Jim Hauser Interview

What’s your name and what do you do?

I’m Jim Hauser, my brother and I own a company called Willet Hauser Architectural Glass. Basically what it is, is a stained glass studio plus. Our predominant product is still church windows but we are doing, about 10% of our business now is public art, mostly with the Metropolitan Transit Authority in New York City. Basically it is creating architectural works of stained glass art that will stand with architecture or by itself as individual pieces in the atmosphere.

How did you start working with glass?

I like to say I was born into it. My father started a glass company in 1946. It was mostly for restoration of existing stained glass windows. When he started the company I wasn’t that interested. I was only 6 years old at the time. But, by the time I got into college I found out I had a little art ability and by that time dad’s company started creating new windows also. so that I wanted to get into the family business at the particular time to see if I could create something in glass and also because I was relatively glib. My father wanted me to be out on the road as a salesman for the company. I figured if I couldn’t make it at sales I could do the artistic part of the glass. That is either the designing or the glass beading.

Did you do the glass designing?

I’ve done it. I’ve done almost everything in the studio but faceted glass by hand. Other than that I’ve designed it I’ve designed projects for about 10 churches and 2 or 3 private homes but I’ve got artists that are much better than I am. I usually do sales work and work with the clients and bring their ideas to the artists. I work very heavily in the restoration part of our business.

You mentioned your dad started the business. When did you actually get into the business?

My first year I went on the road, I traveled with my father’s business. Kind of a road crew that would go from church to church working on restoring stained glass windows. That was before I went into college. It was after I spent some time in the service. It was then that I decided that I didn’t want to go into the family business. But as things developed. When we started creating new windows I was interested because of the art ability that I found out I had in college. So that I was then able to change my mind back into the family business. On the new window part of the project because I didn’t care for the travel of the road crews that worked on onsite projects. As it turned out I traveled a lot more because I ended up being in sales visiting churches and my specialty for about 20 to 30 years was the restoration of the existing stained glass windows and working with clients to make condition reports. Telling them what condition their window was and what our recommendations would be for their long-term care.

One of the nice things about stained glass is that it lasts for along time if you take care of it well. I was in Augsburg Germany about 6 years ago and I saw 4 windows in the cathedral there that are the 4 oldest stained glass windows in the world. They were made approximately 1060 and are going on 1000 years old now. They’re still not in a museum but in a cathedral in their original place. They’re still the original windows. They were cared for very carefully over those 1000 years. Glass can last for a very long time if it’s properly cared for.

How did you start working with Arts for Transit?

Arts for Transit got together with us in about 1996 or 1997. They had worked with another gentleman in creating faceted glass panels from paintings of different artists and the gentleman, even though they were happy with him retired. He was an elderly gentleman and he had recommended that they work with us. They came to us with a project of that type. The Art for Transit project intrigued us right away because 1 it was one that was unlike anything that we were doing. In our stained glass for churches the stained glass was designed by a designer that created his designs with knowledge of faceted glass and how to work with the negative space and colors that were available, which glasses to chip and where to chip. This was all trained into him because he had gone through the different stages himself or herself. That was usually the way we worked in faceted stained glass.

Here the arts for transit program took local artists. Had contests with them to come up with designs. To create paintings that would be executed by us into faceted glass panels. To be used as windscreens for example down at elevated train stations as they remodeled. It was intriguing because we were going to do something that we’d never done before, taking somebody’s art and changing it into faceted glass. We had to collaborate of course we had to get the approval of the changes that we’d made with the artists but it was very interesting and intriguing and my hairline is like it is right now because of arts for transit. Because they came up with kinds of different problems where we would look at their paintings and we’d say we can’t do that in faceted glass. Faceted glass is pure color with negative space that’s created by the epoxy that binds the chunks of thick glass together. We can’t do that and then we’d find a way to do it so that we expanded our techniques and our pallets a hundred fold through this program. It has given us ways to handle faceted glass that we’d never thought about because these artists would come to us with different problems and our solutions to them were something we had never done before. But we were able to find different ways to work with it’s been very exciting. We’re still looking for other new ways right now and we’re getting more and more excited about the faceted glass that way.

Can you tell me about some of the problems that they came to you with and what some of the solutions were?

