Thank you!

11:47 Love you, too. Thank you. Wow. It's always nice to speak after Adam Hamilton. It always makes me feel good. Although I just realized I don't get nervous in front of Kansans. I think, I don't know what it is about you guys, but you guys kind of put me at ease a little bit. So thank you for being here. Thank you, Adam. Thank you, Debbie, DeLise, everybody who's involved. It's a, I was just saying on my way here, I'm, oh, there's my timer. I was just saying on my way here, it's spend a lot of time by myself in my studio these days And I don't get a ton of time around people. So It's been a whirlwind 24 hours and we're just getting started and I have a lot of pictures to show you So I don't want to waste any time Here we go Oh, that's the window, isn't it? This is a beautiful space, I've got to say.

12:43 It's amazing when I see the pictures of the renderings before, and now we're in here, and it's like, yeah, this is it. Okay. What? Where did this come from? This isn't my... You guys want to... No, I'm just kidding. This is Picasso. You guys know Picasso, right? This is a guy named George Brock. These are both cubists, famous painters from the beginning of the 20th century, modern artists. Their whole thing was, what was it, it was kind of getting away from the status quo. They were contrarians, they were unhappy with things the way they were, and they wanted to be different and innovative, and hence their journey into abstraction, and more specifically, this style of cubism. This is also Picasso. That's glass.

13:36 This is also Brock. So two of the most famous and well-known artists at a certain point in their careers wanted something else. So let's go back 400 years. This is Rembrandt and Caravaggio. They also wanted something different. They wanted light, right? Light. Caravaggio is the master of light. Rembrandt, as we know, did some incredible things with light. This is the painter Velasquez, Spanish painter. This is Vermeer and Turner. So Turner was an Impressionist. What did they all have in common? Was their desire to make their paintings glow. So here's, we go back to Picasso and Braque. They decided, well, forget about making our paintings glow. Let's actually make our paintings out of light. And they developed this technique in France that was called gemel, which means enamel gem in French. And people really don't know about this.

14:32 You know, every time I show somebody these pieces, they're like, Picasso did glass? Yeah, he did glass. Not only did he do glass, but he was known to say, his famous quote is, a new art form is born. And then Brock, who's the father of cubism, said in his later years, if I were 30 years old, I would be known as the gemist Brock, meaning I do gemmo. So they made these works out of small pieces of colored glass, like a mosaic, and they used glues and resin to keep them together. They would sometimes heat them in an oven, but as you can probably guess, it didn't really stand up over the test of time. so the techniques died out. But even though the techniques died out, they kind of made a mark, and they sort of set the tone for the idea that we want light. Look at that. There's light right in my face as I'm doing this, and it's actually not bothering me. Don't worry. So light is still the goal, right? We go out to places, and there's usually lights there, whether it's Vegas, whether it's a sunset at the beach or a sunny tree grove or our phones. We look at light. We're drawn to light. These guys had it figured out, right? They knew that light was important. They used light to tell stories in churches a thousand years ago to create transcendent environments and tell stories in the sky. So we got all the puzzle pieces here. So that's kind of setting up a little bit of a premise. So the idea here is you have the colored light of stained glass, you have the skill of a painter with the will to infuse light into their paintings, and the beginnings of a way forward.

16:07 Picasso, glass in the hands of a master. So with all three of these, there were constraints. Stained glass forced you to use heavy black lead lines due to sizes and shapes that glass could be made. Painting, of course, forced the artist into creating the illusion of light using bright white canvases with gesso and translucent glazes. And Jamel, well, it was just ahead of its time. It was a great idea, but it did not have the technology to create long-lasting paintings and glass.

16:38 This is where you guys come in. So we all know there's this book, the resurrection book. I just signed a bunch of them down there. It tells the story of the window. What I don't want to do here is go in and repeat that story because you can read it, and it's been out for a long time. So what I want to do is sort of talk about perspective a little bit. How the project came about is important, and how we made the window is important, but I want to focus on why what we did here matters. Okay, here's the fun part. So we're going back 30 years. That's me in 1996, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, fresh out of college, where I had just gotten a degree in biochemistry. so I had no interest in being a scientist neither did my grades so I call this my art center moment so art center is a really good art school in California and so I ended up going there but winging a prayer I applied and somehow I got in it's that's a long story but I fell in love with being an artist and being in art school even though I knew I liked art I didn't think it was a career. I went there because I had heard they were doing really well getting students hired as animators and character designers in Hollywood and that kind of thing. So I went there to be some type of commercial artist to make money. And then I discovered these guys. I discovered Rembrandt. I discovered Caravaggio. I mean, Cezanne. This is Manet.

