We recently connected with Al Heilman and have shared our conversation below.

Al, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Can you talk to us about how you learned to do what you do?

THE EDUCATION OF THESE HANDS
Al Heilman
I have cherished learning all my life. The road was not always straight, and it was not always fast. Division I basketball consumed my early college years, and serious scholarship came later — when the distractions of athletics fell away and I became the student I was always capable of being. I earned a pharmacy degree, built a resume worthy of medical school one credential at a time, and arrived later than most. None of it was given. All of it was earned — through focus, through persistence, through a refusal to give up that has never once felt optional. That desire — specific, stubborn, undimmed by detour — became the fuel that has never left me. I came to medicine late, to art later, to writing later still. What I brought to each was not youth but hunger. The older student arrives with better focus and stamina — pushing every class, extracting everything available, never taking the seat for granted. I knew why I was there. That knowledge is itself a gift. My first career funded my second. Writing came to tie it all together, the savvy of age and experience worn like a mantle. Never settling. Always pushing. That has been the through line of everything.
The first education began in a cadaver lab in the late 1970s, where I learned that the human spine is a masterpiece of engineering so precise it makes you believe, for a moment, in something intentional behind the design. I was twenty-six. The smell of formaldehyde stayed in your clothes for days. Nobody told you that part. Nobody told you a lot of parts.
Surgery in those years was learned the way most essential things are learned: first in the library, alone, until the anatomy and physiology were no longer memorized but owned. You did not touch a patient until that foundation was unshakeable. Only then did the OR open to you — and what you found there was a place to apply what you already knew to the challenges of trauma, deformity, the slow ruin that aging and arthritis make of a spine. That sequence was not incidental. It was everything.
The surgeons who became truly excellent measured twice, then measured again. They did not take risks that had not been fully thought through. They questioned their own decisions — alone at midnight with the films, and openly among colleagues the next morning. They were not afraid to say: I am not sure. Let’s look again. That willingness to keep learning, keep questioning, never settling into the comfort of what you already knew — that was the mark. Not boldness. Rigor.
Forty years in a spine practice teaches you things no curriculum covers. It teaches you that a patient in pain will tell you the truth if you give them enough silence to find it. That listening and the laying on of hands is the first step in a diagnosis — not the last. You looked at the patient first, then the actual images. The radiology report came last, if at all. Imaging confirms what a careful clinician already suspects. The report is someone else’s interpretation of a picture. The patient in front of you is the truth. That your hands will sometimes understand a problem your mind is still formulating. I operated until I could not. A latex and chemical sensitivity ended my surgical career not with a dramatic failure but with a quiet biological refusal — my own body declining to continue. When the body that had been my instrument turned against me, there was a reckoning. There always is, at the crossroads. You find a way around or you resign to mediocrity. The second has never been in my vocabulary.
The second education began with night classes. Glassell School of Art in Houston. I enrolled initially to engage my mind during a difficult period — a serious spine condition, surgery, pain that had become a constant companion. The first year was drawing. Then more. What I discovered was that the more I focused on the work, the more the pain receded from director to background player. I fell in love with my own creativity, and that love has never stopped. One hundred and thirty hours of classes later I graduated with a certificate degree in enameling from Glassell. I built a studio beside my home on the lake. Glass followed — classes in Houston, then Bullseye Glass in Santa Fe, where the kilns run at a thousand degrees and the material teaches you patience whether you want to learn it or not. One course led to another, and eventually I was teaching them.
What I discovered along the way was that the skills that made me a competent surgeon — three-dimensional spatial reasoning, pattern recognition, the ability to hold a complex system in the mind and intervene precisely — these transferred. Not completely, not without translation, but they were there. The hands remembered their own discipline even when the discipline changed. In the OR I had spent four decades as the person who knew. In the studio the credential that mattered was the work itself. That was a fair trade.
Jewelry followed — goldsmithing, stone setting, years of work alongside skilled masters who understood that craft at this level is never finished learning. Now I move between disciplines as my back allows. Some days it is glass. Some days it is writing. Other days it is gold work and stone setting. Design, color theory, and craftsmanship are always the drivers, pulling the carriage of creativity behind them.
Age brings its own curriculum. My wife faced breast cancer. I faced prostate cancer. Both pulled us away from everything we had built, and both, gratefully, are in remission. You do not pass through something like that unchanged. But you do pass through. That too is part of the education — learning that the work waits for you, that it does not abandon you while you are away fighting for your life. We came back to the lake. The light was still there.
If I could go back, I think I would have pursued art sooner. Architecture was the early dream — but my father discouraged it, and the path closed before I ever walked it. Medicine opened instead, and I gave it everything. Financially, the trade was sound. But more than that — I loved my patients. That was never a consolation prize. Still, there is a quiet wonder in arriving at the studio late and finding that the work fits your hands as if it had been waiting.
I am seventy-three now. My studio faces the water. In the mornings when the light comes across the lake, it does something to the fused glass on the worktable that no other light does — reveals the depth in the layers, the way the colors interact beneath the surface in ways you couldn’t predict when you were firing them. That light has become my measure of a day well begun. On the desk beside the studio door sits the manuscript of a life: one published book, four hundred and fifty essays, a Substack that began as an experiment and became something closer to a reckoning. This is the horizon I did not plan for and would not trade. Glass catches the morning and gives it back transformed. Words outlast the hands that wrote them. Both feel, at this distance, like grace.
My wife calls me undaunted. I accept the word, though I know what it cost to earn it.
Three lives, one learner — surgeon, artist, writer. All three educations incomplete. I would not have it otherwise.
The most essential skill, in the end, was the same in all of them: the willingness to stay in the room when the answer hadn’t arrived yet. To keep your hands moving. To trust that the knowledge was accumulating even when the evidence was thin.
Everything else followed from that.