With faceted glass in particular we’re very limited in our color selection. There’s only 100 to 140 different colors of glass that are available and the artists would come without preconceived ideas so they have watercolor wash and we can’t do that. If you’re changing from one color, let’s say if you’ve got 3 or 4 shades of red and you want to have that same red go through an area there has to be a break between the darkest red, the medium red, and then the lightest red as you try to create something like that. It may not be exactly the same hue of red. One might be too orangish another might be towards the purplish side so you don’t get a smooth flow like you would if oils or in watercolors. Usually there has to be a break or a line between those changes too because you’re going to use a different color of glass to progressively get it lighter.

What we discovered is that we could fuse glass. We could take some of these pieces of glass and put paints on them. Sometimes some of the regular paints that we would use with normal stained glass would work on some of the glasses. Some times it wouldn’t. It was totally an experimental thing because faceted glass was not originally made for being painted on. Also we could take powdered glass, chunks of glass and fuse it, fire it get the glass to create a combination. Sometimes changing the color, staining it a little bit using textures. We would take the faceted glass in some cases and sandblast a pattern on the back of it which would give it a foggy looking pattern looking through it kind of a blurry wave to the front of the glass. Then on the front of the glass we might use a powdered glass called frit. Sprinkle that out there to give it a rough texture on the glass or if you fired it longer it fused firmly into the glass to give you colors that weren’t available from that hundred color pallet that you were always working on.

We found ways to expand our pallet and the colors and in some instances from the techniques that the artists themselves were using in oil we try to emulate parts of that. You couldn’t do it exactly like an oil painting and if you could it wouldn’t be glass anymore you might as well have just plain glass and oil. The beauty of the faceted glass is the thick chunks of glass that add a texture to it right away. The line created by the epoxy but now we’re adding something more. We can add some textures that are on the glass itself. We can add some lines that are on the glass and textured. We can add the sandblasted area on the back to create new designs that are in there so that our designers are learning from these inexperienced glass designers is what it boils down to because they are creating new ideas together.

How did you make this design?

This is Ellsworth Ausby the only that’s unusual about this artwork is that at first we didn’t have pieces of glass that are that big so what we did is we went to our restoration department. In the restoration of glass you try to save the original glass as much as possible so that if it’s broken and you have all the pieces we use special conservation glues to edge glue them together again and save the original glass because we want to save them for future generations. We never thought of using that same glue with faceted glass. So we were able to create the purple are that’s in here with large chunks of faceted glass that were edge glued together and create bigger, broader areas of color than we had before. The way we get the glass, it comes in a flagstone shape and it’s called a dalle which comes from dalle de air because France was the first country to use faceted glass. But the dalles that we get are usually about an inch thick varying form ¾ of an inch to an inch in thickness and then 8 inches by 12 inches so that’s the largest pieces that we can put together. But we started to edge glue and now we can put larger pieces together. But you have to be aware of expansion and contraction ratios because if you have 2 odd of an inside cut which would cause a fracture point because of expansion and contraction of the glass it would fracture in the future. You have to be very aware of those types of problems with glass. But anybody that works with glass would be aware of what you can do and what you can’t do as far as cutting the individual shapes in the glass.

There seems to be a pattern on the glass as well…

That’s accidental that pattern on the glass itself is nothing that we put on to it. What it is is that the glass that is utilized in the Blenko Glass Company in Milton West Virginia is the same glass that they utilize to make fine vases and to blow sheet glass for us for our stain glasswork but what happens here is it’s on a table. They have molds on the table that they pour that same molten glass into the harden into these dalles that are 1 inch by 8 inch by 12 inches and the pattern that is on the table is what’s picked up so that in this particular case what you get is almost like a tire tread pattern across some of the glasses and we’ll position the glass so that those textures are towards the viewer so that they’re accented a little bit, totally accidental. One of the nice things about glass, all art, is the happy accidents that you find creating, whether it’s an oil painting water color or in glass the same way. We look for happy accidents. Glass makers make good glass there are things that happen in there mouth blowing, you’ll find bubbles, striations, you’ll find mixtures of colors sometimes. You may have asked for a red but it’ll come with red and orange tone and a yellow tone at one end of the dalle or something. Those are the happy accidents that we find some way to use later on. We put them aside for when we can use them.

Tell me more about the depths of the glass.

The glass will come to us in different thicknesses anywhere from about ¾ of an inch to an inch and ½ but in some instances for small pieces of glass we want to make a textural statement like shown in this picture we might cut it on the edge so that what you’re looking at is the edge so we can make that stick out 8 inches from the surface of the epoxy almost because we could cut the other way on it and make it a thicker piece of glass but it’s only on smaller pieces that we can do that we can’t do that on every one of them. The does give it a very interesting textural quality to it.