18:06 These are in a museum right down the street from my house. This John Singer sergeant, 20th century master. Odd Nerdrum, who's more of a modern guy, but still the same concept of painting. I loved Lucian Freud. I could do this for the rest of the talk, but I'm not going to, I promise. But this was, I was passionate about it. I said, forget about money, forget about career. I want to just paint. I want to do what these guys are doing. And then it was Diebenkorn and Oliveira. These guys are from the Bay Area Figurative School. Amazing painters. And then it was my teachers. I studied with some incredible modern masters. This is Scott Hess, who's my mentor in college. This is Steve Houston, did amazing paintings of boxers. You're starting to see a theme here, right, with the light and the dark and the Baroque sort of look. This is Ray Turner. And then drawing, graphite work by David Limwright, painting by Richard Bunkall. So here I am, I'm set, I'm at Art Center, and my big mission here is must become great painter.

19:13 So that's my goal. So as you can see on this line that goes all the way down the middle on the black line, you can see that these are the things that I loved. I wasn't loving expressing myself or being kind of a wackadoodle artist. I just wanted to obsess over the formal qualities of art. brushstroke, line, value, composition, presentation, texture, depth, struggle, abstraction, form. What else is on there? Marks. I don't have my glasses on. Light, color, edges. These are the things that still drive me to this day. So these are my first paintings, real paintings that I did in art school. Figurative paintings. I would go to the drawing workshops, the painting workshops. I would copy old master paintings. Here's my copy of a Rembrandt. And then I would draw, draw, draw, draw every day in the workshop from 6 to 9 p.m. I remember five days a week. I have books and books of these drawings, learning how to be a figurative artist.

20:09 Some of my senior picture paintings that I did for my final show. And then it was on to my big career, being a gallery painter. So I was going to be the next Rembrandt or the next Nerd Drum or something like that. And I made a lot of paintings and I sold a lot of paintings. I was down in Orange County in Newport Beach, and I had a gallery. And I was, I mean, all the paintings I showed you here, these were the first paintings I did. And they all were, they were successful and they sold. But no matter what I did as a painter, no matter how many paintings I sold, it wasn't enough to make enough money to survive. It just didn't, you know, I loved it. It was enjoyable. But I didn't make enough money to be a full-time artist. So I always had a side job. Side jobs like framer or working in a gift shop or lots of little things that I did just to kind of foot the bill of my life. Here's my light phase.

21:01 I started doing lighter paintings, still lives. Then I got a little crazy with some more contemporary stuff. I was searching. I'm kind of a searching kind of a guy still to this day, moving through phases, but learning a lot. And so one of my side jobs ended up being this mural. So this is a big 50-foot by 12-foot mural that is the story of the Transcontinental Railroad. It's in somebody's home. And it took me about two years to make. So during those two years, I had a lot of time to think about what I was going to do with the rest of my life. And I wasn't sure if I could do it as a painter or only as a painter. As luck would have it, here's the finished mural. It kind of wraps around an atrium there. As luck would have it, my next moment was about to happen.

21:50 The Judson moment. So I had to have a side job. I was doing my paintings. I had the mural. And some guy walks into my mural at the grand opening and says, oh, have you heard of the Judson Studios? You know, we have a gallery there. Maybe we can show your work. Maybe you can be part of our artist stable. And I'm like, great. I was looking for a new gallery. And so I agreed to go visit. And it was about a three to four minute drive from my house. and the place is kind of this, like Adam was saying, it's almost like an old house. You kind of feel like you're stepping into history. And so I walked in and I said, well, enough about the gallery. What else do you guys do here? What's going on in this weird house? So I wandered through and the drawing studio, the glass cutting studio with all these beautiful colors on the wall. I'm like, that's glass, like stained glass, like for churches? I remember that first feeling that I had because, you know, we all have a connotation.

22:45 We all have somewhat of a connection to stained glass from being in a church somewhere at some point in our lives. So the upstairs studio, which just feels like it's out of another time. This is the dungeon, which has got cobblestone everywhere. And it sort of smells and feels like you're just somewhere else in a different world. Then I walked into the painting room and I said, now that is cool. That I could do. I could paint on glass. Are you hiring? I said at the end of my tour. And it was David who gave me the tour. And he said, yes, as a matter of fact, we are. and everybody who was working there was was kind of been there a long time they were sort of stuck in a rut and so I think David was kind of excited oh this young guy wants to come and work here this is great is that I just part-time just to be like a just to learn how to paint on glass so here I am a youngster I keep looking up at him he's Jesus I'm doing my best here just trying not to look at you so uh I start I just jumped in I dove in two days a week went to three went to four, went to five. This is some of the earlier stuff I did where I was just learning about glass, learning about how to incorporate paint on glass, firing paint onto glass, using transparent material. It was a little awkward and new for me. And so I went through all these different styles, Egyptian Coptic church. This is kind of a traditionally painted front door window.

