescent effects when pieces of glass are fused together.

 Fusing requires extreme heat, usually in a kiln. Martin, the ever-practical product of a conservative farm family, is concerned about the considerable costs involved in creating artistic jewelry. She has promised herself, and her family, that she will approach her work in a business-like manner. Thus, she works hard at not only her art, but at building an art business too.

“The costs involved in making jewelry are considerable,” she says. I’m trying not to get carried away.”

She admits, however, that what she is able to create is quite exciting.  “You never know exactly what will happen when you put two sheets of glass together in the kiln. My first attempts were pretty crude, I think. But, now…”

Martin plans to plow the money she made at the Driftless Area Art Festival back into her business. First priority: enclosing her basement studio.  That will ease her worries about her children hurting themselves on the glass shards that are an inevitable product of her work. “They are forbidden from coming to close to my work area, but kids will be kids.”

Nicole and her husband, Matt, have two children. Grant is seven. Hope is five, a third generation Delight. Martin’s mother is Delight Smith.

So, what lies ahead for this busy medical professional/wife/mother/emerging artist? More experimentation, she says.  “I love to paint. I want to try pottery. There are a lot of things I want to try.”