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A Stained Glass Window (Personal) Breakthrough

 

Recently I stumbled over images of this stained glass window, one of two that I created for a private home in Jamestown, RI more than 20 years ago. I only had these images on slides, if that tells you anything about when this work was made! I had nearly forgotten about it.

I’m so happy to have found these images, though; it’s amazing to look back on old work and observe how one’s process has been shaped over time. When I created this window, I was living in Providence. A contact in Jamestown had approached me about a project in a house that was designed with inspiration from butterflies. I have to confess, I was a little skeptical at first; even at that early point in my work, most everything I made was abstract. The thought of designing something for a house inspired by butterflies caused me to wonder what kind of imagery might be desired by the owners. I doubted whether I would be a good fit for the work.

However, when I visited the house, I discovered that the butterfly inspiration was very nuanced, largely informing the layout of the space. The house had a kind of butterfly-shaped floor plan, with two “wings” separated by a central living area. On the second floor, two bedrooms had windows that looked internally over this space. My contact wanted me to design these windows so that the bedrooms would have privacy, but also ample light and color passing through. She also wanted them to be butterfly-inspired, although I could see (and she agreed) that literal imagery of butterflies would not be appropriate for the space.

After pushing around a few different ideas, I started thinking about photomicrographs (photographs taken through a microscope to show magnified close-up images of subjects) and became obsessed with photomicrographs of butterfly wings. They look like strange little scales – or pieces of translucent glass. Suddenly I was off to the races.

 

 

I tend to think of artists who work in stained glass falling into one of two design camps: 1) those who keep their colors and shapes neatly bounded by the lead line, and 2) those who allow their colors and shapes to expand beyond the lead lines. As you can see by the images here, I fall into the latter camp. The grid doesn’t really follow the color. To create the windows, I cut stacks of glass rectangles, all the same size, in just a few colors – white, gray, and amber. I brushed the edge of each piece with black and umber vitreous paint and fired it on. I then played with different ways of sampling the pieces, putting them together like mosaic tiles, occasionally adding pops of other color (like the blue below). The black edges obscured the straight edge of the lead lines, giving the whole composition a shifting quality that was exciting and new to my work. I also set the grid at a slight angle which gives the piece a dynamic quality suggestive of flight.

 

 

In many ways, this project was a breakthrough for me; in creating the windows, I discovered a process that very much foreshadowed the work I’m doing today. Decades later, I still intuitively arrange colors and shapes on grids in a similar way; I just do a lot of it in Photoshop now, versus moving the pieces around by hand.