24:05 This window has no paint on it at all. It's just light and lead. But I kind of got to know a lot of the different glass styles. And although I really liked it, I still felt like, okay, this is cool, but I'm not in love here. It's great, but I'm not in love. But it was cool. It was cool. And it still is. This is this sort of craftsman, copper foil type windows that are done all over where I live in Pasadena.

24:33 More craftsman work. I'm on slide 66, Debbie. I'm going to prove you wrong. She didn't think I could get through it all in time, but I'm doing good. Am I talking too fast? Okay, good. Okay, so here we are, more residential work. This is another craftsman style, kind of a shield window for a home in Pasadena. And so going about doing this stuff for a couple years, and then at some point I start to go into the Judson archives and start to look into the old windows that used to be done there, and the old windows that used to be done around America. And I'm thinking, some of these old windows, they remind me of the great painters that I used to love. Because look at the quality. This is Tiffany on the left in Lafarge. And then over here is Henry Holliday, English painter.

25:27 And I'm like, I'm not seeing a lot of stained glass like what we're doing that compares to how good this stuff was at the turn of the century. I went on a couple trips. And every time I would travel after that, I would start to go into churches. and see windows that I thought were just better than what I was doing and what we were doing. And I didn't know what it was or why. And then, you know, it occurred to me that I must revive stained glass. That was the next thing I told myself I had to do. I want to bring that painting and that quality back. One of the reasons that it wasn't around was because a lot of studios that had come about at the second half of the century. They started employing people that were in wordworking and craftsmen, and they would move up the ranks and they'd become glass painters, but they didn't have art backgrounds.

26:19 So they weren't bringing artists into the craft. They were using the craftsmen and bringing them into art, and it didn't really work, but because glass is so pretty, they were getting away with it. And so I didn't like that. I was like, no, we've got to bring artists back to glass. So that was my mission, and I started seeking out people who knew how to paint. I went and did a bunch of workshops. I learned different techniques like these. These are all four different styles of painting with different art mediums. I practiced with transparent glass and opaque paint. I learned how to use oil and water and different types of media that could actually activate the paint and turn it into something that you could do in a really beautiful, realistic way. So these are some of my samples. And then we brought that back, all that knowledge that I got from these workshops. We brought it into the studio. And David, the owner of the studio, was like, yeah, bring it back and teach the other guys how to do this.

27:14 I think this is fantastic. Of course, it made the work more expensive, which is important because, you know, you want to have really good stuff. You've got to pay good money for it. So it was a big thing about those windows that were being made in the second half of the century is they were all kind of budget-style windows. I was like, people have money. You've just got to show them what you can do, and then they'll spend it. So we did that. And we brought back some amazing styles of glass painting that were really making the studio sing and making us get these big jobs. We got projects that we could have never gotten before. And it just kind of was all coming together for me because I thought, okay, now I feel fulfilled. I'm doing artwork at a stained glass studio that is like fine art. It has the beauty, the painting, and it's got the light. So now I'm starting to kind of bring these things together and do things that I'm really proud of. And it led to jobs like this.

28:08 This is the USC Catholic Church in L.A. that Adam was talking about. And it's full of traditionally painted windows. It took us two years to do. It was the biggest Catholic church project in L.A. in 50 years. So that was really cool. Some details of those. A lot of heavily painted detail. So then the next thing for me to do was to start to do my own work in glass. So I was like, okay, painted, sort of reached my pinnacle, what I thought was my pinnacle there, stained glass, it's this thing. Now I'm starting to merge them together and do my own work and take these painting techniques and make things that I was interested in. This is a nativity scene, but it's not the nativity, it's the innkeeper. So in the background is Mary and Joseph, and the innkeeper is sort of the hero of this piece.

29:07 I did some really contemporary stuff, some silly things. That's me flossing my teeth on one side. Small little things, but really enjoying, you know, this is stained glass that I'm turning into fine art. I was loving it. I started playing around with how you could use lead in different ways, how you can layer glass and abstract it and add paint to it. Another self-portrait. I've done a lot of these self-portraits over the years. This was one of my first big personal stained glass commissions, which was a wild, wacky story. It has a lot of layers to it, and it ended up being part of a collection up in the Bay Area. So I'm fulfilled. I'm doing my thing. I'm making my artwork, and I'm doing all the things that I wanted to do as an artist. until 2014. I'm reviving away at Judson Studios, and then this comes to my desk.

30:08 And I go, oh, man, what's that? What is that silly spaceship thing? It's pretty amazing. I was looking at it from my hotel room last night, and it's just striking. But I saw this on my desk, and I just thought, surely this is not something we could do. And then I saw this picture, which was the initial rendering for a little church in Kansas, of all places. And so I went up to my boss, David, in the movie. I say, David, this window looks like it's 40 by 100. I think that's 400 square feet. And he goes, no, that's 4,000 square feet.

