Meet Crystal Thorson
It’s like treasure, you know. There are so many little bits and pieces to play with and it’s an excuse to hoard all kinds of weird stuff,” Crystal Thorson laughs cheerfully while restocking her earring display at Gallery 4 in downtown Fargo, where she sells hand-crafted jewelry made from repurposed materials.
Earrings of her own making swing at her ears, and a necklace she calls a “statement piece” graces the front of her sweater.
“I wear my own pieces when I go out, and I get a lot of comments, especially with crazy or funky stuff. People are all, ‘Oh, where’d you get that?’ and I am like, ‘Well, actually….’”
Crystal has had a lot of conversations about art over the years. She began making jewelry and doing the craft fair circuit in the 80s when her children were small, and she was a member of Gallery 4 at that time, as well. An art teacher, she moved away from the Fargo area until just recently, returning after her retirement to settle in Barnesville and rejoining Gallery 4 as one of their newest premier members to sell her signature mixed-media wearable art under the name Metal Shop Rogue.
“I grew up in a family that just made stuff. My grandmother made things out of nothing. All three of our daughters are artists. It’s in our blood. Then, when you’re teaching art, you’re teaching many different art techniques, and your budget is limited,d so you are always looking for things to use and reuse. I have huge stashes of things I’ve been saving since my art teaching days. And, really, I like the idea of not creating more objects from new materials to put out into the environment,” Crystal said.
Crystal’s husband, Rob, her biggest supporter, enjoys finding interesting materials to work with at thrift stores and auctions. With an eclectic store of supplies available and a host of random little skills built up over years of teaching art, Crystal takes the term “mixed-media” to an elevated level. Her pieces may feature watercolor enamel, shapes cut and formed from vintage tins, cast pewter or pewter melted and worked with rubber stamps, decals, leather, and a host of other materials, often in combination.
“I have the need to create things in mass quantity. It’s an obsession, A really fun one, because they just seem to make themselves,” Crystal said. “I’m kind of at a phase where I’m trying to figure out what is going to be next. I am considering a line of jewelry pins, but also collage and monoprints, because I taught all that but never really explored it as an artist myself. There’s an incubation period, I think, where things you’ve done years ago come back to you in a new form and you have to ask yourself, ‘Where is this going to take me?’”
No matter what direction Crystal’s art takes next, one thing is clear. Whether bright and quirky or classically elegant, the end destination for her eye-catching pieces will be one-of-a-kind works of art.
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