Part 1, White Knuckle Ride.

O.K. so it goes like this...
I've got six weeks to knock off an exact replica of a 12' x 8' 19th century stained glass master work by the F.X. Zettler Studio of Munich, Germany that depicts the baptism of Christ.
Normally this is an 10 week proposition but as usual the fates conspire against me and I am only now free of other studio obligations and can sink my teeth into this thing proper.

But I digress, first the background.

Beyer Studio is doing the stained glass windows at a new Church in Chester Co. PA named Mary Magdalene. Most of the windows going into the new building are adaptive reuse windows removed from St. Aloysius in South Philadelphia and from the the original St. Mary Magdalene. One of the windows they wanted from St. Aloysius, was the baptism of Christ unfortunately it was already spoken for.

We of course jumped a the opportunity to offer to make them one exactly like it. I'm going to attempt document the creation of this window and my inevitable decent into neurotic spasms in the process.

Allow me to introduce you to Mr. Zettler:



Beyer Studio (sadly) removed this window from a really beautiful Church in S. Philly two years ago, this job has been in the pipe line that long. It's funny how that pipeline more resembles a gun barrel as I get closer to deadline for this window.

Again with the digression.

Week One

Neil Cippon, computer wunderkind, photographed each section of the original window in an easel at the shop and then assembled the window in the computer.

We made some alterations to the composition to make the window so that it would conform to the frame dimensions of the Churches baptistry.

Neil then printed the window out at full size with our plotter and this is what I used to pattern out the window.


The printout.

Of course this all sounds very straight forward until you begin to factor in that Neil is being hounded by architects and frame makers for other jobs and no less than three other people in the studio are driving him nuts to get their projects printed (which all have the same deadline as mine). Also he is the only one who can operate the computer without invoking the blue screen of death. Neil juggles chain saws for fun.

Once I had my hot little hands on the full scale printouts I patterned the window sections. This consists of laying out card stock and brown paper under the printout with carbon paper between each layer. I then trace all the original lead lines of the window and end up with a glazing drawing and card stock glass patterns that precisely match out original. Pretty cool huh?


The layout.


Each piece numbered.

All the patterns get cut apart with a spiffy set of sears that has three blades and thus can consistently remove a thin strand of paper from between the patterns that allows compensation for the heart of the lead.


Cut apart.

By the time I've got this design reduced to a giant paper puzzle it's Thursday.

I start selecting the glass I want to use in this window realize immediately that I didn't order enough of a couple colors I need and tear apart the studio looking for alternatives.


Lamberts antique glass sheets used in the landscape.

Neil and Jason cut glass for me as I strip down full sheet of antique Lamberts (classy German mouth blown glass) as fast as I can. My boss Joe tell me he doesn't think I can make the deadline. I say I don't either, but being an artist I've gotten used to the concept of living a lost cause and I tell him I'm going for it anyway.


glass pile


Jason cutting

Fucking Paint! My boss urges this repeatedly to motivate me to stop selecting the window glass and move on to painting the line work (called tracing). The biggest problem with this directive is that there is almost not enough glass cut to effectively trace. To top it off Neil has know idea where the glass I stashed for this gig is located in the racks. I piss off my boss by selecting for another couple of hours before I cave and follow directions. I begin tracing the heads and hands, not what I had in mind to warm up with but that's what I got. My wife calls the shop and tell me my son Luke had a fall off a chair and cut his head and I need to get home. Joe is not happy. Luke is fine by the time I get home.

Week 2

Week two starts on Sunday with a painting marathon. Traced cherubs, John's head and an Angel in brocaded robes. Boss is no longer annoyed with me. Off to a good start.

Tracing on the light table.


Detail.

I fire the Cherub heads because someone had extra room in the kiln, one of them cracks up the middle.

So much for the good start.


Neil says if we're gonna get this done I'm gonna need more coffee.

Hey everyone, here's how I spent December and a big chunk of January.
"The Resurrection of Christ" 152" x 52" Stained Glass.
This window is the result of what my job becomes when two Churches want the same window. Our Lady of Victory a Catholic Church here in Philadelphia closed recently and Beyer Studio (my day gig) removed the stained glass windows to be reused in other Churches. The windows were from a German company named F.X. Zetler and date to the early 1900's. They were really nice windows, a little worse for wear but top shelf painting. We ended up with two Churches wanting the windows for their new building project so the Archdiocese split up the set between them. So of course we tell both Churches we an copy the windows that they didn't get and here is my contribution.

There were a lot of hands besides mine in this piece, Joe Beyer (The Boss) painted the heads and hands, Tony (bagadoughnuts) Harrington and Mike Leanetti cut the glass and Vlad glazed the sections up. The ugly ass bottom border is actually from one of the original windows and when installed will go all the way around.





I'm already pushing paint on the next one.

This painting started out as a simple drapery study. My studio is still trashed after moving it upstairs, but I've been trying to push paint on some small studies so I don't atrophy. As I began to alter the painting I was using as a reference to suit my own interests, I decided to add a severed head (a la John the Baptist) to the composition.
It seem to belong in the design, as if the previous painter left it out or painted over it and all I was doing was putting it back where it belonged.