30:49 And so I'm going through my head thinking, well, how do I do this with what I know how to do in glass? I mean, that's a big window. Well, we'll just make a big giant stained glass window. This was our submission. So as Adam said, they sourced 40 or 50 studios and narrowed it down. We were one of the big studios from the beginning, and we stayed in touch. We did our request for qualifications. We did our initial design. We whittled it down. We did an interview here, and we got selected based on this design in our interview. and it was a probationary selection. They said, okay, we like this design, but it's not quite right. It needs to have more going on, more color, more contemporary. So that ended up turning, after the probationary period, into this. And so then it was like, oh, man, okay, that's a big, colorful window. But we could probably do it.

31:45 and then this is the moment right here this is the moment and I can hear David as he's we projected the design onto the wall in whatever that the old sanctuary was and the whole committee was there and I'm see him this is me like this and David's like what the did you get us into because if you look at the design there's all this color up there this is not red glass and a lead line and blue glass. This is color upon color upon color, melding and coming together and soft edges and hard edges. And I said, I really, I wanted to get the job for that guy, Adam. He's so persuasive, man. He really wanted me to make it contemporary. I had to do something. And I said, don't worry, we'll figure out how to do it. We'll figure it out.

32:36 So I go back to the studio. Here we are at our little tiny light table. Everything looks so small to me now. Started doing samples. These are some of our early samples. You know, in stained glass, you can sometimes get two colors on a piece of glass if you use acid to remove the color, or if you add silver stain, which is a gold color. That's what that is on the piece on the left, but it wasn't a lot. These were limited ideas that we had, but they were kind of cool. We felt like, all right, we may be able to figure this out, but it was not very promising in the beginning. And we were, you know, we had convinced you guys that we got this.

33:16 This sample turned out really cool. I like this one. But with stained glass and leaded glass, what happens with the design is it always gets toned down. You do these colorful, amazing, bright things. And then when you start making them in glass, you end up using a lot of paint. And the colors become gray and black. And that's why when you go into a traditional church, you see a lot of windows that tend to be sort of dark and moody. And Adam was very clear, contemporary, colorful. Okay. All right, back to our timeline. This is the Narcissus moment. Oh, O-M-G.

33:56 That's what I call that one, because that's the effect it had on me. Narcissus Qualiata, he's a glass legend, born in Italy. Everybody knows him if you're in the glass world, but back at this time, which is, what are we looking at, 13, 14 years ago, he was not accessible. He was not teaching. He was just making incredible stuff like this, doing huge commissions all over the world. We had his book in the studio. And, you know, he just was somebody that I was never going to meet. I was much less get to know and work with. But I loved his work. And here's what he kind of represented, avant-garde, state-of-the-art, super bold contemporary glasswork. So this image, if you can believe it, showed up one day. while I'm in the middle of making all these samples, it shows up on my Facebook feed. And it says, Narcissus Quagliata is teaching a workshop in Denver. And I go, what? So I call up stairs to David and I go, Narcissus Quagliata is teaching a workshop in Denver. That's like a two hour flight. And it's in two weeks. And he goes, go, you go, go, go. So I decided, I looked at the first of all, I looked at this thing and I said, if I zoom in on my design in some of the areas, that looks like the perfect technique to do some of the craziness that I have in the window.

35:15 So I went to Denver, and I met this crazy old Italian guy. And we hit it off kind of from the beginning. You know, he has this thing he does in the beginning of every workshop where he asks students, oh, at some point over the next few days, I'd like to sit down and talk about your work with you. And so I raised my hand. I said, can I go first? I'm first. and so I sat down with him we looked at the design and this is the thing I showed him was the face of Christ and he zoomed in on it and he like looked at me and he zoomed in again he goes how the hell are you going to do that and I'm like I was like well that is why I'm here my friend that's why I'm here so my job was to get him to like me to to want to teach me and to want to come and help with this project because I knew that we had to do it and that was the way to do it. So I took the class. So that was the beginning. I hadn't even touched fused glass yet. And I started working with the material. And man, it's really wild. If you guys ever get a chance in LA to come out to my studio, you're all welcome to watch this unfold in a studio. It's, you know, using frit, which is crushed glass, using sheet glass, using what's called stringers, and then just melting it all on the kiln, setting up these amazing reactions, and getting these really beautiful results. These were the first things that I did with the techniques. These are the pieces I made, and so I started thinking about all these color transitions, the greens, the blues, how to make it all work in one piece of glass, and then I came back, and this was my first sample of John Wesley, which was kind of exciting because, again, it had all this color. I still got to do some painting, but it wasn't all reliant on paint. The light was just being completely trapped in this beautiful colored glass. This is one of my favorite early samples because it's just in like an afternoon sunlight and it's just holding light. We're looking at it right here. It just has a whole different way of transmitting and harnessing light than a painted stained glass window.

