I Hate Stained Glass
When I started in the stained glass industry, I was fresh out of college and was giving stained glass a second look. All that I could think about when I saw stained glass up to that point was about how stuffy and old fashioned it looked. The imagery was sleepy. Up until that point, all I could think about was being this kid sitting in a church board and not able to stay as still as I was supposed to be. Did I really notice the stained glass as it's own separate thing as kid? It's really hard to say. There are no memories of windows that impressed me or played an important role, really. It wasn't until after getting my BFA in drawing and painting that I noticed the windows that much. For me, they were like some girl that I knew was there as a kid and was kind of annoyed with enough to not really talk to or care that much about. But then one day after she was grown up (and I was grown up), looking up at her and thinking, wait a minute.
Old windows are insight into how people thought and how they live. Years go by. Generations of people are born and die in front of these things. Their stylized imagery which seems so quirky tells something about how people used to think about their bodies, environments, and soul. I imagine these long Gothic bodies as depicting the moment when the soul is pushing it's way out of the body skyward. I imagine forests that were cut down and buildings that are no longer there.
We live in a time when so much importance is given to the written word of scripture. Locked away in all these old fashioned windows though is something else. It is something that doesn't go noticed so directly. It is something that becomes the space in which the text is read. Just like a Biblical scholar, we can ask is this window true? Was it handed down directly from God? If we answer that it they are true, then heaven has been created on earth, right? If we say no, then it is all a look into something else.
As a restless kid, the space of churches were unlike any environment in my life and somehow I tried to make myself comfortable. Now, I realize how important it was and is for me to hate stained glass. It pushes me into a career of making churches comfortable. As a stained glass artist, I create the windows so they are true and real to me. I don't have to worry about if it is from God or true for everyone. Instead I focus on, do they work for these people? If the truth be told, stained glass windows still drive me crazy, but I figure them out and make them work.
1 Comments:-
At 11:38 AM,
Anonymous said...
-
Funny, I loved stained glass as a child -- I remember watching the colors slowly move across the pews throughout church service, being mesmerized by the figrues in the windows-like a giant illuminated comic book of the bible. My early fascination with stained glass, more than anything, has pushed my drive to eventually work with it. I didn't necessarily always like the style of the glass and paintings when I was a child, but the idea of it always seemed comforting. Now that I can actually create stained glass the way I think it should look, I have less tolerance for the glass that doesn't quite look right to me, though I also have a better appreciation for the stuff that been done really well.
Post a Comment
<< Return to Current Journal