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FIRST COMMISSIONED PROJECTS
These are among my first commissioned stained glass projects, all of them, perhaps coincidentally, for luxury homes in Beverly Hills. Before embarking on my own autonomous artworks with a liberated vision and zeal for exploring new directions with the ancient medium, I was hired by a studio where I restored antique windows for an auction house. With the fundamentals well-honed, I opened my own studio, where I designed and executed a series of commissioned windows, doors, lampshades and skylights for luxury homes, bars, restaurants and hotels. Most of this early architectural work was designed in traditional styles from Gothic to Art Nouveau and Deco.
My first commission was for a skylight for a Beverly Hills mansion and the client asked for birds and flowers to be incorporated into the design. With virtually no training or experience as a painter, I first created this watercolor:
The best solution I could come up with was to paint the birds and flowers on glass, which had become a lost art. Details of representational stained glass compositions required applying dark pigments onto colored pieces of glass. The pigments were powdered enamels mixed with an oil that would be brushed onto the glass surface and then, with a kiln, fused into the glass at around 1400 °C, the temperature that glass starts to melt.
I knew of nowhere I could go to learn this nearly extinct skill. Upon researching the subject I located a factory in the industrial section of Los Angeles that labeled perfume bottles with ceramic pigments which were permanently fused to the glass. The owner generously gave me various pigments in powdered form and a special oil with a pleasant eucalyptus-like odor, with which to mix them, before brushing them onto a glass surface. I purchased a ceramics kiln and from that point on, I simply experimented until I perfected the point of permanently fusing the pigments into the glass without visibly melting its surface. The first two images below of this skylight and the full-screen background slideshow showcase the very first results of my experiments, among my first commissioned work. The background slideshow also demonstrates what the skylight looked like, seen just once after completion, when positioned vertically before background trees just outside of my studio, thus documenting for this rare moment the beautiful texture of a very light blue glass.
Here it is installed as a skylight on a bright sunny day, along side my other first commissioned projects:
During the 1980s, as my knowledge and vision evolved, I continued to create commissioned projects but with contemporary motifs and experimental concepts (as can be seen by clicking here).
On the other hand, the stained glass projects I made for the exhibition of “The Underground Cathedral” often incorporated found objects, celluloid, photo transparencies and other mixed media into artworks which explored the definition of the original purpose and intent of stained glass for ecclesiastical purposes. These artworks are found in the “Conceptual Stained Glass” section of “The Underground Cathedral” menu.
