YOUR SPACE: Artist has a blast with glass

Ever wanted to shower with the wolves?

Or lather up with a village watching you?

Steve Briggs can set you up. Glass is his canvas. He turns panes into art.

Animals, aspens, wizards, whatever. He sketches then sandblasts the images on insulating panes for windows and baths.

Briggs, 49, started etching glass about 20 years ago. Before that, he tattooed buffalo hides and human flesh. “I had a tattoo shop in my basement for about six years,” the Colorado Springs native says.

“I’m a little bit different. It doesn’t take any skill to be normal. If I had to sit in a cubicle and wear a tie, I’d be swinging from the light fixture before you knew it. The only reason I graduated high school was because I did good in shop class. My parents were pretty good about leaving me alone and letting me do what I do.”

Briggs runs “Reflections of the Mind” from his rural Peyton home. While horses graze in a neighbor’s yard, he blasts glass in his workshop, with three dogs and two cats for company.

“It’s a pretty good dream job,” he says.

Well, maybe for him.

“It’s just a filthy job. You get extremely dirty doing this. It’s cold in the winter, it’s hot in summer, it’s dusty all the time,” Briggs says. “Most people want to do art within a comfort level. I don’t care what my comfort level is as long as I get good results at the end. I like the possibilities, there are no limitations.”

Example: A shower he did for some old “Dungeons & Dragons” players. “It had a village with 48 little buildings in it and a castle. A big tower with a wizard at the top and he’s bringing lightning and thunder and all kinds of devastation down on this little village.”

Another piece had thousands of deer, panthers, mountains, trees ­— “a whole running movie in the shower unit.”

A foyer window with aspens costs about $300. Sometimes he hides things that aren’t obvious, like a squirrel holding acorns that are really hand grenades, but “the Average Joe doesn’t get that,” he says.

Inside his home are his toys: skeletons, matchbox cars, KISS action figures. “It’s arrested adolescence,” says the twice-married artist. “I can’t find a woman who’ll put up with me with this stuff, but if there’s one out there, feel free to apply.”

Oh, yeah, there are two caskets from his days in the Manitou Springs coffin races. “I’m going to take this coffin and turn it into a DVD cabinet,” he says. The other coffin stores lawn chairs on the deck.

He’s art doesn’t end there.

Two sun-faded pink flamingos in his front yard have leather spiked collars from an earlier stint making bondage gear.

“Did I mention I’m single?” he says.

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