37:17 So this is the point where I want to mention, you know, you're probably thinking back to the beginning when I said Picasso and Brock worked with glass, but it didn't last. So what changed? So what changed was this guy. This is Dan Schwerer, the guy whose hand is out. This kind of looks like a Caravaggio painting. But Dan Schwerer is the owner of Bullseye Glass. And in the 1970s and 80s, his company, him and his buddies up in Portland, Oregon, developed ways to create glass that could be melted together. And so the whole problem is that glass, when it's colored, they have to introduce different minerals to it, chemicals, cobalt, magnesium, for all the different colors. So when you have all these different chemicals, along with the raw material of glass, it makes them heat and cool at different temperatures. And so they don't, when they melt together, they cool and they crack. So that's how it's been since the dawn of time. And that's why people haven't really been able to do it. So what Bullseye did, and we still don't exactly know how, is develop a methodology for the way they fire and heat their furnaces, the additives they put in the glass to make it all what's called compatible. And so they've created a whole palette of glass that can now be, well, it started then and is to this day, melted and mixed together in all kinds of wild color palettes to create paintings and glass. So that was a game changer for sure. And so we took advantage of that. Narcissus was the first one to take advantage of it. But people didn't really do a lot of like painting style things with fusing. It was mostly like bowls and platters and there's some casting because what Narcissus is doing, what we ended up learning how to do is really difficult because in order to get a flat painting in glass, you don't make it flat. You make it like a cake and you got to know how it's going to melt and then it melts down flat. So it was really not something that people were doing a lot of. So it was just so rare and unique that I got to meet him. And then when we came back, we got right to work on the window. And again, you know, I have a lot of pictures of the window and the making of it.

39:25 They're all in the book. And, you know, I'm going to refer you to that for a lot of the details. I'll just go through some pictures here just in case you have questions later about some of the techniques about how we made the window. But this was the point in time where it was like, okay, we know how to do it. I got the guy who's going to help me and we're going to make it happen. So it was really exciting moment. Here we are making the NOAA panel, which was the first one we made. I don't know if you guys remember. And at one point, Adam lowered it from the rafters and dropped it into the sanctuary. And it looked like this. I don't know where it is now. It's probably somewhere hiding around here. So this was our proof of concept that it could be done. just a little bit about the techniques so you know just not to go into too much detail but so this was that part of the design that I showed you before the lion and the swords to plowshares figure and so what we started with was a drawing or a printout actually this is a printout of the drawing and I would draw these lines on top of the drawing and number them for all the different glass colored pieces that we were going to use then I would do painting on clear glass then we would cut all of the colored glass that would then be placed on top of the clear glass.

40:41 Then it's the frit, hence holy frit. Frit is crushed glass or powdered glass. Then the pieces all get put in the kiln, that big old kiln back there. And then the glass comes out. So this was those four panels in the window at Judson. Here we are, tandem fritting. It's called fritting when you're laying the frit on there. It took a while for Narcissus to give me the, let me have the reins with some of that stuff. He was a little proprietary of things in the beginning. But we started developing all kinds of things. So what was cool is that he knew what he knew. He brought that to the table. And then he and I together started developing all new things, like how to create foliage. We developed this pre-made material idea that we could take powdered glass and sheet glass and make these crazy shapes that the kiln would then distort. And they would make some wild and crazy imagery that's great for foliage and for landscape type of stuff.

41:47 So here's some of that. This was our big beautiful studio in Pasadena that we ended up having to rent because the studio, like Adam said, was way too small. He was right. We could not do the window in that studio. But what we did do, which was kind of nuts, was we stopped production basically for six months and then built up a whole new studio that's about this size, maybe even bigger. And it ended up being this crazy thing where we did the first quarter of the window in, I don't know, a year and a half. And then the last three quarters we did in six months. So because we were flying and up and running. And so these are some of the really cool shots we got from the studio of the window in pieces before we sent it out here.

42:35 We could see 16 panels at a time on this wall of glass, which was really kind of amazing. This is one of my favorite sections of the window, the wolf and the lamb, which everybody thinks it's the lion and the lamb, but it's the wolf and the lamb. I mean, I think the lion and the lamb are somewhere together. I think. I shouldn't talk about that. I'll leave the theology to Adam. here's the trees which were just nuts i'll talk a little bit about the face of christ and how we made it uh if you remember in the first image of narcissus and i working together we were we were putting piling glass in the kiln and melting it kind of downhill to create wild organic shapes this is what one of those pieces it's called a slider uh and it's a it's just raw material that we would then cut up and place onto the face so we would cut the pieces and and line them up with certain parts of the face to build the image, kind of like a mosaic.

43:31 So here it is in all those little pieces. They're cutting them and grinding them and fitting them all together. The eye is kind of wild how it all came together. And there's the finished face panel with little me there. here's Pastor Adam seeing it for the first time. This was pretty cool. Adam and Debbie and Dan came. And I don't know if maybe Dan wasn't there, but we all looked at it together. And it was kind of an awesome moment when it was like, okay. I think that was maybe the first time Adam was like, all right. I guess I think I made the right choice.

