About Jim Vormelker

It well and truly started in early grade school – maybe before, because I remember owning 3 three-pound candy boxes of crayons. In late grade school I built things from Tinker Toys and A. C. Gilbert Erector Sets–structural metal construction kits. I seem to remember (maybe because it is convenient to) building stuff beyond the suggested drawings and being frustrated that there were never enough parts.

But I never thought of it as “artistic” or “creative”—it was just fun to build stuff. And I didn’t do any drawing, and we all know that the measure of being an artist is the ability to draw.

Later, I built a kid’s size house trailer with a spring loaded screen door that compounded the heat of an Ohio summer with magnificent efficiency.  And then model airplanes, at a time when balsa wood had Gone to War, and quickly learned the disadvantages of pine as an alternative material. I would have built out of my head instead of from kits, only I knew I didn’t have enough information to do that.

So when it came college time, I knew that I didn’t want the science areas or business areas, and as I went through the catalog, Department of Speech was the first thing I came to, alphabetically, that sounded at all fun. In my first year there was a requirement to make a 3D model of a stage setting for a specific play. I distinctly remember alienating a large number of potential lifetime college friends by turning in a stage made of plywood with velvet cloth curtains and Christmas lights overhead. While it was enjoyable, and came out rather better than most of the class would have liked, it did not seem an artistic thing at the time.

Nor did working in TV at a time when TV almost didn’t exist yet, or in industrial motion pictures, or running my own film and slide company, for quite a while. But it eventually started to dawn on me that some percent of me is an artist, and then I started to figure out what I wanted to do with it.

Some of what I have done about it is here. Enjoy.

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