Windows of Colored
Glass

by Laura Austrian

A private tour of one
of the area's grand homes on a perfect spring day? Count
me in. Artist Kathleen Gavin, who invited me to
accompany her to Wilderstein one afternoon in April,
has spent the last few years restoring the stained glass windows at the
Queen Anne style home, which has a dramatic five-story tower and
spectacular Hudson River views. She suggested that
we visit Wilderstein in the afternoon, when the
sunlight makes the windows sparkle. Stepping
inside the house was like entering another era. The
colorful windows glowed in the afternoon sun, illuminating the entryway's
dark oak paneling and tooled leather walls. Portraits
of members of the Suckley family, who were descendants
of the Beekmans and Livingstons,
hang proudly in the hall.

The day before my private tour, Gavin had installed
the third of three restored windows, each approximately two feet high by
two-and-a-half feet wide, located on the landing of the Wilderstein's
grand wooden staircase. As Wilderstein's
glass artist-in-residence, her task was to remove and refurbish the window,
which featured a Victorian floral pattern in a palette of pale blues,
purples, pinks, and golds. In
addition to hundreds of flat glass pieces, the window features cast glass—three-dimensional
glass pieces resembling gemstones. According to Gavin, the main problem
with Wilderstein's windows is bowing, a condition
that occurred in stained glass windows made after the Civil War when silver,
a strengthening agent, was removed from lead. The
silver-less lead holding these pieces in place had weakened over the years,
giving the window an undulating appearance. "You
don't see this in medieval windows," said Gavin, who told me that the
equivalent lead used today is strengthened with antimony.

The painstaking
process of restoration required Gavin to release the window from the frame
that had held it for over 100 years, make a charcoal rubbing of it in order
to record the location of each piece of glass, remove the lead holding the
glass in place and, using dental tools, chip away at the brittle cement
that had once held the glass securely within its leaded channel. After removing the old cement, Gavin cleaned the glass
using a gentle detergent in order to remove a century's worth of coal dust
that coated it. Then, using new lead and fresh
cement, she fitted and soldered the glass pieces back together, replaced
the window in its frame, and returned it to its original position in the
home.

"Wilderstein is a wonderful place and I feel very
honored that I get to do this work," said Gavin, who spends about 150
hours over the course of a year restoring a window. In
three years she has restored three windows; about 33 remain to be restored;
they will be addressed in order of need. Though
the creator of Wilderstein's windows is uncertain—a
few resemble the style of artist John La Farge while the others seem
to be closer in style to that of Louis Comfort Tiffany—Wilderstein's
executive director Gregory J. Sokaris noted, "They are beautiful regardless of who
made them."

Gavin does her work
on Wilderstein's windows in a workshop on the
property, but she has had her own studio in Red Hook since 1987. Growing up in a family that valued craftsmanship, she
became interested in glass during the 1970s, when the work of artist Dale Chihuly began to attract attention. After
a two-year apprenticeship with one of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's
glass conservators, she set up her own studio, which is called Visual Music
Studio. Lately she has become interested in
creating fused glass, in which pulverized glass called frit is
melted in a kiln to create various abstract patterns. For
Gavin, who also works full-time at the Astor Home for Children as an art
therapist, glass is a medium whose textures, colors, and patterns are all
expressive.

Artist Doris
Cultraro, who established her Rhinebeck studio last year, was introduced to
stained glass in the 1970s when a jewelry making class in which she had
enrolled in New York City was cancelled and, instead of requesting a
refund, she transferred into a class on stained glass. From
the mid-1970s to early 1980s Cultraro had a studio and art gallery, first
in Larchmont and then in New York City. In 1983
she moved to Mount Vernon and continued to attract stained glass
commissions from private clients for residences, churches, and synagogues,
even while she worked more than forty hours a week at a corporate job. In 2004 she returned to working on stained glass
full-time. Last year she relocated from Mount
Vernon to Rhinebeck and set up her own shop, called DC Studios LLC, in her
home. Though Cultraro was familiar with the area
since her father-in-law has lived in Staatsburg for the last 15 years, she
is only now getting to know it better. She speaks
excitedly about the beauty of the stained glass found in local churches and
homes such as Wilderstein. She
said, "I can't tell you how much I love stained glass. It is really a passion for me."

Cultraro describes
her artistic style as "photo-realism." She
designs all of the pieces she makes. Although she
does sketch her designs occasionally, she prefers to work on the computer. After Cultraro creates a design for the window, panel,
lampshade, or other item commissioned by a client, she translates it into a
pattern. She then begins cutting glass and fitting
pieces together. Between the pieces Cultraro
typically lays copper foil or lead, depending on the type of project she is
working on. She then solders the metal so that it
holds the glass in place. Once she adds a patina
to the piece, it is finished.

Cultraro also does
restoration work. Her current project is the
restoration of a ten-foot-high, six-foot-wide window whose creator is
unknown. Cultraro, like Gavin, is meticulous in
her work. She estimates that she will spend about
18 weeks, and more than eight hours per day, on this window, which her
client found in a salvage yard in Yonkers in the 1960s and purchased for
$100. The window features the figure of a woman
whose white gown is rendered in pieces of pearly, three-dimensional glass
called "drapery glass" because of the way it cascades out of the
frame. The figure, whose face and hair are painted
on a single piece of glass, is surrounded by an abstract floral pattern
rendered in various shades of green, blue, purple, pink, and gold.

Cultraro's task is to take apart the
window piece by piece, replace damaged glass, clean the salvageable glass,
redo the metalwork, and build a new frame, which can be no more than
one-half-inch smaller than the original frame. She
also hopes to find a signature painted on one of the glass pieces so she
can identify the maker. Regardless of who that is,
however, Cultraro believes the window to be of very high quality. She said of the project, "This is really what we
live for—windows
like this."