Jeannie Papadopolous says there is a healing aspect to painting windows. So much so that she sometimes ignores the small tumour in her brain that blocks the nerves in her left arm and causes her to suffer from seizures.
The professional window painter will have to retire next year. But until then, creating colourful winter landscapes and birds on St. Albert storefronts still brings her joy, helps the family business and “exercises the brain,” she says.
“There’s something about it that is so healing, I don’t really know how to explain it,” she says, then looks at a bird she just painted. “It fills the window but it also makes it really feel like Christmas.”
Papadopoulos has been in the business of window painting for more than 30 years. Her work is prominent around St. Albert, at car dealerships, dentists or animal clinics, or the Gazette’s front entrance during Christmas time.
She paints glass for events and the four seasons, winter animals and landscapes in December or cowboy scenes during Edmonton’s K-Days, and helps businesses advertise products in their storefronts with big, bright numbers and letters.
“It’s so underestimated as to what this can do for your business, especially including lettering and prices of products,” she says.
Window painting is not difficult to learn but it’s a hidden career, she says. Papadopoulos herself stumbled on the job by chance.
Thirty years ago, she was a traditional painter specializing in horse portraits, when a couple bought a friend’s parents’ store. They wanted to advertise the new business and asked her to paint their front window. It opened the door to a whole new world of art, she says.
“And I had no clue how to do it,” she laughs. “So I had to ask a fellow sign painter in Stettler, which was 100 miles away, to walk me verbally through it.”
She entered a program on sign painting at NAIT in 1989, the only school that taught a relatable art at the time. She later offered her own workshops on window painting in Edmonton. And there are lots of people who want to learn, she says.
When she placed her first ad for the course in the paper, calls started coming in from across Canada. There were even people calling who lived in the U.S., Spain, and someone serving with the U.S. military in Japan, she says.
Not surprisingly, she adds. Her students can earn anywhere from $25 to $50 an hour, and the only difference between them and her is speed. Window painting is a rewarding job for anyone looking to pursue a passion in the arts, she says.
“People like that, people that are sick of their jobs, that aren’t making enough money or need to make money on the side and yet don’t want to pay a fortune for an education,” she says.
Perhaps the most surprising pieces in Papadopoulos’ paint set are her brushes. They were made of hairs shaved from the back of a Chinese squirrel’s tail, she says.
The four- to six-inch strands, mixed with some synthetic thread, allow her to apply her paint to the glass in clean, smooth lines. She stresses that no squirrel was hurt in the process of making them.
The brushes along with her paint were developed by Papadopoulos, and are now sold by her daughter to other window painters. Much of the work she did this year was also to support her daughter and the business. But it’s also just passion that drives her.
“I don’t think you can have any job in life, if you don’t have a passion for it, you shouldn’t do it,” she says. “You should do what your heart tells you to do in life, because you only have one.”
