The lead knife is vibrating against my palm because I’m holding it too tight, a direct result of the adrenaline from waving back at a man who was actually waving at a golden retriever behind me. I can still feel the heat in my neck. It is the kind of social catastrophe that makes you want to crawl into the glass kiln and set it to 1006 degrees. Instead, I focus on the patina of a piece of cobalt glass that has seen 86 years of Chicago winters. My hands are stained with the grey dust of oxidized lead, a substance that is both my medium and my slow-motion poison. People think stained glass is about the light, but they are wrong. It is about the shadow. It is about the refusal of certain things to be transparent. In a world that is increasingly obsessed with the frictionless-the digital, the cloud, the intangible-my life is lived in the friction of 46-pound sheets of mouth-blown glass. We are losing our grip on the physical, and I suspect that is why everything feels so hollow lately.
The light doesn’t ask for permission; it just arrives heavy.
This brings me to the core frustration of my trade, which I’ve started calling Idea 46. Most people who walk into my studio want the windows to look ‘new.’ They want the grime of 116 years scrubbed away until the glass looks like a television screen. They want the colors to be uniform, the lead lines to be perfectly straight, and the surface to be as flat as a smartphone. They are asking for the death of the object. When you remove the struggle from the material, you remove the soul. I spent 36 minutes this morning trying to explain to a client why the tiny bubbles in her transom window-what we call seeds-are more important than the clarity of the glass itself. She wanted them gone. She wanted perfection. But perfection is a vacuum. It is a state where nothing can happen. I told her that if she wanted perfect clarity, she should just buy a sheet of plexiglass from a big-box store for $16 and leave me to my dust.
The Honest Scars of Time
I probably shouldn’t have said that. It’s a bad habit, this tendency to defend the flaws of the past as if they were my own relatives. But I’ve lived with these windows for 26 years, and I’ve learned that the ‘damage’ is often the most honest part of the story. There is a specific kind of crack, a ‘star fracture,’ that happens when a stone hits a window. It doesn’t just break the glass; it maps the impact. It creates a history of a specific moment in 1956 or 1976 when a bored kid threw a rock. To erase that is to erase the kid, the boredom, and the rock. Why are we so eager to delete the evidence of our existence? We treat our digital lives the same way, constantly curate-deleting the ‘bad’ photos, the ‘messy’ status updates, the ‘unproductive’ hours. We are becoming transparent, and it is making us ghosts.
Archive
236 crates of history.
Weight
Gravity’s stubborn form.
Sanctuary
Steel for 19th-century glass.
My studio is a chaotic archive of what remains. There are 236 wooden crates stacked against the north wall, each containing fragments of cathedrals and dive bars. The weight is literal. When you deal with glass and lead, you deal with gravity in its most stubborn form. I’ve had to rethink my entire storage strategy lately because the floor joists were beginning to groan under the pressure of 666 individual panels. I ended up sourcing a reinforced unit from AM Shipping Containers just to handle the overflow of salvaged materials. There is something profoundly satisfying about putting 19th-century glass into a 21st-century steel box. It creates a sanctuary for weight. You cannot upload a stained-glass window to the cloud. You cannot compress its data. It demands space, and it demands that you feel its 56 kilograms when you try to lift it onto the light table.
The Metallurgy of Memory
There is a technical precision to this work that people often miss because they are blinded by the colors. To restore a single panel, I have to navigate 156 distinct steps, from the initial charcoal rubbing to the final cementing. The solder must be exactly the right temperature-if the iron is at 776 degrees, you’ll melt the lead cames; if it’s at 696, you’ll get a ‘cold’ joint that will fail during the first freeze of the year. I once spent 46 hours re-leading a rose window only to realize I had used a slightly harder lead alloy than the original. The expansion rates didn’t match. It buckled. I had to tear the whole thing apart and start over. It was a mistake that cost me $976 in materials and a week of my life, but it taught me more about the metallurgy of memory than any textbook ever could. We try to force the present onto the past, but the past has its own physics.
Material Cost
Time Invested
I’ve been thinking about the man I waved at earlier. The embarrassment of it still stings, but there’s a lesson there too. I was trying to connect with something that wasn’t for me. I was inserting myself into a narrative where I didn’t belong. We do this with history all the time. We look at a window from 1886 and we try to make it speak our language. We try to make it ‘relevant’ or ‘modern.’ But the most revolutionary thing a piece of art can do is remain stubbornly itself. It doesn’t need to be interactive. It doesn’t need a QR code. It just needs to sit there and let the light move through it. The glass doesn’t care if you understand it. It has been there for 106 years, and if I do my job right, it will be there for another 206.
Entropy and the Actual World
Sometimes, late in the afternoon, the sun hits the ‘muff’ glass-a type of glass blown into a cylinder, then cut and flattened-and you can see the striae, the tiny lines where the glassmaker’s breath actually touched the molten silica. It is a physical record of a human lung from 126 years ago. When I see that, the digital world feels like a fever dream. We are so busy building ‘virtual’ realities that we have forgotten how to reside in the actual one. We want everything to be fast, but glass is slow. It is technically a solid, but it behaves like a liquid over centuries. It sags. It settles. It remembers the heat of the furnace. I have 36 different types of ruby glass in my rack, and each one reacts differently to the light. One might look like a sunset at 4:16 PM, but by 5:26 PM, it has turned the color of dried blood. You can’t simulate that kind of complexity with pixels. Pixels don’t have chemistry. They don’t have 16 layers of metallic oxides baked into their bones.
Entropy is the signature of a life actually lived.
I often think about a conservator I knew in France who refused to use modern glues. He insisted on using a recipe from 1666 involving animal hides and crushed garlic. Everyone thought he was a lunatic. They told him it was ‘inefficient.’ But his repairs are still holding 56 years later, while the ‘high-tech’ epoxy repairs from the 1980s are yellowing and peeling off like sunburnt skin. Efficiency is the enemy of longevity. If you want something to last, you have to build it with the understanding that it will be neglected. You have to build in the ‘slack’ for the world to be cruel to it. We don’t do that anymore. We build for the next 6 months, the next fiscal quarter, the next software update. We are creating a world with no ruins. Without ruins, we have no way to measure our progress or our failures. We just have a continuous, flickering present.
The Point of Anger
There is a specific window in a church on the South Side that I’ve been working on for 26 days. It was designed by a man who lost his eyesight shortly after finishing it. You can feel the desperation in the way the glass is cut. The pieces are jagged, almost violent. It is not a ‘pretty’ window. It is an angry one. The congregation wanted me to ‘soften’ it, to replace the dark purples with something more ‘welcoming.’ I refused. I told them that the anger was the point. If we make everything comfortable, we stop feeling anything at all. I’d rather have a window that makes people uncomfortable than one that they don’t notice at all. We have enough things that are easy to look at. We need more things that require us to adjust our eyes.
Jagged, Violent, Angry.