Stained Glass
There is nothing quite like it for beauty. Light streams through stained glass illuminating colours, textures, bringing the landscape within the glass combination to full throbbing life. Coloured glass transmits light and throws wonderful prisms of colour onto the surface of nearby objects, floors, anything at all. We've also found that coloured glass transmits heat. The heat-transference properties of coloured glass are colour coded in the sense that the darker the colour the more heat is transferred, with white of course, transferring little-to-no heat. As we've got full-size stained glass windows, those sites which are in full afternoon sun require sheer draperies to be pulled across them in the summer months, effectively deflecting heat transference. On the other hand, in winter, the sheers are pulled sharply to the sides and we welcome the transfer of heat, assisting in warming up this large airy house with its large expanse of windows.
My husband has the soul of an artist. He does original oil paintings, he builds furniture; he has built us a refectory table for our library (25 years ago) an armoire for my 40th birthday (28 years ago), as well as many other items of furniture (as does our youngest son now also). He has laid ceramic, marble, and wood strip floors in our house. He has excavated great swaths of areas back and front of our house to lay down cobbles, build stone retaining walls, and generally beautify the home we share. About thirty years ago he became fascinated with stained glass and began teaching himself (he teaches himself how to proceed with anything he becomes interested in by reading, studying helpful material, and then proceeding to produce items that reflect his current interest) how to make stained glass windows. He never does anything on a small scale. Our previous house which we sold about fourteen years ago, was left with a new front door entirely built by him, with a half-window of stained glass representing a coat of arms. The house foyer had two french doors of stained glass representing floral vines. The french doors he designed and built between the living room and the dining room represented an ambitious forest-and-pond scene.
In our current home he has completely altered the interior to reflect his creatively-ambitious taste. He studies possibilities for his creations, then does a number of sketches until he completes one which reflects his vision. The sketch is then rendered in full size, another replicated, and the second of the sketches has the pieces numbered, cut out and ready for work. He then sets about making a frame for his work, and proceeds to cut the glass appropriate to the work at hand. I tag along happily when he goes shopping for the glass, and he even consults me occasionally.
He has built three stained glass doors; one between the laundry room and the hallway leading to the powder room and kitchen, another set between the upstairs hallway and our bedroom; the third between our bedroom and our en suite bathroom. The first represents a forest scene, the second a large brilliant-coloured, long-legged water bird, the third an underwater scene of tropical fish.
The windows which cover two-thirds of a long wall in our bedroom reflect a scene reminiscent of one of Tom Thomson's paintings of a lake in a storm in Algonquin Park. In our en suite bathroom the window has been transformed to reflect a stone terrace overlooking an exotic garden. The large windows in the library, which side on two walls, are another forest scene with lake. The large windows in the family room are differentiated, and they're represented above. As are the brightly exotic windows housed within the Palladian-style windows over our front door and into the foyer. A long, slender window in our kitchen hosts a gentle, stylized waterfall. Over the kitchen sink there is a large set of windows of a woodland scene. The window in the powder room represents a floral bouquet of irises and lilies. We walk through beauty wherever we happen to be, in our house.
The changing seasons, changes in daylight hours, dusk time, all alter our perception of the views represented by these various windows.
posted by Pieface @ Wednesday, October 05, 2005
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