Then I noticed something.

Jerry Biesel was an incredible man, he was friendly and funny and smart as hell. He was an eminent badass. He was fearless. He could fix anything, with or without wheels. He always seem to have a solution or was able to understand the issue as a whole. He never stopped surprising me with the breadth of his knowledge or abilities.
He was also one of the best friends I've ever had. We rode motorcycles, chased girls, drank way too much and in general enjoyed all the mayhem Philadelphia had to offer up. Jerry always had my back. Even on a couple of occasions when I probably deserved to get my ass kicked, he still stood with me. He went on to marry a beautiful and amazing woman and own a couple of buildings downtown. If he didn't have it made, no one did.

It's been a year now since I stood in front of his coffin at a thread worn funeral home in northeast Philly.

The dope ate him alive from the inside out. The junky still looked like my friend, but the Jerry I knew was gone. The body in the box looked like Jerry. But this time, gone was permanent.

It was heart breaking to realize that I had inadvertently drawn into the folds of the angel's drapery the image of Jerry Biesel.
If this is what my subconscious demanded of me to acknowledge my grief, then I figured completing the painting was a small price to pay.


I lost Jerry twice. The first time was to the heroin, and finally to the abyss.

I will grieve for this man till the day I die.

Bryan Willette

June 3, 2007

I've always liked wood cuts they are a quick and easy way to make multiple copies of a composition.
The works of Albrecht Durer and other printers of that era have always held a mystical resonance for me. I've also always been drawn to old tarot decks, playing cards and illustrations from hand printed books. There's something about the punch of basic black and white. The three prints below are in no particular order, The Blessing of the Pig, 3.5" x 8" 1999. The Hanged Man, 3.5" x 8" 2001 and my Christmas card from 2004 3" x 6"

The parents of my sister in law Jill did an addition on their house which included a bathroom with a large window. Their kids decided to commission me to cut some stained glass to to fill in the window and provide some privacy. The kids all pitched in a equally and Jill gave me the window size. "Just something simple" she said.

Never one to shy away from over-kill the three stained glass windows below are the end result. The windows are each 24" x 10" and hang independently side by side.

The in-laws loved them.

Good thing cause it took me ten months of fits and starts to finish them.

Artist Statement

It all began with an impacted wisdom tooth.

As I sat there in the dentist's chair, the Novocain had not taken effect.
"I can give you another shot of Novocain," the dentist said, "but I have someone in the other room and it'll be at least a half hour before I can get to you."
"Hell with it" I thought, I was a veteran punk rocker and I had certainly seen people loose teeth in the pit under far less sterile conditions.
"Go ahead and pull in out." The tooth proved to be far more difficult to remove than expected. There I am flat on my back, feet in the air. Nurse on my left has me in a headlock, the dentist's knee in my chest, both hands in my mouth twisting angrily at my wisdom tooth.
In one staggeringly painful moment the tooth shattered. The room went white and for the first time I experienced a true hallucination.

My art work all grows out of this event. I painted what I saw in the hallucination, and liked it. I've found that if I go back to that place in my mind, there is always another image waiting for me, to take out, to make real.

Bryan Willette

Posting pictures of what I do for my day job isn't what I had in mind when I started this page but my home studio got moved recently and the resulting chaos sends me into convulsions every time I walk through its door. Needless to say I haven't gotten a lot of painting done on the night shift.

My stained glass studio gig is incredible and I must admit that I'm quite proud of these windows. The Church that commissioned them wanted a building that looked like a Church, not a car dealership or mall food court which is what all contemporary architecture seems to morph its subjects into. They put a lot of effort into getting it right and I have to give them credit because they pulled it off.

St. Raymond of Penefort Catholic Church is in Springfield, VA just outside Washington D.C.. The Church's stained glass committee bought four 15 foot antique windows from a defunct Church in Pittsburgh, PA. The stained glass windows they scored were late 19th century master works from a German studio named Mayer of Munich. They were painted in a pre-Raphaelite style and depicted the life of Mary. Since the plans called for six aisle windows, St. Raymond's commissioned Beyer Studio to make two new windows to fill in the blanks.

I got to design and build those two aisle windows along with three rosettes for behind the altar and a glass-geek-dream-come-true rose window for the choir loft. I had lots of help from my coworkers who painted, glazed and got stuck with the grunt work. My main man Neil did all the computer work and made full size CAD printouts for me to work from. Most of all I gotta thank my boss Joe for letting me off my leash to go gothic on this project in a big way. I freaking love gothic. If I had a dog he'd have a gothic dog house.

The stained glass windows posted below took the better part of 2006 to complete. More than a hundred sheets of colored antique glass were cut over months to create the gigantic kaleidoscopic puzzles that were then waxed to full sheets of plate glass and wrangled into our easels to be painted.

Two steps of paint, trace (line work) and Matt (shading) and it all went into the kiln to be fired on permanently. The glass is held together with a soldered web of lead came called a matrix. Its then gooped. With glazing compound of course.

The installation was a trip; the job site was total mayhem but since I thrive on that kind atmosphere I actually had fun.