In his retirement, Bernie Pennock found a way to turn fire into water.
The former medical research scientist said it was just one of the many problems that needed solving in his Sea Pines home, where art has become the answer.
"It's really the same idea as what I did as a career," Pennock said of his hobby. "You see a problem and think of how to solve it. I think of what I want to do and how to do it, and then I do it and see if it works."
Using old brass blowtorches he has collected over the years from antique shops and friends, Pennock constructed a fountain next to the pathway leading up to his front door to get the collection out of his kitchen.
"My wife hated the blowtorches, so I started thinking about what I could do with them," Pennock said. "I've always thought they were so neat. I have this memory from when I was a kid and watching the painters take paint off the houses with them. Somehow, it's just stayed with me."
Instead of spitting flames, Pennock's structure spouts water. He mounted the old-fashioned tools to a sheet of copper and then rigged a water pump and pipes behind it. While his wife was just happy to see the rusted stockpile out of her kitchen, Pennock said his friends describe the work of art as "very Rube Goldberg."
Goldberg was a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist, author and sculptor whose signature art and inventions involved making elaborate, absurdly connected devices to achieve simple tasks.
Goldberg's name is listed in Webster's New World Dictionary as a noun associated with any comically complex
innovation.
"I see myself as a folk artist," Pennock said. "Most of what I do is with things that other people would throw out."
Inside his home -- on lampshades, along walls and attached to windows -- guests can see numerous examples of the former scientist's artistic experiments. His most recent obsession, apart from the fountain, has been working with stained glass.
"It all started with this window that looks out on the pool," Pennock said. "I wanted something that let in light, but wouldn't allow you to see into the bathroom. When I got an estimate to find out how much it would cost to have someone do a stained glass window, I decided to make my own."
The multi colored scene is based on a photograph Pennock took of two people walking on the beach. Since then, he has made at least a dozen more windows that include a copy of a Monet painting, the Talmadge Bridge in Savannah and his interpretation of
12 stained glass windows designed by Marc Chagall at the synagogue of the Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Center in Jerusalem, Israel.
Pennock said he usually buys the windows from a Habitat for Humanity store and gets his stained glass from a supplier in Charleston. The next project he plans to take on is a bamboo sculpture, because he's running out of windows.
"I dabble in a lot of things," Pennock said. "I like to invent. I just start from scratch, get ideas and see what happens."
Among his rules for living, which Pennock painted on leftover floor tiles that hang next to the blowtorch fountain, is fittingly: "Pay attention."