Creativity is the soul of U.S.1’s annual Fiction Issue. And while this issue focuses on writers working on stories and poems, another form of writing has arrived that touches another form of creativity: stained glass. Sparta, New Jersey, stained glass artist Neile Cooper has written “a creative guide” of a visual art expression that has enchanted practitioners and viewers for hundreds of years. In the following excerpt, she talks about how glass became a part of her life and the creation of a stained glass building in her New Jersey backyard:
During a particularly challenging time of life, I built myself a sanctuary. I gathered what was in my world — from scraps of glass, discarded lumber, old window frames, and a neglected corner of my backyard, to my unique set of crafting skills, experiences, fantasies, and fears — and followed my folly.
I built a cabin that I would cover entirely with my stained glass visions. I didn’t exactly know how to build a cabin, nor how to procure the supplies, nor how I’d find the time, motivation, and cash to complete this project, but I grabbed a few concrete blocks and a shovel, and began to lay the foundation in a spot that felt right
Now, six years later, I can walk the short path to my stained glass cabin and feel absolute satisfaction. There’s no electricity, no heat, no water. But my cabin surrounds me with the creatures of my own making: oversized snails and mushrooms, gigantic dandelions and ferns, feathers and butterflies, crystals, and webs, dogwood petals, and deer antlers, the enormous wingspans of a hawk, and the comforting gaze of a fantastic purple barn owl. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the spot where I chose to lay the foundation seems to be a focal point for the sun as it follows its daily and seasonal path across the sky. Somehow, light always imbues the cabin with life that shifts and changes constantly, adding more to this sacred space than I ever could have planned.
Stained glass is a medium that transforms simple materials into something absolutely magnificent. It is elemental and alchemical. Sand, limestone, and soda ash, Iron, manganese, chromium, tin. These are the materials that make up glass and the metals that suffuse it with that beautiful spectrum of reds, blues, yellows, and greens. It’s simple science, and it’s ancient — human since the early Egyptians have been making glass. But, there’s one final ingredient that invokes the magic — light. It’s the light shining through a stained glass window that brings it alive and makes the medium truly unique. The closet parallel I can think of in art is Alexander Calder’s mobile sculpture with the added element of motion. When his newly invented mobiles first began dancing around in the air, Calmer must have been thrilled. That how I feel when I see the sunlight illuminating stained glass.
I fell in love with stained glass the very first time I picked up a glass cutter. I was in college studying graphic design, and I was not thrilled about spending all of my days on a computer. I yearned to work with my hands, so I took a stained glass workshop at a local studio. I knew nothing about the process, and every step seemed like magic to me. To be able to manipulate these beautiful raw materials into my imagined compositions was thrilling. I never did end up getting a graphic design job — it immediately became all stained glass, all the time, for me.
If you are new to stained glass as a craft, then I want to assure you that there’s a relatively low-cost entry. A simple stained glass studio can be set up at home, even in a small apartment or tiny house, with a minor investment. It is a craft that is easy to learn, and the necessary supplies are readily available online, if not locally.
Making art is journey, and this book is a companion, for the long term. It doesn’t necessarily matter what section of the trail you’re on, if you’re just starting out, we’ll go over the basics.
Further on down the path, we’ll explore incorporating found and foraged materials into your work, and we’ll consider strategies that will allow your designs to move into the third dimension, step by step, if you’ve got great ideas, we’ll figure out how to achieve them in glass; conversely, if you love the craft but are in need of inspiration, I’ve got you covered too… this book includes a bunch of patterns that you can use as a foundation to grace with your personal style.
This book will not cover lead came construction and glass painting, though these technique are obviously worthy of your exploration.
Similarly, this book will not cover every possible variation of the copper foil technique. It can be human nature to want a black-and-white, right-and-wrong approach to a task, but in this craft there are so many ways to get to the same end point.
I hope that this book will inspire you to take the next step on your own journey.
Every technique I’ve used to adorn my own stained glass cabin in the woods is covered in this manual, and I hope you’ll be inspired to dram big and create your epic masterpiece too.
Kicking Glass: A Creative Guide to Stained Glass Craft by Neile Cooper, $20, 168 pages, Herbert Press.
