Sunday, April 10, 2005

Stained Glass light...

Image Hosted by ImageShack.usAs far as stained glass goes, the pattern is not sublime. I bought this glass in 1982 at a small stained glass store on Queen Street in Toronto, back before it became an upscale fashionista district, when there were cafes and used book stores galore. I lived in a condo in a renovated Victorian house near the Art Gallery. All my windows looked out onto brick walls or a parking lot. I missed the sky and wanted to hide the impenetrability of brick, the way I felt cemented in.

My father was dying, my life changing irrevocably; I was in a wild and passionate relationship with an intellectual poet. I surrounded myself with stained glass, some pieces more sublime than others.

After my father died, I bought a house with huge windows and privacy a few blocks away. I could see the sun and the moon in the sky. The stained glass went into the attic for almost two decades.

I moved it with me to Vancouver, finding it bringing back a time I had forgotten, and hung it myself with my power drill.


Image hosted by Photobucket.comDuring the day the windows are open. In the evening I shut them and enjoy the deep and glistening colour. When I sleep I draw the curtains.

In this digital photograph of the stained glass casement windows this morning it looks as if the sun is, is... there is such brilliant light, it seems to be pushing the glass open, the curtains open, drawing the viewer out to its brightness, a whiteness into which the landscape has collapsed, the dark blue lace that I have hung as netting to keep out flies and bees in the Summer becomes a mere few stitches of a design over the whiteness of the sun's field, even the window frame is being submerged in light, a light almost blinding to the occupant within...

What intrigues me is that I was working on a cross-cultural study of light in many different fields when my father died, a piece of work I never completed; it was based on stunning dreams of light...

Can you describe this photograph? It is one of the ones with a light that seems almost visionary. Be poetic...

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