Marvels of Stained Glass Making | Let There Be Light |Parable

in the time before there were churches and before there was electricity when things got dark at night it was a pretty tough environment to live in bad things happened to people at night there are a lot of wild animals there were a lot of predators people would be predators on other people so darkness was always equated with evil [Music] sitting atop the highest hill in the nation's capital washington national cathedral is the sixth largest cathedral in the world with over 200 stained glass windows the cathedral has a reputation for a magnificent light light that creates a bridge between the world of the physical and the world of the spiritual more often than not i'm intrigued by the effect it has on that space and that to me is also some of the greatest spirituality of these windows the light and this enchanting patterns it creates and these patterns if you are patient enough and stay with the patterns they move by us rotating around the sun and that to me is awesome to be aware that we are part of a big universe for dieter gold goldkula and artist rowan lecompte the cathedral's west rose window is the crowning achievement of their careers it is the cathedral's most celebrated window and was once called the most beautiful window in all of christendom [Music] the essential experience that launched the window was in september october peggy and i went out to look at leaves and we had we were living in reston and the leaves were so beautiful some in shadow and some in full sunshine and some mysterious and dim and others just like trumpets and trying to make a design that said that and i worked and worked and worked and worked and worked with work this is it [Music] the rose window is certainly special in my career and it only happens once in a thousand lifetimes to have a chance to be working on a host window of that dimension it's presumptuous to try to say this shows oh no it doesn't this is a a meditation you might say just one person's meditation on the complexity of the universe i can't i can't i dare not say more than just it's a [Music] it's an unknowing whisper in the dark [Music] but it's happy [Music] after finishing the west rose in 1980 rowan was commissioned to begin work on a series of large windows at the clear story level of the cathedral the first of these was the isaiah window the windows location within the cathedral led to an experiment in the transparency of the glass consulted with the building committee and they all agreed that with this blazing nave the choir looked like a dungeon very very dark so we decided that if we could make the nave dark at its end near the choir you wouldn't be feeling that you're sitting in a place bathed with light looking into a pit make it dark at that end so that the choir doesn't look so terribly dark like by contrast so it was dark deliberately very dark in 2005 cathedral friend and patron hugh trumbull adams made a gift to the cathedral so that this dark window could be replaced with a new window of similar design but with lighter glass in fact rowan was given a commission to replace one of his own windows [Music] the glass will have much more variation i'm using one green for instance and whereas in the glass there will be at least three the idea being there will be a kind of richness of color just as in the impressionists in van gogh it's a marvelous this combination of tones and tints and shades are so wonderful it's isaiah who was in the temple one day and [Music] was told that there would be an angel who would come and put a hot coal on his lips and that would purify him and uh yes he would be able to eat the next day but this would purify him and and prepare him for his ministry so here came the angel [Music] i loved architecture and therefore when i was 14 and an aunt visiting from canada proposed taking me to washington for one day we were met at union station and uh were startled by a very nice dusky gentleman who said that he would be delighted to show us the wonders and sights of washington and it was then just a little before 9 00 am and he would drive us all around anywhere we wanted until 12 a.m and how much would the would that be said my aunt and he said ma'am that would be five dollars oh that sounded pretty good to her so away we went in his cab and late in the morning when we were up on embassy row a chance that we went past an opening in some trees and i saw an astonishing sight which i reasoned must be this gothic cathedral that i had heard of and and said why dear dear would you like to go see it and i said oh yes and please we reached the door we pulled it open and there was absolute darkness beyond that was in our eyes because when we stepped through the door and it closed behind us we were really in an enchanted place there was only a perfectly charming blue rose window opposite hanging in the air up there with other windows nearby and they were all in lovely color and i'd never seen color in architecture like this i had never seen architecture like this it was so huge and so beautiful that i was simply thunderstruck [Music] it was like a meeting with god well it was it was i was overwhelmed by the beauty by the mysteriousness i was just enthralled i was petrified with joy [Music] these full-size drawings are called cartoons and they were called cartoons before anybody drew a picture in the funny paper [Music] and i just slug along and try to do everything i'm doing as well as i can but generally finding that it doesn't please me and i go over and over and over and hope that somehow during all this i'll think well i can't do any better than that and it may not be right but to help with it no you don't say the hell with it you say i give up temporarily [Music] drawing on something on one of the hardest things here to get the angles of the hand right [Music] and this is an area of much change and uncertainty [Music] [Music] and it's too small for figure and has to be bigger [Music] when i was 16 i was by glorious chance introduced to the architect of the cathedral by a mutual friend and i went and heard him on the subject of stained glass and that was an education he said he wanted stained glass windows in his buildings to have richness