Alan Cottle, renaissance man
The West Tisbury boat builder, glassblower, farmer, and artist left school at age 16.
We live in a place where most of us have to do several different things to make a living, so we can appreciate the willingness and ability to figure out a variety of pursuits. Alan Cottle manages Blackwater Farm on the West Tisbury family homestead, builds furniture, does wet and dry stonework, creates works of art with blown glass, and paints in oil. He can mill his own lumber and contour it through heat into ribs, for his own boat construction (he’s currently building a 40-foot lobster-style boat) and for boat builders like Gannon and Benjamin in Vineyard Haven. Mr. Cottle has refined his glassblowing process to allow him to apply and to embed delicate hues and images into glasswork — such as glassware with a mapped outline of the Island in it.
Mr. Cottle and Debbie Farber, his wife of nearly 30 years, also operate Lambert’s Cove Glass, a seasonal retail shop in Menemsha featuring Mr. Cottle’s glass artwork. Mr. Cottle is descended from a thousand years of Cottles in Europe, including Edward Cottle, who staggered ashore on the north shore of the Island in 1652 after being shipwrecked.
Mr. Cottle is what some of us would call a renaissance man, a person defined by Merriam Webster as one “who has wide interests and is expert in several areas.” It’s a fascinating term for most of us to consider, particularly in a culture that rewards specialists and advises 10-year-olds to concentrate on a single sport or interest.
The Times visited with Mr. Cottle recently in his artful environs on the 200-acre Blackwater Farm. He is an open, engaging man who is joyous about his work and appears to be continually fascinated by the ability of physical laws to produce the results in his handiwork, a delight that is infectious to visitors and evident in his co-workers, Martina Musilova and Russell Carson.
Ms. Musilova, in her early 20s, is a native of the Czech Republic. She has been working with Mr. Cottle for four years, learning the glassblowing art form. “I never did anything like this before. Everything I know about the art has come from Alan’s teaching, and there is so much more to learn,” the young woman said, keeping an eye on the shop mascot, an ever-busy Australian shepherd, trotting about the shed and yard.
Mr. Carson, originally from Roxbury, Conn., is an experienced and career glassblower. “I’ve been working with glass for 13 years now. I’ve worked here with Alan in the winter months for the past three years, and I work at the Martha’s Vineyard Glassworks [State Road in West Tisbury] during the summer months,” he said.
Their workplace is a riot of creative output in glass, in oil paintings, artifacts, and the 40-foot boat under construction. The language of their work involves “crucibles,” “frits,” “punties,” and “glory holes,” arcane words associated with the constant motion of forming art from molten semi-liquid heated in a 1,200°F oven.
Mr. Cottle, 53 next month, is also a member of another group of renaissance men — including Thomas Edison, Beethoven, and Richard Branson — who were driven to succeed and express their talent despite being severely dyslexic. Dyslexia occurs as a result of subtle problems in information processing in the different parts of the brain. Dyslexic people struggle to read, and thus to make sense of information. The effect on children, immersed in the education process, can be devastating.
“It’s very difficult when you can’t read and write, and kids can be cruel,” Mr. Cottle said. “You can become discouraged when you can’t put thoughts and feelings in words. So I had to find another way to do it. That’s what drove me. To show that I could do things that other kids couldn’t do. Not that I don’t believe I have as much talent as everyone else.
“Today I believe that I’m kind of lucky, but I didn’t believe it back then,” he said. Mr. Cottle credits Priscilla Fischer, his teacher in the one-room West Tisbury schoolhouse, as an important intervenor in his life. “She knew something was wrong, and sent me off-Island to be tested, and they found the dyslexia,” he said. The town hired a specialist who worked with Mr. Cottle after school, he said. Dyslexia was relatively mysterious then. Today, research indicates that 20 to 25 percent of children contend with some level of dyslexia.
Mr. Cottle wrestled with academics until he was 16, then left formal education. By that time, he had built a house from scratch, had driven heavy equipment for eight years, and was skilled in power tools, farming, stonework, and carpentry. He has vivid childhood memories of watching Edgartown glassblower Joe Serpa work, and of art lessons his mother had arranged for him. He would go on to rent a space to perfect his glassblowing skill, and he would attend classes at the Rhode Island School of Design to develop his painting skills.
“I learn visually, and so I learned to pay attention and to remember what I learned. It’s just a different learning curve,” he said. He notes that the ease of gathering information on the Internet seems to have a downside. “I notice that people can look something up today, get the information, then tomorrow it’s gone from their memory,” he said.
“My favorite art form? Well, it depends on my mood. [I] really like putting the glass together, forming it, and joining it with wood and other materials,” he said. Mr. Cottle’s work can be seen beginning in late May at Lambert’s Cove Glass on Basin Road in Menemsha, next to the Beetlebung Cafe.
Mr. Cottle’s art provides a life lesson beyond its aesthetic value: that beauty can come from adversity. “You have to keep going,” he said of the condition that has fueled his success, “doing other things, so you don’t get depressed or discouraged.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified Mr. Cottle’s wife, Debbie Farber as Betty Farver.
