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Recently I came across a box of
brochures that I had printed back in the days before the internet. The
brochures were a marketing tool before the internet, before I could
simply direct potential clients to my web site. The photos that were
used in this brochure were taken long before digital photography became
commonplace. I thought you might like to see these impressive artworks
that I made a long time ago in a garage far far away...
 This
first artwork is a rendition of Spring, one of the four seasons created
by the artist Alphonse Mucha. I was probably in my late teens when I
made this artwork. That was so long ago that the stained glass grinder
had not yet been invented. That means that all of the intricate pieces
of glass in this artwork were cut by hand and finished with grozzing
pliers, small hand held pliers with a serrations along the inside of
the blades that were used to "grind" away tiny bits of glass. At the
time, I was quite proud of the craftsmanship I was able to achieve,
especially after the glass grinder first came on the market. Although I
resisted buying my first grinder for a while after they were first
available, I eventually did buy one and incorporate it into my way of
making stained glass. Today, I cannot imagine making a stained glass
artwork without a grinder. One of the major advantages of using a
grinder is that the earlier method of "grozzing" the edges left tiny,
even microscopic flaws in the edges of the glass pieces, and these
flaws could cause a piece of glass to crack during construction,
particularly while soldering the artwork. Most often, this happened
when construction was
the copper foil method because this was when the heat of the soldering
iron was most directly transferred into the glass. Grinding the glass
pieces to finish them almost completely eliminated the potential for
these cracks.
 This
second artwork was probably made when I was in my twenties. The logo is
sandblasted black-on-white flash glass; a thin layer of black glass
fused to a thicker layer of white glass, allowing the black layer to be
sandblasted away and revealing the white layer underneath.
 This
third artwork was done by when I was about 50 years old. It is
constructed with lead (rather than copper foil as in the first two
artworks on this page). Years after I made this room divider, the home
was purchased by a couple for whom I done a lot of stained glass in
their former home. They invited me out to their new home to replace a
number of stained glass panels, and that was the only time in my career
when I was asked to replace my OWN stained glass with new stained
glass artworks!
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