and sparkle he emphasized richness and sparkle and those sounded like wonderful ideals to me i mean there was nothing in me that shrank back and i think there are people that would be offended by that by those demands because they'd say oh no it should be it should be mute it should be quiet it should be restful which is why people fall asleep injured but in short it should be soothing and not arousing and mr frohman very definitely wanted it to be something that inspired and at that time too i had a small commission from goucher college in baltimore they wanted a panel of stained glass about seven inches wide and 20 inches tall he took the panel and put it up and i must say the angels were with me because it looked absolutely splendid and there was a huge rainbow projected through it his compliments were so obviously sincere and so pungent that my head spun [Music] and he said there's a there's a place i'd like you to see and we went into a strange room the like of which i'd never seen we were in the unfinished chapel dedicated to saint dunstan and in its far wall was a single window and it was completely open he said that the window that you showed me just now is the kind of window that i've always dreamed of having in that chapel well i was more than intoxicated because but the idea of being able to do something for the cathedral was for me just totally overwhelming and i couldn't help starting little sketches [Music] he was delighted when i put before him the full-size pen and ink drawing and he said well i i like these very much but we'll see what the building committee says he said the building committee doesn't have much on and i will be back in hardly more than an hour oh just before he left he said and he was very formal always by the way with mr collins uh how old are you and i said i'm 16 mr froman good god he said i said i thought you were older and then he took the drawings and disappeared when he came back he said i'm delighted to be able to tell you that the building committee has unanimously approved your two drawings for the same window in saint dunstan's chapel and of course again everything went blurry before me and really i had never experienced such extremes of joy as i did then never [Music] when rowan finishes a cartoon he sends it off to master craftsman dieter goldkula who must translate this drawing into glass and lead for nearly 40 years this collaboration has produced some magnificent windows the drawing allows you to keep control over all these many pieces because each pattern is going to be coded or numbered so and that tells me where it where it belongs [Applause] [Music] but you see it's taking shape now this is an interesting double knife pattern cutter see it eliminates a little bit more than a 16th of an inch for the core of the lead this is what i eliminate [Applause] and it's being replaced by the core of the lens otherwise it would never fit together multiply that by the number of pieces it just wouldn't go there was a family business my father was in commercial glass storefronts or furniture glass tops that sort of thing and my father was also quite an entrepreneur and he had three sons and he wanted every of his boys in the business so he thought it would be a neat idea to open up a letter glass shop and i was drawn to that the next step was then my father sending me to a technical school where i served an apprentice and there again the faculty was all dislocated people from bohemia which historically is a glass making environment [Music] it was a school which taught them the history of stained glass then making or designing your own panels and making them and it became a love affair and it hasn't left me and it has to do with the magic of glass and the relationship it has with light and that is a lifelong pursuit of mine [Music] what has the greatest influence on me is the medium the glass itself this is the liquidity it is how the glass reflects the light with all its imperfections like air bubbles or ripples it is it scatters the light [Music] well and also i feel often the glass itself the the individual pieces talk to me rather than this in a way dead reflective surface and the glass to me just the feel of it is you know all these for instance this is the edge a fire polished edge you know that to me is just like such a smoothness such a feel to it well this is the sharp edge now and also i i know the process of making glass the effort that goes into this and the physical labor and the in a way dedication of these people to devote their life to it [Music] the more traditional 19th century way of making this glass is it's a factory environment it's a continuous process the kiln is never cooled down they work in shifts they work on teams most likely three or four people and the initial gather on a blow type is done by the lowest person on that team and then he may probably create the initial bubble [Music] [Applause] [Music] the master glass blower will then enlarge that to a balloon or cylindrical shape [Music] when i watch these people work they do not talk it's like a ballet around a furnace [Music] so [Music] so [Music] okay this is it it's a nice medium red ruby red it's quite critical that the size of the glass fits the pattern if the fit is just right not too loose and not too tight that will contribute to the glass or the panel's longevity if there's any slack gravity will eventually cause it to sag in the 16th century they discovered that a diamond can score a glass and along that scoreline the glass breaks but then the actual fitting occurred with a grossing tool that nibbled away along the edges to make it fit and i've seen medieval glass where the cutting or the grossing was exquisite now here i have the biggest piece and i would love to have some shading in that piece now this is a juicy piece now when i see this blue green next to a different shade of and the slight variation from light to dark that to me is when the colors start to sing and also i like to see now this form emerging once i have this piece in so yeah that's where i get my my kicks but then also owners often need to change pieces so if if i get emotionally too involved then i feel i own it and then for me that would be very difficult or it's difficult