44:07 Debbie was very helpful in that. He was like, I think it's, yeah. And she's like, it's beautiful. Come on. And he's like, you're right, I love it. Do you remember that? And then, of course, the galaxy was fun. We were just inventing things as we went along at this point because we felt like we really had control of the material. So we were feeling really great, and it was kind of, at this point, a race against time. So here's some more details. Moses is one of my favorite faces. Gosh, I don't even remember where these designs... When I did them, I was using so much different kinds of reference and coloring and just came together very serendipitously. Here's a whole section of that side of the window. I was telling the docents earlier this figure of Joseph is one of my favorites with his arm out being dragged off into slavery.

45:05 Oh, here's the tree again. We got two trees. This is my favorite picture of the whole process when we put the first 100 panels in or 50 panels and everybody came and signed the floor. And it was kind of an amazing, amazing event. And we got to stand up there. And when I saw this picture, I was like, wow, that's really big. It's a big window.

45:29 And this one I always love showing people too. This is the finished window where we have all these people. and it's like, oh, that's really big. And I'm like, no, those aren't the people. That's the screen. The people are down lower. Look lower. And then they see the people at the bottom. They go, oh, jeez, yeah. Yeah. So here's some more details. This is, you know, I love this picture too because it just shows that, you know, when you're painting and you do a brush stroke, it's all just brown or black when you're doing stained glass. But this is one of those brown or black brush strokes. There's like four colors in here. There's violet. There's this color called neo-lavender. There's carnelian and coral. And it all forms this one stroke that, from a distance, reads like a fold, but it's so alive with color. This is something that I really like that kind of makes me happy in thinking about the design and how we translated it into the glass. So this is the lion panel, and you can see the design in the glass and how we actually did it.

46:34 We made the window look like the design, which was I did the design without knowing how to make the window, and just credit God for that one. Okay, so then what? Window's done. I quit. I quit my job. I left the studio. Thanks to you guys. I became jobless after that. I'm still jobless 10 years later. So I have nothing but the Church of the Resurrection to thank for developing this amazing confidence that I could leave and become my own artist and start my own studio. And all the big churches were going to come. I was going to be doing huge Jesus windows all over the world. So I did one. I got one. This was the first project I got after I started my own studio. I felt brave enough. I felt like I couldn't stay there any longer. It was just too much had transpired. I felt too much like I had been sort of launched somewhere. And going back to just doing more normal church windows and being an employee, it just felt like if I was ever going to leap, that was the time so so I did it started my studio 2018 and this was one of the first projects I did which is the same technique and it's still working on this building to this day it's a mausoleum out in New Jersey this is some details of some of the windows I'm doing there there there's the evangelist windows I'm now doing the stations of the cross which are there's 13 of them and so they'll surround the mausoleum so I've been working on those for seven years with the leaded infused technique that was created here. This was another similar window to what we did here, but this is the first time we actually did it without lead. And so we started going, okay, when I say we, I actually worked with Judson on this one. So we made these panels for a church in San Diego, and it was really kind of fun. And I realized, okay, you don't have to have lead, as you can see with this guy. This is the cowboy in a private home. I'm just going to kind of go through some of the pieces I did after the first resurrection window and where it kind of led me.

48:41 Residential windows, I've always wanted to bring this inside into a gallery or a private home. I feel like it really looks good and it has a different appeal than a normal oil painting has. So these are some of the pieces I've done over the years. I love sports. We'll get to that in a second.

49:03 Sliding into home plate here. Larger outdoor panels. So these pieces can go outside, which is amazing. It's super archival medium. Glass is not going to change. You know, you can't break it. You don't want to do that. But everything else is very stable about it in terms of the color. So I started doing my own really small personal work. So I was thinking again, here I go. I'm coming full circle. Now I'm going to be in a gallery again. Let's try that. So I start making small pieces. Back to my figurative roots. These are all fused glass. A little bit of paint in them. you guys might recognize this one. Justin called me. He said, I want your face. I want it to be a portrait, but I want it to look like a work in progress because that's what you were in the movie. So I made this in one afternoon in my studio, and he said, that's perfect.

49:55 And then this is just kind of my portfolio of work during those years after I left the studio, and a lot of this stuff is still sitting in my studio. A lot of it were commissioned pieces, but just fascinated with what glass can be, what it can do, how it can be manipulated, different types of imagery. It can be made into a guitar. This is a project I did with Gretsch Guitars in L.A., and we built a glass top falcon, which is the name of this guitar. And when we finished it, we were really lucky that it got played at a show in L.A. by this guy, Zach Brown. Zach Brown Band. Yeah, he played this at a concert. It lit up. It was the coolest thing.

