Stained-glass artist helps faithful see the power, dimensions of faith

READSBORO, Vt. (The Vermont Catholic Tribune) - It's not always easy for artist Debora Coombs to step back and look at her work, especially if she is working on a 25-foot-high drawing that she is going to translate into a stained glass cathedral window.

So she works in sections, and sometimes she gets a look at the big picture from a loft above her studio. The British-born stained glass artist works in the studio that's about 20 feet by 30 feet, a former garage her husband converted for her work after they moved to this rural area around 10 years ago. She needed to be near the North Adams, Mass., Cummings Studio that was leading the stained-glass windows she was commissioned to create for St. Mary Cathedral in Portland, Ore. A huge easel window faces north, giving Coombs good daylight that becomes perfect for choosing color when there's snow on the ground. The north exposure is steady, cool, with no direct shafts of light. Coombs, 49, is deliberate about each color of glass she chooses, about each stroke she paints on the glass, because she is not only creating a picture out of glass and paint, she is transforming the atmosphere inside the building where her stained-glass creation will be placed. Stained glass is a complex medium, one that is difficult to work with successfully because of the technical and practical requirements. The heavy glass has to be securely supported, for instance, and the transparency has to be just right. But it's the medium Coombs favors. "I love it. It's a beautiful medium to work in, if challenging," she said. She spent three and a half years working on the more than 1,000 feet of stained-glass art that became the windows of the renovated cathedral in Portland. The eight new clerestory windows high in the nave reference the church's seven sacraments, and the six large and two half-height nave stained-glass windows represent saints and blesseds of the Americas. The stained glass was fabricated at Cummings Studios, with Coombs executing all glass painting and artwork. Once the project was commissioned, she researched the sacraments, the saints, and the blesseds that would be depicted in glass, and that study had a profound effect on this mother of two teenagers who was raised Anglican in England. Windows for the cathedral were to have a cultural theme to serve as a visual means of bringing together the different peoples and cultures that make up the country. Those depicted include St. Peter Claver, St. John Neumann, St. Rose of Lima, Blessed Damien de Veuster, Blessed Junipero Serra, and Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha. In her quest to learn about Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha, "the Lily of the Mohawks," Coombs attended two Native American conferences, one in Potsdam, N.Y., and one in Albuquerque, N.M. Being British, she felt it important to be particularly sensitive to the native culture, one "taken over" by British colonists, she said. At the conferences, she constantly asked participants for advice on how to depict Blessed Kateri in the stained-glass window. "I had so much invisible support," she said. "People were praying from all over." But it was an elderly Sioux man called "Mr. Rex" who gave her the profound advice that made a deep impact on her life: "You pray." "In my ignorance, I said, 'How?'" Coombs recalled. "He said to pray the Indian way. You give thanks." From that day on, she woke up every day and gave thanks for everything she had. Her husband, children, hands, eyes, intelligence, opportunities, sunshine. "I couldn't remember what I woke up 'whinging and whining' about; that's a British expression," she said. "If you spend time thanking God for what you have, the thankfulness vastly outweighs the difficulties." She did not grow up feeling confident the world was a good place, but now she sees every day as a gift, every minute as a miracle, Coombs said. "We're so fortunate just to be here." For her, "here" is the home she shares with her husband of 22 years, Richard Criddle, a bronze caster, sculptor, and the director of art installation and fabrication at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams about a dozen miles away. The family emigrated in 1996 and found their modest home on an acre of land, on a dirt road where the chirping of birds is interrupted only by an occasional car passing or the buzz of saws at a log cabin under construction just down the road. Her studio is attached to her home. Inside the studio on Rue Madeline, collages, cartoons, pictures and paintings hang in various stages of completion on the high walls, and books fill a case in one corner. Two six-foot-by-four-foot light tables are pushed together in one area, and a smaller one is positioned against a wall of windows overlooking the road beyond. There's a kiln and a woodstove, and even an afghan-covered chair where a sleepy cat dozes. It's not unusual in her studio to hear the sounds of Mozart in the background, or it could be African music or Mexican religious music, depending on the project on which Coombs is working. Stained glass is a time-consuming art. After researching her topic and consulting with the clients, Coombs - sometimes using her family or other people she knows for models - draws and refines her pictures that will be transformed onto the glass. Sometimes she has had to go back to the drawing board because a figure - of Jesus, for example - isn't looking in the