August '21: Stained Glass Trip, Part V: What I Came For

 This is part five of a series; you really should read them all, and in order, starting with Part I. All the pictures for this trip are in a Google Photos album that you can see by clicking on this link.

I had planned to be at the museum at Forest Lawn, in Glendale, when it opened at ten o'clock this morning. I woke up right at 6AM, so I guess I must be used to Pacific time. Had breakfast at Noah's Bagels, a couple of miles east of my hotel. I had breakfast there a year and a half ago when I'd just bought the Sacramento Jag & was taking it to its new home, & I remembered that I really liked everything about the place. It's a little different now -- all the restaurants here are, because of all the restrictions about masks and indoor dining. But the food & coffee were still good, the employees were still helpful, and the prices were still reasonable (for Los Angeles).

Being up so early meant I had some time to kill. First I went for a walk down Beverly Boulevard for a few blocks. I seem to be in the Jewish District. I passed two synagogues, and there are several Kosher restaurants (including a Kosher French Bakery & Cafe), and some other businesses with signs in Hebrew or names that reflected their Jewishness; all this mixed in, of course, with Salvadoran and Thai and Italian and Greek and a few things I don't really recognise. 

There was a guy standing on the sidewalk, leaning against a doorway, and he had some kind of black box on a strap on his head. It looked at first glance kind of like a jeweler's loupe, pushed up onto his forehead. Overall, he looked like I imagine a diamond merchant would look during a break from work. We said hello as I passed by headed east. A few minutes later I'd turned back, and he was still there. He said hello again and commented on my having just passed not five minutes before. I said something about it being as far as I'd wanted to walk, and started to go by when I decided I was going to ask him about his loupe. So I said, "Are you a jeweler?" and he said yes. I asked him about the thing on his forehead, which he called by a word I couldn't catch (it was probably in Hebrew) and said it contains a scripture verse on a little roll of parchment. It's used when you pray in the morning. Kind of like a mezuzah, I guess; that little metal box you put on the front door frame. We talked about that for a while, and about judaism (like I know anything about it) and then I moved on, back to my hotel. It was only when I got back to the room that it occurred to me that he must have thought I had asked him, "Are you a Jew?", which even I would think a rude question, coming out of nowhere like that. Especially since, as I started to tell him I was curious about his loupe, I couldn't remember the word "loupe", so I just kind of waved at the thing on his head. 

Still a load of time to kill, so I got on the internet, where wasted time goes to live forever. Some of you may have gotten my morning blast of funny signs put up by the Indian Hills, Colorado, Community Center ("Welcome to the Assumption Club! I think we all know why we're here!"). Putting that together and sending it out took up even more time than I had to kill, mostly because I was laughing and not paying close attention to the time. But I got to Forest Lawn pretty soon after ten.

I thought Forest Lawn was where all the famous movie stars are buried. Maybe they are, but if so, it's an oddly understated cemetery. There are, actually, half a dozen or so Forest Lawn Cemeteries scattered around California, so maybe there's another one somewhere that features the kind of self-important carved marble tombs one expects the very vain -- and ordinary New Orleanians -- to be buried in. This one has a number of mausoleums scattered around, each with a name like you'd expect an unctuous sales committee to have given out in the 1950s. All the graves have flat headstones in the modern style, with just names and dates and maybe one short descriptive line ("beloved husband"; "together always now"; that sort of thing). And the place is huge; L-shaped, probably two miles front to back and side to side.

The attendant at the entrance helpfully gave me a map with the route to the museum highlighted, so I had no trouble finding it. Besides, there were signs at every intersection. (Temple of This to the right, Temple of That straight ahead, museum to the left.)

museum on the right, cathedral on the left

The museum looks like a small building. That's partly because it stands next to a large Gothic Revival building that looks like a medieval cathedral from some unspecified place in Western Europe. Inside it's a cross (get it? Cross?) between an underused convention hall and a government building. The main attraction in the place is a painting called The Crucifixion. The painting is enormous, nearly 200 feet from end to end and fifty from top to bottom. It was painted for a worlds' fair by an artist from Poland who couldn't afford to get it home with him. Now it hangs on a curtained wall behind a shallow stage and in front of seating for probably three hundred people. It is an impressive painting, and not just for its size.

But the museum. It's showing an exhibition called "Judson Studios: Stained Glass from Medieval to Street". This is why I'm in Los Angeles, to see this before it goes away.

