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I have lived with the art of Virgil Cantini my entire life. Our house at 354 South Highland Avenue was filled with it, from a wall-size carpet that graced our dining room, abstract enamels that adorned our living room and foyer, to the bowls from which we ate our morning cereal.

As I grew up and moved out on my own, my grandfather’s work — and his ethic as an artist, an artisan, and a maker — came with me. His celebrated enamels, yes, but more so small-scale objects including bowls, flower pots, bookends, side tables and coffee tables, all of which he made. When I think of my grandfather, and his life as an artist, these are the objects that appear to me rather than the large-scale public sculptures that animate Oakland and East Liberty.

It is because he embodied, more than anything, the belief that art was a way of life as opposed to solely the creation of objects for display. A sense of aesthetics and design should be as present in the morning when you pour out your Shredded Wheat as it is when you wander the galleries of the Carnegie Museum of Art. The artist should bring to bear his or her creativity to improve anything he or she can. It is, in fact, this same spirit that underlies his public art. Beauty should be available to everyone, he believed, and a shared civic space should move past mere functionality to also communicate the creative possibilities of humankind.

Nothing, in my experience, was immune to my grandfather’s imagination. In my adolescence he often called upon me to mow his lawn in the backyard at 205 South Craig Street, and one summer, after I had finished and loaded the push mower into his Jeep so he could drive me home, a thick Pittsburgh thunderstorm blew in. My grandfather decided he would wait for it to pass, so he turned off the car and the windshield wipers. Almost immediately the heavy rain began to pour over the windshield in a strange corrugated pattern, and my grandfather made a frame of his hands by putting the tips of his thumbs together, and moved it around, isolating the rain’s abstraction against the different backgrounds of Craig Street. At that time, Mellon Bank was across the street, and he most liked the way the water looked against the thick opaque glass of the building. He explained to me that he often made a frame of his hands that way whenever he was stuck somewhere for an idle moment, because you never knew where you might find an idea or a form.

Looking back on that after 25 or 30 years, I am still struck by how clearly I can see what he made me see, and the pure joy he found in seeing. Having become a poet and artist myself, I am also aware of just how valuable a lesson it was: let there never be any separation between art and life.

- Andrew Seguin