to accept than changes once dieter finishes selecting and cutting the glass rowan comes in to inspect his choices this often stirs up a bit of creative tension here are the two pieces that you wanted to recut right well i think that no the wrong spatial or may i the wrong space the hole is up there no it's for that good god thank you so much oh yes that's it [Music] peter i think that if this were in some version of dark or dull red dark uh not so perhaps not so that's a dark but if this were reddish and uh maybe in one or two other spots reddish uh i think it'll all it'll tie together that's it there's the choice to be made on this i felt i couldn't make that decision and once i cut it and rowan disagrees with it then i feel sorry for the piece so i'd rather have him make the decision and have the responsibility for facebook most reasonable most recently so uh well ultimately all it's it's your window there's always a second guessing element in that well i i think i make what i think is the right choice and it turns out not to be yeah but ultimately i don't want to waste a glass no that's what it boils down to and that's why i never throw out any yeah that's oh there will be a day all right well theater let's see the possibilities after they settle on the glass rowan takes the panels back to his studio and begins the solitary arduous process of painting on detail and controlling the light everything that i do is an experiment and it gets changed and discarded that seems to be the way i'm working looking at what i have thought of having there before and rejecting or accepting the paint is made of glass ground to the smoothness and softness of talcum powder but it is glass and if you look at it through a microscope you'll see that it's all kinds of little sharp points which we are with our elephant skins unable to feel unless we bite it and then it crunches [Music] there's no book of rules except the best one there's a wonderful book about stained glass called it was written in 1905 by a londoner an englishman named christopher wall w-h-a-l-l it's called stained glass work half the book is how to do it but the other half of the book is called why to do it and his whole insistence this is on on making it a personal cause don't do it for money you'll never have enough money do it only because you're just in love with it would pay to be allowed to do it then and i wish that anybody doing stained glass should do it for that reason because the world is full of awful windows made by people who were anxious to who had no skill except their hunger for money [Music] i think i'm in love with the process because that's what i'm involved with on a daily basis there's also something in me that urge to be working or to be making something and i'm not spending much time to contemplating the finished product there are fleeting moments when i i'm conscious of hey that looks pretty good and i'm proud of being involved in a row of windows the glass has to fire at a temperature of about 1250 degrees but it's important that the temperature of the paint fires at a lower temperature than the melting point of the glass and 1250 degrees for this type of paint is just about the right temperature if you fire way beyond 1250 the glass itself will deform probably at 1400 1500 it will already be to a point where it loses its shape and at 1700 certainly it will have lost its shape and it will continue to deform completely and becomes a puddle and the temperature controls on the kilns are set to reach that temperature within 25 minutes and we are already in the process have reached 920 degrees and we have let me see six minutes left and i hope it knows what it's doing back in his studio rowan is constantly tweaking the window changing out pieces of glass to get just the right effect well i want to change the the light piece in that foot because his skin as seen in his hands and face is a fine deep tan and these feet i'd like to have at least match those hands and developed a strong ball of tremor in my right hand about a year ago it happens that i'm right-handed in writing and in drawing and in glass cutting now here comes the excitement not bad not perfect not bad this is a comedy of errors a nightmare it's fine i'm gonna need to do this too in the assembly i use lead strips that i produce myself i also cast lead into ingots and then the ingots get milled in a lead mill that produces this i-beam channel the tighter the the pieces fit the longer the panel will stay upright if there's any slag it would cause the panel to to shift so therefore my cutting fitting testing [Music] now it becomes interesting because this is going to be a deviation from the plan see by a piece being having been re-cut [Music] this fiddling now shouldn't be now i have to make it fit which i just am not very fond of [Music] yeah slight adjustments much better sometimes it's just a fraction [Music] voila see once i get the panel back from going then it's totally in my control again and i can set the pace yeah and then it becomes an away mind until it is in place it's like well no it's not like doing the head of the statue of liberty but myself it has to be very coarse or big and bold or it's not going to show up at all from the distance i go way off and look at it and i kind of closer look at it and the point is to get something that would not disgust anybody seeing it close up and that will be reasonably effective seen at a distance the complexities of line color glass and even technical structure that rowan must keep track of is really quite astounding especially when you consider that at any given time he is only working on a small fraction of an enormous window the window is now more than three years behind schedule this delay has forced dieter to resign from the project as the work is bumping into his other commitments commitments like restoring the windows in mercersburg pennsylvania that actually inspired young rowan i had already planned for this particular commission a year ago or so and i couldn't back out of that commitment i felt and i also enjoy this particular artist and the craftsmanship in these windows and the coloration of these windows it's quite extraordinary rowan has asked mary clerkin higgins who is a former