As an altar boy at St. John Fisher, I used a tiny, glass funneI to help fill the cruets with water and wine when setting up for mass. Sometimes I'd sneak a sip of wine before a 6:30 AM service. I used a red one to fill the gas tank on my dad’s lawnmower when I cut neighbors’ lawns in the summers during grammar school. Ten bucks for the small front yards and twenty for the bigger back yards. During high school I filled sauce bottles using plastic funnels at an Arby’s one summer, where I sliced the meat (and the tip of one finger). As a college waiter at Bristol’s I filled oil and vinegar bottles through metal funnels.
I collect funnels. I don’t know when it started. Probably the mid 80’s. I fell in love with them in the Lithography Studio at the University of Texas at Austin. In that printshop, it seemed like everything went through a funnel: lithotene, acid, gum arabic, acetone, grit, water. There was an unspoken rule that if you were filling one empty container, you filled them all. There were also giant barrels of gum and lithotene on a loading dock that required a giant funnel to fill a smaller container, which would then get carried inside so I could fill the containers at each press with yet another size funnel. Through the wall of windows looking into the intaglio studio, another hangout, they had their own funnels.
Eventually I went to grad school in lithography at the University of Illinois, only to find out on day one the litho professor I had gone to study with went on sabbatical, so I taught the courses and ran the shop my first year. The litho studio was in the old firehouse in the center of campus. My studio was in the basement, where I would watch feet walk past the high windows while I drew. We also kept some of the printshop supplies down there, and that’s when I really fell in love with the funnels.
Was it the shape? From one viewpoint, a funnel was very feminine; from another, phallic. Depending on the angle it could be sensuous or mysterious or shy. I loved how the light and shadows played off them. At UT I had mostly painted the figure, often rolling huge litho stones up the elevator to life drawing classes. But in grad school I started using funnels and other objects as stand-ins for humans. I realized I could “pose” funnels in still lifes and create narrative. Some of my prints and drawings of funnels were more sexual than any of the nudes I had drawn.
In the years after grad school there was a lot of chaos in my life, which didn’t end the second I quit drinking and drugs. I spent years trying to create order out of my chaos and realized one day that funnels also do that. Funnels make order out of chaos. That is their purpose for being.
I mostly loved drawing funnels head on. Like I see with my monocular vision, no one could tell if they were looking into the funnel from the wide end or down its neck from the narrow end. To me they looked the same, so I had finally found something that I saw the same way other people saw. Flat. I suppose in the same way I used funnels as symbols for people or genders, the head on funnel images were self-portraits. Those perfect circles within circles within circles are still in my work today.
My colleague and friend, the painter Perry House, once stood in front of my painting with a funnel in a faculty exhibit and announced that I needed to take a class in drawing ellipses. He didn’t like the shape of the wide opening. I challenged him to teach me and he got out paper and a black marker from his pocket and explained the trick he used to draw perfect ellipses. I’ve used it ever since.
Many years later, in the early 2000’s when I started to channel, I had a hard time getting clear messages as well as a voice that I could speak in for longer than ten minutes. It was suggested I ask for help, like asking how to tune in the radio receiver in my head. I remember clearly hearing to imagine a funnel above my head. Once again, to make specific that which seemed messy. Being given a message from Spirit with a very personal symbol is always help in discernment.
Like the keys in another vignette posted here, my favorite funnels are the used ones. Those dents, stains and scratches tell stories of the men and women who in some routine or dramatic way were using a tool to do something difficult with grace and ease.