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FIRST COMMISSIONED PROJECTS
These are among my first stained glass projects. Before embarking on my own 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. All 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. The best solution I could come up with was to paint 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 lost skill. Upon researching the subject I located a factory in the industrial section of LA that labeled perfume bottles with ceramic pigments that were permanently fused to the glass. The owner generously gave me various pigments in powdered form and a special oil 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. The first two images of this skylight and the full-screen background slideshow showcase the very first results of my experiments, from my very first commissioned work.
Here are some of my first commissioned projects:
During the 1980s, as my knowledge and vision evolved, I continued to create commissioned projects but now with contemporary motifs and experimental concepts (as can be seen by clicking here). 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 “Artworks” section of The Underground Cathedral menu.