50:38 And then I've been doing portraits, like the Jesus portraits in both windows, contemporary figurative portraits of all kinds. This is one of my favorite ones. This is Dan, the owner of Bullseye Glass. And this sort of brings it full circle. When I look back at Rembrandt and what he was going for with light and now what I've sort of realized can be done with glass, it just has really gotten me excited. and not just me, I mean other people. Judson's still doing it. This is Judson Studios shortly after. They made a bunch of really amazing fused glass panels. Contemporary artists like painters were coming to us and saying, wow, this is amazing. How do we translate our work into glass? So these are some LA artists who've been working with the material.

51:25 This is in a fire station, these really beautiful panels in Santa Clarita. One of the most famous contemporary artists is a guy named James Jean, and he came to us to do glass panels for a huge client of his, and we made these in the studio with leading and fusing. And it's just the sky's the limit. A big public art project at an airport, which was really fun and kind of wild. And then Bullseye did this, which is about maybe two-thirds of the size of the resurrection window. This is glass. It's all in white, so there's no backlighting. but it's a mosaic artist who got this project and she used our designs as proof of concept that it could be done. And people just started doing this and it's been happening, I mean, in a really exciting way. And so there was, at this point, the only thing left to do was, oh, that's old me.

52:19 That's new me. Same stuff, get the word out. So that's what we were doing. That's what we did. That's what was the plan. A holy frit, what got out there. Bullseye is doing their thing, teaching classes. I started a company with Justin called Vitrionics, where we teach classes. We have four class videos that we've done. And we've got the book. So here's our holy frit. This was our media tour. We traveled all over the country. We did screenings in New York and Texas and all up and down the coast. And we had a blast sharing this story with people. And so everybody knows about you guys all over the world now. It's kind of cool. This little old church in Kansas, huh? This is our YouTube channel that we started, which is stories about fusing glass, stories about people that are doing it, not just me, about other companies that are working with the material.

53:19 There are stories about Bullseye. It's a really fun little channel where we're sort of in the vein of Holy Frit. It's kind of fun and silly. Here's some of our class videos. We have a portrait class, a landscape class, and what's something called expressive painting in glass. And the VIP program is our online membership Patreon program that allows people to come and take classes from me and work with me on a weekly basis. And then the really exciting thing, you saw the glass guitar, so we filmed that whole process. And we're working on a TV show. So when we did Holy Frit, one of the, what is it called? The critiques or the write-ups on the movie, it was a really positive review. And it said, this guy, Tim Carey, it's like if Da Vinci was a slacker.

54:10 So Justin said, that's the title of our TV show, Slacker Da Vinci. So we're working on a lot of stuff that is hopefully, Glass looks amazing on film. The story of it is really cool. There's a lot to kind of worry about and to be anxious about and the reveal of the kiln and all that. There were two major museum shows in L.A., which were amazing. One of them was a Judson Studios glass show. And then Narcissus did a retrospective on all of his glass work featuring a lot of his fused stuff. And so, I mean, it's kind of really grown, especially in L.A. and a lot of other places. still has a long way to go. And so that was the end of the story. Until I got this on my desk.

54:58 I was like, what's this? So I thought I was done. I was like, well, we're back to the church. They're a smaller church, but it's still huge. So this was the rendering I got. And I was extremely excited. Suffice to say, I was excited because the timing in my life was amazing to be able to get back together with Judson Studios and to do something that I felt was very different. This window is not like the other one. It's got a different purpose, I think. It's got a different mood. It required, I think, a different technique, which is a fused glass window with no lead lines. It's all based upon ambiance, feeling. It's more contemporary. I think of it as a step forward from what we did in the main sanctuary. and I think it's something that maybe shows people what else can be done that doesn't have to just be a leaded glass window so it's of course the like pastor said the gospels Jesus calming the storm so I will show you a little bit about the process but it's really not like the first one which was a wild ride this was like a smooth canoe trip it was just like really mellow So this was, we made a lot of, I made, so I did it at Judson, but I did all the artwork myself on this one.

56:15 So no lead lines in this window means we have to make all the imagery from scratch on the light table. So here it is in progress, cutting pieces of glass, huge panels. Again, you have to lift these up and put them into the kiln. The pre-made material are those little white dots. It's putting glass in the kiln and letting it kind of turn into these sort of interesting shapes for the stars and for the water. I keep forgetting that it's right behind me. Here's a detail with all the frid on there and then putting it in the kiln. See two huge panels putting in the kiln. And then here they are on the light tables. Really kind of like fun and abstract and alive. So we were able to go up on the mezzanine at Judson Studios and look down. So these are the windows as they're coming to life. I imagine over the years you guys are going to find things in this window, see things. I've already seen things that I never knew were there before.

