St. Marks Church, San Diego, CA
Above: The door I designed and made for St. Marks Church
I had carved a number of panels inside St. Marks Church over the years. It had always been a pleasure to work with their board of directors and volunteers so when they asked if I would design and build their two entryways I was excited to be working with them again.
The wood I chose for the doors was walnut, as it was used throughout the interior of the church. The extensive amount of glass art in the church is deep-colored leaded glass, contemporary in design. However, they did not want colored glass in the doors and asked for my ideas. I came up with the idea to create heavy glass panels for the doors and side lites, following the same contemporary design as the leaded glass inside the church, but using kiln-cast 1/2" glass.
Making the panels was a very difficult and challenging process. If you look at the picture above, you can see that each door has three panels and the side lites have four on the sides and two across the top. I designed the panels so that the contemporary lines would flow, and at the same time would all match each other in each panel. To accomplish this I made a full-scale drawing of the entire entry, then made moulds for each panel, making sure of the alignment and spacing. I had to lay my patterns out in my garage, the largest open space I could find, to make sure that when I transferred the design to each glass panel, they would flow continuously.
Next, each piece had to be fired in my kiln separately, and that was also a challenge, because all the glass had to slump at just the right time to get the same patterns and diffusion, so as to match when I installed the glass into the door panels. If any of the large glass pieces had a defect or slight variation in size, problems could arise. My kiln is computerized and I am able to program my firings to duplicate the same end results, so problems rarely occur, but one never knows!
The next step was to take the cast glass and have it tempered - another possible problem area - because the glass could get damaged during transport or during tempering. Luckily, all went as planned, with no mishaps, and I think the doors turned out spectacular. And, as always, the board of directors and the volunteers were a joy to work with.
Above: Close-up of cast-glass panels.
Above: The leaded-glass design I incorporated into my design for the church's entryway.
Above: "Before" photo. I would say I much improved their door!