right direction or his hands are not positioned in the right way. Once the drawings are approved, she "draws them up full size" - sometimes as large as 25 feet tall. Because her wall is only 15 feet high, she has to work in sections. "It's a bit mind-boggling," said the petite woman with graying hair who wears lightweight glasses. Next, she makes a pattern called a cutline to trace the shapes for the glass piece, cuts the colored glass, and paints the images and shadows onto the glass. Each piece is then fired two, three, or more times to meld the images onto the glass pieces, which are then leaded together. Although she does do some of her own leadwork, she sent the cathedral windows to the North Adams firm, giving herself more time to do the artwork and sharing work with other craftspeople. A juried member of the Vermont Arts Council, Coombs knew from an early age that she wanted to go to art school. During an exchange trip to Portland, Ore., while in high school, she stayed with a host mother who took her to art galleries, craft displays and a contemporary stained glass studio. "That was it. I'd decided to be a stained glass artist," Coombs said. She was educated at the Royal College of Art in London and Edinburgh College of Art in Scotland. "I have spent more than 30 years practicing, studying and teaching the art of stained glass. It is a passion and a means of exploring and connecting with the world," she said. "Each new project prompts practical, artistic, or technical challenges, and commissioned works provide me with a great excuse to study." Her work has been published, is held in public and private collections, and has been exhibited in Great Britain, the United States and elsewhere throughout the world since 1981, including Japan, France, Austria, Canada, and Australia. A solo exhibition of her stained glass took place at the Jeanetta Cochrane Gallery in London in 1994. Coal mining, slavery, botany, Native Americans, consciousness, communication, and chaos theory are just some of the subjects that have found their way into her work over the years. "There's a freshness and surprise to be found in the odd partnering of Medieval artisanship and contemporary ideas," she said. "Craftsmanship, my relationship with materials, provides a perfect counterpoint to the intellectual, scholarly side of art-making. The sensual and tactile qualities of glass and paint are alluring and absorbing both technically and artistically." The majority of her work is commissioned for a variety of historic and contemporary buildings. She has made stained- and etched-glass screens, windows and skylights for schools, libraries, hospitals, a law court, a traditional English tea shop, places of worship and private homes. Her largest commissioned work was for the Oregon cathedral, with its more than 1,000 square feet of hand-painted stained glass and a 120-square-foot, French-embossed (acid-etched clear glass) screen on the themes of cultural diversity and the sacraments. Noting that medieval stained-glass windows were created "to tell the Bible in pictures," Coombs said she hopes to not only communicate a story but to prompt reflection. "I don't have authority to teach about the faith, but I can listen to what the church wants to say something about in a window and offer something that allows the viewers the opportunity to reflect and connect with their own faith," she said. The windows are "like the labyrinth, a tool for worship and spiritual connection." She has taught at Pilchuck Glass School near Seattle and at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts in North Adams. She has taught a master class to stained glass professionals at the Millard School of Glass Painting in Antrim, N.H. Coombs also enjoys working with teenagers, and in 1981 she spent six months as artist-in-residence at Cymer Afan Secondary School in Blaengwnfi, Wales. "Fifteen years later it was gratifying to discover that the stained-glass window made under my wing by disadvantaged youth for their community center was still intact in an ex-coal-mining area with 60 percent unemployment and high vandalism," she said. In 1999, she spearheaded the creation of an after-school program here and continues to work with disadvantaged youth. She has been mentoring a high school student who spends time in her studio drawing and making stained glass each week. Coombs has taught stained glass at art schools throughout the United Kingdom and in Ireland, and was head of decorative glass studies in the School of Public Art, Chelsea College of Art, London, from 1992-95. She has given lectures and published papers about contemporary British stained glass in the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada, and given presentations on her own work to artists and stained glass professionals, church groups and local communities. Last year she was the keynote speaker at the annual conference of the Stained Glass Association of America and has spoken at the Artworker's Guild in London and at the British Society of Master Glass Painters. She is currently planning a solo show in London in 2007 and a show with others at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams next year. - - - Cori Fugere Urban is a staff reporter at The Vermont Catholic Tribune.

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This story was made available to Catholic Online by permission of The Vermont Catholic Tribune (www.vermontcatholic.org), official newspaper of the Diocese of Burlington, Vt.