57:10 Like there's a shark there. I didn't know there was a shark there before. My son pointed that out to me. See that little thing? I'm like, that's not a shark. He's like, it looks like one. I'm like, okay, fine. But like there's a bird in the sky and it could be a dove. There's lots of little things. But it's really meant to be a peaceful window. It's meant to feel peaceful and to feel calm, even though there's these big, giant, huge waves. We had that giant window at Judson just fully loaded all the time. And I'll go through a little bit about the face, this face, which is very similar to the last face, but not exactly. I made the glass in a little bit more of a, it was a little more abstract. It didn't quite have the, these were made in like little piles. The other ones were big slabs of glass, so I had to be a little more delicate. Here it is in progress.

58:02 There's me standing at the light table. So all of those little tiny shards and little pieces of glass turned into that face. Sorry, I'm pouring the little bits of frid on there. This is a very stressful panel because if this one would have gone wrong, having to redo it would have been tough. Here he is in the light table and there he is in the window. We were cruising at this point. These waves were a lot of fun to do. I really enjoyed doing the sweeping waves and the color. This was one of the last shots before they ended up going in the crate. They got laminated, which is really cool because they're actually attached to clear glass on the backside so they're safe. If anything were to crack, which is unlikely, they wouldn't fall out of the frame, which is nice.

58:58 So here's our installation. Some of you guys might have been here for that. There it is finished, as you can see. Here's Adam putting it to work, so to speak. Our baptismal bowl, which was a lot of fun, although it's kind of making me have to go to the bathroom right now.

59:22 Sorry. okay so in closing glass i i hope i hope i've communicated that i i think i just think it's the best i think it's the best and it's not just for this or for that but i think it's for every kind of art um narcissus says the perfect painting is in glass these are some of the piece things i'm doing now i'm becoming more interested in in some wild abstraction that's a self-portrait on the left, probably about how I felt. And then these cast pieces I'm doing, I did, I'm still doing the portraits. That's Narcissus. I did that one last year. This is one I just completed at Judson this summer. It's a four by four foot piece, which was another really exciting thing because it was a commission for a women's leadership center, public building out in Wisconsin. So I was excited that I got to do that. And of course I did Kobe. I'm a huge sports fan.

1:00:20 And I think my dream project is to do something in sports. These are some cast pieces. I've been sort of playing around with the experiment of doing athletes in action. I just think it would look amazing at a stadium. I've done some concepts. This is a Kobe waterfall. This would be a Kobe wall at Nokia Center. I want to do Kobe. I really do. I mean, you see bronze statues everywhere at these stadiums. And it's like, come on, let's get to the next thing. here's Vin Scully at Dodger Stadium I want these these are just concepts that I have and so I I like to put these out there in case you know anybody I see some I see some of these Chiefs shirts out here I know you guys have this this stadium here right like could you imagine right imagine walking in there and like up at the skyline you you walk in you see up there and There, Taylor Swift, right up there.

1:01:15 Just staying glass. Wouldn't that look good? We could put Mahomes up there. I could do Mahomes. All right, guys, so get the word out. Do me a favor when you're talking to people and talking about glass. Give them my card. I love talking about it. I love sharing stories. And, again, I'm grateful to be here and to have had the opportunity to work with you all. Thank you. Debbie. Told you. Maybe I sped through it. So if you have a question that you would like to ask, yeah. Given the newness and all the what in our minds here in Little Corner, Kansas is a masterpiece, any reservations about kind of taking that on again within the proximity of these two and to say it needs to be different, it's got a different purpose, but what were your thought processes?

1:02:35 Yeah, good question. I mean, yeah, for sure you initially have that thought. Like, how do I, oh, I have nowhere to go but down from there, right? That's the thought. But I, you know, I'm working with all of these guys and all of you guys in the first one. There's a trust that got developed. And like I said, it was really smooth the second time around. I trusted Adam. I knew that he had the right idea. I knew that this was different enough where I thought we could make a different kind of a statement in here. And so it was a no-brainer for me really to just say, yeah, let's do it. So, yeah, initially there's always that thought, but then I just remind myself that I've gotten myself into these kinds of things before, and I always find a way out. So, yeah. More questions. Who else has a question for him? Look at me. I have to go all the way to the front. Are you going to run?

1:03:27 And I have heels on today. the other window is flat this one has so much depth to it yeah we were just taken back by walking in here jesus was up against the frame and the water was way back in there yeah uh that is because of the lamination so because these windows are laminated the back of the surface of the glass is fired on a shelf and that shelf has a texture to it so the glass picks up that shelf texture and the window in there still has that texture on it which is actually important because it keeps the sunlight from blaring into people's eyeballs now we'll see what this one looks like in whatever in the winter when the sun's really low but because these are laminated it's now they've got this glossy surface that has softened that texture. So you're seeing straight through it. And so that means the texture of the front, the wobble of the glass, is creating this illusion that there's shadows and shapes, which we did not expect. And I consider it a really lucky, happy accident.