Al, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

WHO I AM
I am a spine surgeon, a visual artist, and a writer. Not sequentially — not one thing neatly replaced by the next — but all at once, layered, each discipline informing the others in ways I could not have planned and would not trade.
What I make: fused and kiln-formed glass vessels and panels. Gold and silver work, stone setting, jewelry at the level of craft. I work from a custom-built studio with floor-to-ceiling windows facing Lake Conroe — a space I designed and built largely by hand, part of a home thirty years in the making. The studio is where the work happens. The lake is where I think.
What I bring to the work is the perspective of someone who has mastered more than one difficult thing — and who knows that mastery is never finished. I am my own most demanding student. Every day in the studio is a negotiation between accumulated knowledge and problems the work hasn’t let me solve yet. The surgical vocabulary, the material science, tge engineering, the design instincts — all of it becomes a private curriculum, revised with every firing, every setting, every piece that doesn’t go where I intended. That is not failure. That is the work teaching back.
The writing came last and tied everything together. I publish personal essays on Substack at These Hands Remember and my memoir, The Quiet Return, is available on Amazon. I write about medicine and patients, about art and craft, about illness and recovery, about a life built from reinvention. Four hundred and fifty essays in, the work still clarifies something I didn’t know I needed to understand.
What sets me apart, if anything does, is the refusal to specialize in only one life. The surgeon’s spatial reasoning serves the glasswork. The artist’s eye for composition serves the writing. The writer’s habit of reflection serves the making. Nothing has been wasted — not the detours, not the losses, not the years spent becoming someone else entirely.
I am seventy-three. I am still learning. I intend to keep going.
That is what I most want people to know.

How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?

ON SUPPORTING THE CREATIVE ECOSYSTEM
I come to this question not as a theorist but as someone who has lived on both sides of the equation — as a physician who funded his own creative life, and as an artist who has watched talented people walk away from the work because the structures that should have supported them simply were not there.
Here is what I believe.
The first thing society can do is take craft seriously. Not just art as concept, not just the museum piece or the gallery opening, but the making itself — the hours at the kiln, the bench work, the study of color theory, the years of bad work that precede the good. We have built a culture that celebrates creative product while remaining largely indifferent to creative process. That is a mistake. The process is where the learning lives. The process is where the next generation of makers is either encouraged or abandoned. If we want a thriving creative ecosystem we have to value the work of becoming, not just the work of having arrived.
The second thing is access. I was fortunate. A surgical career gave me the financial foundation to build a studio, travel to Santa Fe, study under master craftsmen, and take the time that serious learning requires. Most people do not have that runway. Talent is evenly distributed across economic circumstance. Opportunity is not. Community studios, funded art education in public schools, accessible workshop programs, subsidized materials for emerging artists — these are not luxuries. They are infrastructure. A society that defunds art education and then wonders why its creative culture feels thin has answered its own question.
The third thing is mentorship. I learned surgery from surgeons. I learned glass from glassmakers. I learned goldsmithing from masters who had spent their lives at the bench. In every case the transmission was personal — one person showing another, in real time, with real materials, in a real studio. That kind of knowledge cannot be fully digitized or democratized through a screen. It requires proximity, time, and the willingness of those who know to teach those who don’t yet. Experienced artists and craftspeople should be supported, compensated, and celebrated for teaching. Right now many of them cannot afford to.
The fourth thing — and this one is harder — is patience. We have become a culture that measures creative work by its immediate market value, its follower count, its revenue potential. That framework is lethal to serious creative development. The best work takes years. Sometimes decades. A young artist who cannot afford to spend five years making bad work before making good work will not make the good work. A community that cannot tolerate the long arc of creative development will not produce the artists it claims to want. Patience means funding that does not demand immediate return. It means criticism that is honest without being cruel. It means creating the conditions for artists to fail, recover, and keep going.
The fifth thing is simply this: buy the work. Attend the shows. Read the books. Subscribe to the Substacks. Commission the pieces. The creative ecosystem is not sustained by applause alone. It is sustained by people putting their money where their admiration is. Every time someone purchases original art, hires a working artist, or pays full price for a handmade object rather than a mass-produced substitute, they are casting a vote for the kind of world they want to live in. Those votes accumulate.
I built my studio by hand over thirty years. I designed the space, cut the steel, laid the floors, installed the windows that face the lake. It was not efficient. It was not fast. But it is mine in a way that nothing purchased could ever be. That is what creative work gives back — not just to the maker but to everyone who encounters it. It returns something human to a world that is always at risk of forgetting what human means.
Support the artists. Fund the schools. Mentor the young. Buy the work. And above all, resist the pressure to make every creative act justify itself financially before it has had time to become what it is trying to become.
The best things take time. Society’s job is to give them that time.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

