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Tim O'Niell was born in Indiana in 1954. His family soon settled in Albuquerque, NM, where he grew up the second of 6 six children. While attending New Mexico State University he decided to take a break in his third year. He took a life-changing trip down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon and decided to become a river guide. He has spent the past 30 years on the water. As a river guide, he rowed wooden dories, loaded with passengers, along rivers throughout the west, from Alaska to Costa Rica. As a commercial fisherman, Tim spent over 20 years negotiating the waters of the Puget Sound and southeast Alaska. Water and boats are a recurring theme in his life and in his art. Trained as a shipwright, Tim O'Niell began working with wood in 1979, and metal in 1996. He became fascinated with glass in 2001, after taking a hot casting class at Seattle's Pratt Fine Arts Center. Artist StatementI create hot cast glass and kiln formed glass art, usually using metal molds. My work begins with the mold, or negative. Its form will give birth to the piece, and it must both intrigue and please the eye. I like imagining the mold. Once I've got it down on my pocket note pad, it moves to my sketchbook for further detail and revision, then into my metal shop for forming and proportioning. I'm interested in the interplay of metal and glass, metal comprising the mold, containing the heat of creation; glass, once shaped by the metal, often relying on metal again in the form of the stand that supports the finished sculpture. 
A boat builder uses the term "fair", as in "fair curve", which means pleasing to the eye. I apply that standard to my forms and shapes. Even before I became involved in art, it was important to me that anything I made be fair-experientially and visually stimulating. I've always felt that, no matter how ordinary an object is, it should enrich your experience by capturing your imagination. I like the interplay of two disciplines, metal becomes the mold that contains the heat of creation - the glass is shaped and formed by the metal, then metal becomes the stand that supports and displays the glass sculpture. We live in an organic world. Yet the world we build is all boxes, square corners, flat surfaces. Imagination can free us from the box; bring us back to the beauty of curves, and surround us with shapes that affirm our true nature. Artist Bio
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