What’s the reason for that is it about the light?

Our studio is located in Wynona Minnesota where we work with our faceted glass. We’ve got two studios one in Philadelphia and one in Wynona. All of the faceted glass comes through Wynona and the artists will usually come up for a day or two to approve the pallet they’ll approve that we’re going in the right direction and very often if they see some of the sample pallets that we’ve done for other people they’ll see some of the textural qualities of these glasses and try to get that in there and one of the ways to do this is by putting it on edge like this in certain areas. It would look out of place to do it too often. It’s best just to use it as accents the same with the hand chipping along the edges in some instances you’ll hand chip it very deeply along the edges and it will cause a sparkle on that edge as you’re looking at it but if you had every piece of glass and every edge sparkling all the same then it gets boring. What you want to do is bring your eyes to certain spots in the takayo Noda panels where she did a number of flowers roses and tulip the center of the tulips was another color of yellow inside a red tulip for instance and that would be heavily chipped, faceted, cause that to sparkle but the leaves of the tulip around it would not be because your eye would go directly to that sparkling area.

How many colors do you have in faceted glass as opposed to stained glass?

Stained glass has been around for almost 1000 years and you do have a much wider pallet in stained glass than you do in faceted glass. In stained glass we have probably around 5000 colors and tints, hues, things to work with. In faceted glass, which has only been around since the 1930’s, the pallet is much more limited and it’s probably somewhere between 100 to 140 colors that we can get so that we’re very much limited with basic colors there. That’s why the excitement of being able to change some of these colors through the application of paints, stains, glass powder, frit that we can fuse onto the glass, sandblasting, things like this creates a wider pallet for us to use and gives us much more excitement I think with the glass.

Can you name the first project in faceted glass?

I can’t name the first project but they started in the 1930’s before the Second World War in France and in this country we started in the 50’s. A number of different studios had seen what was done in France brought it over to the United States. Our studio started doing it in the late 1950’s when it was first being done it was done with glass in concrete rather than glass in epoxy and it was a very messy project to create those faceted glass panels and one of the biggest problems that they had was structural. In that the glass and the concrete did not adhere to one another. The glass was kind of loosely set after the concrete dried and they did not have the same coefficient of contraction and expansion so subsequently when it dried quick changes of temperature could cause the concrete to crush the glass or the glass becoming loose and actually falling out of position. When it was discovered that certain epoxies had an expansion and contraction ratio close to that of glass and would adhere to the glass they were developed for faceted glass use and there is one or two brands of epoxy that were developed specifically for faceted glass use. It’s much stronger than concrete, probably longer lasting, doesn’t need the internal reinforcing bars and best of all it does have that expansion contraction ratio so it worked out really good for the fabricators of faceted glass panels.

You mentioned longer lasting. How long would you expect faceted glass the last for?

This is a hard one to say. In lead and glass I could tell you about how long lead and glass might last. In the United States for example in most cases between 85 to 150 years is the age of when the lead in a leaded glass window has the be replaced. The glass can last for a much longer time if it’s taken care of. You get a faceted glass panel, we figure the epoxy is the equivalent of the lead but we don’t know how long it’s going to last. The epoxies have been around since around 1960 so some of the oldest faceted glass panels are going on now 50 years. Whether they’ll make 100 years 200 years, I’m afraid I won’t be around to find out.

Can you take me through the process of how you create these windows?

In creating the faceted glass windows, whether it’s the work of the MTA or our own artists basically the structural creation of the window is the same and it all begins with a design. The designer has to have a good sense of color and line usually because the epoxy does create negative space and the negative space is usually lines but one of the nice things about the epoxy is that you can vary it unlike leaded glass. Leaded glass you can vary the width but it isn’t a smooth variant. You have to paint on it in order to vary that line in leaded glass.