president of the american glass guild to take over for dieser and help finish the window mary's very very good and i would put her only second to dieter and she's very fine [Music] i'm really thrilled that rowan asked it's so much fun to work on a project like this and i i love working with rowan i just love working in stained glass and it's a beautiful project to work on it is interesting because dieter has done the the color selection for all of the lancets i am doing it for the rose and so i need it to fit in with what he's done and still be true to what i can bring to it and still make rowan happy rowan is the ultimate judge of everything it's his window he is the one who needs to be happy with it not only is mary cutting the glass for this portion of the window she is also painting it for this i really have to imitate rowan's style because as i understand it because most of the window has been painted by rowan rowan's style is to pretty much use straight dark black lines almost like a wood cut in any stained glass work it's the line is very important it has a certain energy to it and so you try to draw the lines with energy so that the energy actually becomes part of the piece you can feel the artist's hand in just the stroke and that actually does impart energy all lines have a certain power to them so that's what i'm trying to do is to find the power [Music] wow wow [Music] oh mary you've had such a good time i have [Music] i am very very very very pleased i will make the light a little bit uh a little bit savager okay i hope you won't mind oh i do i want you to be happy i want you to be happy both be happy i want to make the features such as will be seen from the floor i don't think there'd be any way that i could have painted it and then he would have just loved it as it was because i painted as best i can understand it according to what rowan wants but only rowan knows what rowan actually wants and so here he is finding it he can add and subtract as he wishes to so i'm really happy with how he's bringing it to life i'm just glad he didn't take all the paint off looks jolly to me oh yes i declare us done well congratulations rowan mary to you the praise [Music] ruins stained glass was subject to review just like any piece of art in the cathedral a small group looked at a composite photograph of the windows panel and they determined that there were enough inconsistencies between the approved cartoon and the completed panel so the window could not be brought forward to the full fabric and fine arts committee the message i got was that the committee that looked and peered at not the glass but photographs that had been taken with electric lights and that's what their complaints and doubts were based on and indeed the original contract for this window says that there shall be no opinions about it until the committee can see it in place in the church in september of 2010 rowan and his wife peggy traveled to washington to discuss the window with the reverend timothy boggs who at the time was the provost of the cathedral [Music] reverend boggs had a list that he and the dean and this committee and other people had prepared of things they did not like about this window and his statement which was very strong and emphatic emphatic said there is no further decision or discussion about this the window will not be installed in the cathedral which was a blow and also a startling way to put it that there is no further this was [Music] when that's said by a politician one smile i was really stunned because i had seen the window in my studio of course and it's an incredibly beautiful window and now i had only seen the lancet that i did so my first reaction was okay maybe there are issues with the other lancets and i haven't seen them but then when i saw the documentation that the committee was basing its decision on i thought well they haven't seen the window either because this has got nothing to do with the window and that's when i put together the photographs i had and the information i had the knowledge i have of stained glass into a report to try to make it more understandable one issue was that the angel was holding a coal up to isaiah and the coal should be a glowing ember and that was the lancet that we had actually put together here at the studio and the ember is a beautiful yellow with surrounded by orange reds it really is a gorgeous gorgeous glowing ember and it really works well but again in the committee's photographs it's pink somehow and it's pink it's dull and it blends in completely with the glass around it it's all the same color and i cannot understand how that could have happened there's also light bouncing off of the front of it which is not something that you will get when the window is in place it will be surrounded by blackness the presentation to the committee had a stark white background which actually even on a piece of paper it just flares around the window and you can't really appreciate the the colors and it makes any dark-ish colors look really dark [Music] we gave a copy of that to the canon and requested that he look at it and he said i'll look at that sometime but the decision is the window will not there is no further discussion there often is a tension between committees and artists what i would have to say about rowan's work on this window is that it is the culmination of a lifetime spent contemplating stained glass and its issues and how to make a how to make windows that really have life energy and substance to them and he has made many masterpieces he is not someone who takes stained glass lightly he thinks about all of the elements in a window and how he can put them all together to make a window that's alive it's not an easy thing to do and we see many windows around us that really have no life to them whatsoever but rowan's have life they have energy and all of his decisions are related to trying to get to that in a window so i don't know what the outcome was going to dictator i mean we just this is just a couple hours ago i say that it will be for the good [Music] there's always this underlying goal of perfection and that is elusive i will never be absolutely perfect but that's what is behind it now and to do something as well as i