St-Gaudens, Lincoln

When I stepped into the museum, I was taken by surprise. It never occurred to me that the Forest Lawn Museum might have its own permanent collection of art, real art to exhibit, but there it is. Not a lot of it, just one good-sized room; they may have more, of course, but there's just the one room on show: half a dozen exquisite bronzes by famous American sculptors like Remington and Borglum and St-Gaudens. Beautifully carved marbles. Copies of a few famous sculptures. (They used to have a full-sized copy of Michaelangelo's David, until an earthquake knocked it over. Now they exhibit the head, and so for the first time I could see, up close, just how monumentally big that statue is.)

It was truly an impressive little collection. 

In the room behind that is the museum's gift shop. And in the two rooms behind that is the glass exhibition I've come all this way to see. 

Can you feel tension building? If you're not really interested in the techniques of glass, I suggest you skip pretty much the rest of this post. I'm really only writing it for me anyway.

There are now three kinds of stained glass in the world. (Four, if you count dalle glass, which is big chunks of brightly-coloured glass stuck into cement; it was popular mainly in church architecture in the 1970s and '80s, but we got over it.) All three kinds are usually called "stained glass", but actual Stained Glass is the kind of thing you see in medieval churches: pieces of coloured glass, painted (or stained) with a dark layer of something like soot, most of which is then removed, leaving behind part of a picture. 

actual stained glass

Look at the face of Mary Magdalene in this photograph. The thick, heavy lines that go across her mouth, along her jaw, over her eye? Those are lead-lines, where pieces of "stained" glass are joined together. Her face consists of five or six pieces of flesh-coloured glass. Each of those pieces was painted with a soot layer, then an artist scraped away soot to leave behind her features -- eyes, nose, mouth, teeth -- like a drawing. The shadow on her neck is made by leaving behind some of the staining layer, sort of like an artist working with pencil will do crosshatching to make the appearance of a shadow. The glass, after the extra stain is scraped away, is then fired and the bits of the soot layer that were left merge into the glass, and these stained pieces are assembled into a whole with lead.

Then there's the kind of craft that I practice. It's called "stained glass," but it's more properly called "leaded glass," or "leaded-and-foiled glass." The technique I use takes pieces of coloured glass and assembles them into an image or design without using the staining process, which takes an artistic talent that I've never exhibited, like the ability to draw.

Torrey Pine

This is the kind of work I do. This panel is done by foiling, where the edge of each little coloured piece of glass is individually wrapped in a thin piece of copper, and the wrapped pieces are then soldered together to make the image. You can also join the pieces using long strips of lead, which is soft enough to bend around the edges of pieces of glass. Copper foil (now, thankfully, manufactured with adhesive backing) is much more flexible than lead, while lead produces a more even line. You can zoom in on this picture and see that the black lines where pieces are joined together vary in thickness; up close, they're irregular. (The lead lines on Mary Magdalen are a little bit irregular, but that's because lead calme -- the strips of lead that join the glass pieces together -- were made by hand back then; nowadays, they're just extruded from a machine like pasta.)

Then there's fused glass. This technique started to become popular back in the 1970s, but unlike dalle glass, which was just an architectural fad of the era that required no artisanal sensibility, fused glass has become more and more popular with wider availability of the needed equipment and supplies. I've never tried it myself; I don't have the equipment, and it's only recently that I've given some thought to getting it.

This is fused glass. Tiny pieces of coloured glass called frit are laid out in a design and slowly melted together to form an image. The ovens needed for this process are now cheap enough, a couple hundred dollars, that normal people can afford small ones; that's why, when you go down to the Sasquatch Hunt or the Boudin Festival, you see pop-up booths where people are selling jewelry made from glass beads they've made themselves. Commercial concerns, and serious artists, use ovens that have gotten bigger and bigger; they're similar to the room-sized ovens that ceramics companies use. 

Most of the works in this exhibition are a combination of fused and stained glass.  All of them show a level of artistry and technical expertise that blow me away. I'm tempted to put all the pictures I took of them into this post and describe each at length, but nobody I know is really that interested in any of it. If you wanna see some pretty glass art, look at the photos in the album that goes with this series of blog posts. I will, though, show you my favourite piece, a modern piece of actual stained glass:

 

 

 

Sangre Nueva, by Mike MacGregor

Now, then: plans for the rest of this trip consist of a visit to the Petersen Automobile Museum tomorrow morning; lunch with a lawyer I know out here, and watching the Liverpool match on Saturday morning at a bar in Culver City, half an hour south of my hotel, where the local LFC fan club hangs out. I had planned to drive the Palos Verde Peninsula scenic route, but now I think I'll wait until I can put the top down again. 

My point being, there probably won't be much to write about after this. Besides, I'll probably be starting on my article for automotivemuseumguide.com, and that'll likely take up all my computer time. So don't expect more of this weird prolix drivel. It may come, but no promises.