My name is Oisín Mac Suibhne, and I'm a 26 year-old artist who was born and raised in San Antonio, TX.  Hard as I've struggled to overcome the sad fact, it takes very few drinks for the accent to sneak back out.  I have a long-lived love for world mythologies, Insular art, and the Irish language...and spent a sizable chunk of my childhood with my face buried in cheesy fantasy novels and atlases.  That said, I still doubt I could point out Paraguay on a map.  I can, however, find Texas easily enough... and that's got to count for something.

            I have many reasons for doing what I do, but the primary focus of my life at this point is to become a bilingual speaker in Irish-Gaelic. And learn to play the fiddle. And to grow my own food. And to get a kitten.  To those ends (and many more), I pulled up my roots in Texas, moved all the way up to Tacoma, then moved back to Texas..and am now happily settle in the Pacific Northwest once more, in beautiful Portland, OR.  Moving back up here has opened up a world of possibilities for both me and my glass, and my newly reacquired sandblaster and I are already getting along marvelously.  I've met many talented and generous people in my short time here already, and this new sense of having the world opened up to me is taking some getting used to.  At the moment, a percentage of the glass I sell goes towards funding an eventual Irish immersion course in An Cheathrú Rua next summer...as well as towards the normal human necessities and distractions.  And ever the next project, of course.

            I have been working in stained glass since my introduction to it in November of 2004 (as can be followed through this gallery) by complete and random encounter (henceforth to be referred to as fate) on the streets of Austin, TX.  At the time, I was traveling up to Austin every Sunday, meeting for an Irish language class—and through the course of events, stumbled upon this amazing opportunity.  A craftsman by the name of Mick McCoy took me under his wing for a couple months, and my mind hasn't been quite the same since.

            Like most artists, I can say I've been drawing since I was a kid...but the visual arts were never really my passion growing up.  I spent my free time drawing maps in my notebooks and trying to create worlds like the ones I read about all the time, and so ended up attending a magnet high school for four years, with a major in Creative Writing. What experience I did have in art resided solely within the pages of a handful of sketchbooks, and it came as shock to me as much as anyone else when I took to stained glass like I did.  But when I consider it, it makes perfect sense.  I love telling stories, and I love connecting the past with the future...so what better medium than this?