can is still my pursuit and then i can only think of how lucky i am that i have a chance to work on projects that will that will last and will maybe have impact on further future generations [Music] mary's report actually did have an effect in a subsequent meeting with rowan and peggy the dean and andrew hollinger said the cathedral will look at the window again with fresh eyes a team was assembled to review the window and to look at some of the panels through natural light they determined that the next step would be to install the two side panels replacing the existing dark panels it is possible that the once the two new lancets are installed they may have a better understanding of how the window works and they may decide to install the other two lancets i would like that and i'd like to live long enough to see it but who can tell we all of us can vanish away before we know it but i would like very much to see that in place in the hope that i would say oh it's better than it was before if i say oh it's worse than it was before that is disappointing so at this point i am i will be installing two lancets of the s8 window in october in august of 2011 a major earthquake rattled the washington dc area one of the hardest hit buildings was washington cathedral with over 17 million dollars in damage the cathedral's focus had to shift and the installation of the window was put on hold [Music] [Music] on february 11 2014 at the age of 88 rowan lecompte passed away unable to withstand a bout of pneumonia the cathedral celebrated his life and legacy in a memorial service that july so two months later in early october 2014 the cathedral's new administration was finally able to use the scaffolding installed for repairing earthquake damage and revisit the issues surrounding this window [Music] after three years of darkness in the cathedral attic portions of the new window once again saw daylight [Music] mary higgins assembled a crew to begin the delicate difficult task of removing the old panels and installing the two side lancets of rowan's creation [Music] [Music] the new windows are much lighter than the ones we're taking out we have one of the original windows sitting in between two of the new windows and it looks completely black compared to these other windows which have rich color in them and which are really sparkling so you can see why rowan wanted to redo the window because the other window is so black and it fits in better with all of the other windows in the nave clear story i think the committee can't help but notice how much lighter they are and how they fit in with the other windows in the nave but i have no idea what decisions they will make there's just no way to tell when they actually got a chance to look at the the whole window in place the decision was that they really felt that for a lot of reasons the the newer window the window that mr compton made was really better for that space than the then a kind of mixture of old and new i mean uh and i felt when i looked at it that it would be better to have one aesthetic vision uh rather than a mixture of two aesthetic visions his earlier window in his later window and uh and i agreed with him and i thought that the the later window was a better choice so um they they reversed that original decision and actually went with um went with the uh the newer window the later window art in the church is always a dance between the individual artists and and the needs of the community and i'm just grateful that we're at a place now where we are able to get closer to uh a mutual understanding of mr lecomp's vision for that window and our vision for that window and that they are they're now in the same place [Music] so we just put the last panel in of rowan's isaiah window and it looks amazing and it well it feels really good to be at this point to be to have accomplished this [Music] i think the window looks fantastic it fits in very much better with the windows surrounding it than the original did i think duder would love it and he's done an incredible job of having movement in the red i mean red is a rich color to start with but then he's made it exciting and interesting by the way that he's done the color selection i think rowan would be extremely pleased with this and i know i think it's i'm very pleased i think he did he made a beautiful window [Music] when the angel arrives there will be terror but say yes [Music] the sound of wings like the breaking of a mirror but say yes it will arrive where you're little and you're scared it will lay claim to the things you've never shared and though your heart and your soul are unprepared say yes and it may tear you from home and family but say yes [Music] it may demand you become a refugee but say yes and when you're cold and you're homeless and you're poor when you're in pain in a room without a door and when the angel returns and asks for more say yes rowan and dieter's legacy at the cathedral will be everlasting rowan is clearly one of the finest stained glass artists in the world and we're just so pleased to be the showcase for so much of his beautiful beautiful work dieter was a craftsman unparalleled his attention to detail shows through him their names will be cherished here and remembered forever when the legions of angels call you blessed say yes and were you faithful in each and every test say yes and when they ask you with story and in song were you upheld and protected all along and did the power of the spirit make you strong say yes i want you know gaiety song and dance let there be music let there be color let there be light [Music]

Channel: Parable - Religious History Documentaries

Views: 18,547

Keywords: parable, parable channel, parable documentary, religious history, religious history documentary, bible documentary, bible documentary bbc, jesus documentary, christian artists, christian artists female, christian art, early christian art documentary, christian art documentary, art documentary, art history documentary, let there be light, stained glass art, stain glass, inside cathedral, inside cathedral art, cathedral art, washington cathedral, religious iconography

Id: sTfj8EoRPQQ

Length: 55min 28sec (3328 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 03 2022