THE MOST REWARDING ASPECT
People expect me to say the finished piece. The vessel delivered, the painting hung, the essay published. The moment of completion, the validation of the work, the response of an audience. Those things matter. I will not pretend otherwise.
But that is not the answer.
The most rewarding aspect of being an artist — of being a creative in any medium — is the state of making itself. The hours when the problem in front of you is the only problem that exists. When the question of how this color behaves next to that one, or how this sentence wants to end, or how this line of solder wants to run — when that question fills the entire available space of your attention and everything else recedes. The back pain. The calendar. The accumulated weight of a life fully lived. All of it steps back and waits.
I spent forty years in medicine, which is a discipline of high stakes and chronic urgency. There is very little in surgery that can wait. The body does not pause while you think. I loved that intensity. I also carried it home every night for four decades, and I did not always know I was carrying it until I put it down.
Art taught me to put it down.
Not as escape — I want to be clear about that. Making is not where I go to avoid difficulty. It is where I go to engage with difficulty on different terms. The studio is not refuge. It is laboratory. But the laboratory has its own time signature, and that time signature is slower, more forgiving, more willing to let a problem remain unsolved for a while. Glass teaches patience because it has to cool before you know what you made. Writing teaches patience because the sentence that wants to be written tomorrow cannot be forced today. Goldsmithing teaches patience because the metal will not be rushed. Every medium I have worked in has been, among other things, an education in the virtue of waiting.
The second most rewarding aspect is surprise. I have been making things for decades and I am still regularly astonished by what emerges from the process. A color combination in the kiln that I did not anticipate. A sentence that arrives fully formed and says something I did not know I believed until I read it back. A piece of stone that reveals itself under the graver in a way that changes what the whole setting wants to be. You cannot plan these moments. You can only show up consistently enough that they find you.
The third — and this one surprised me when I recognized it — is legacy. I write, I have said, for legacy rather than engagement metrics. That is true of all the work. A fused glass vessel delivered to a Houston dance company will outlast me. The essays on Substack will outlast me. The memoir will outlast me. The jewelry I have made will be worn by people I will never meet, passed from hand to hand through decades I will not see. There is something clarifying about that. It changes the question from how does this look right now to what does this mean over time. That is a better question. It produces better work.
I am seventy-three. I have had a serious spine condition, multiple surgeries, cancer, and a career ended by my own body’s refusal to cooperate. I have also built a studio that faces the lake, published a book, written four hundred and fifty essays, made glass that caught the light in ways I still cannot fully explain, and set stones that will be worn long after I am gone.
The most rewarding aspect of being a creative is the evidence, accumulated over a lifetime, that the making was worth it. That the hours at the bench and the kiln and the desk produced something that did not exist before and now does.
That it will keep existing.
That is enough. That is everything.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://Www.alheilmanart.com
• Instagram: Alheilmanart
• Facebook: Alheilmanart
• Other: Substack
  https://substack.com/@thesehandsremember?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=27oiy6

Image Credits

All photos by Al Heilman