In epoxy it’s the negative space that binds the individual chunks of glass together like a mosaic so that you can make it very thick in some areas, thin in others to create your design it’s one the things that got me in particular excited about faceted glass because I like that idea and I designed about 4 of my projects myself in faceted glass for churches. It’s a medium that I like very much. So the stage is set so that the first stage is a design. If it’s a designer from the MTA then one of our designers has to work with them to cartoon the project. That is to break the color areas down into a linear quality so that we can put it together in chunks of glass in a mosaic like panel. Each of the windows, no matter how large the window is and in at least one installation we did a 9-story building entirely made with faceted glass panels. The panels have to be broken down in size to usually not more than 3 or 4 feet in any one dimension. You do that for a number of reasons. One is so there’s room for the panels to expand and contract. 2 for a larger window opening you have to be able to support it. You can’t just stack them all just one on top of the other so that a panel may support one more panel above it it won’t support it it wouldn’t support 10 panels above it so that you have to have a framing of some sort that puts it all together And the framing should be designed with the design of the window in mind so that it adds to it rather than distracts from the design of the artist. So you have to get together with the architect in the case of a large window. You have to get together with the framing engineer you have to have the artist and the designer work in conjunction to make sure that they all come together.

Once that problem is done and the artist does create a final drawing of each of his panels then a design called a cartoon, usually in black and white is created that shows where each individual piece of glass is going to go and what shape it’s going to be. At this time the glass selector who knows the pallet of glass or knows how to create the colors, textures that we now can get in the faceted glass will select the individual glasses for each spot. Indicate on them with a grease pencil what the size and shape of the glass is going to be and then the glasscutter will cut it either with a saw or with a hammer. Most often the glass is finished off with a hammer because it gives a hand hewed rough edge of the glass that will cause a little bit of sparkle on the edge. Areas where we want the deeper sparkle we will hit a little bit harder from the edge causing a deeper concave curved piece of glass the fly out of there and it will cause highlights in that particular area of the glass. Once all of the individual glasses are then cut, positioned on a cartoon panel they will go to the room where we actually pour the panels.

The first stage now is to make a flat bed of sand on one of our tables we use for pouring. On that flat bed of sand, that very smooth flat bed of sand we will put the cartoon. The cartoon now has been prepared by having gone over and outlining each piece of glass with a spoked wheel that causes perforations to be poked in the cartoon that stick out on the other side so that when you lay it on the soft sand it gives us little indentations outlining where each individual piece of glass goes. The glass then is positioned appropriately on the top of the sand bed and a Styrofoam frame is placed around it to limit the size of the flow of the epoxy. The epoxy is mixed because it comes to us in two parts with the hardener and the basic epoxy. They’re mixed together until they’re a semi liquid, like a very thick milkshake. Then utilizing crushed cans or squeeze bottles we will pour the liquid epoxy between the individual pieces of glass. They have to set up after this for about three or four days before we can move them off the table. So on larger projects we build new tables because we are limited to about four or five pouring tables in our studio.

After they come off of the table then there are areas that we have fine lines to pour in where unfortunately sometimes we get a little bit of the epoxy on the surface of the glass. Down in the groove between the glass is where we met it. So then we have to heat that up with a hot gun and chip that off of the surface of the glass. Clean it up and do some finishing to the final piece of glass and then crate it up and take it to site for installation by one of our crews.

So you do the installation?

We do most of the installation. The MTA program is a little bit different. The arts for transit program is part of the New York City or State, probably State laws where they have to have a certain amount of their budget when they remodel or make a new building, a government building. They have to have a certain amount of budget for the art that would decorate that building. And the MTA is remodeling their elevated train stations and as they remodel them and bring them up to date they have to use a certain percentage of their money towards the art. This is where the arts for transit program came into being and where the idea of using the windscreens developed. Thus far we’ve been fortunate. We’ve been chosen to do over 30 of the renovated stations with 30 different artists for the arts for transit program.

Do you do the actual installation of the projects?

For most of our projects we do do the actual installation on site. For the arts for transit project because it is part of the renovation of the existing elevated train stations the contractor there will install the panels into the windscreens. It’s not a real difficult installation so if they’re still on site from their renovation they’ll do it. In a few instances the panels or the artist weren’t selected until after the station was well underway so the panels were not done at the same time that they still had contractors available to insert them they’d hire us. But in most cases the arts for transit people have their own contractors do the installations.

How thick is the epoxy and how can you use the epoxy to make lines when things are too delicate?

The epoxy itself, the panels are usually about 5/8 of an inch thick in some instances they’ll go up to an inch or a little bit thicker in a few rare instances we’ve made them much thicker because we’ve sculpted the epoxy also for an outside appearance. In some instances also the glass cannot be cut to the shape that the artist would like it to be cut to. They’ll put lets say the silhouette of a figure together in epoxy but that means there are some inside curve cuts that we might have to do that would not be structurally sound in something that’s going to expand and contract with weather changes. That would crack a piece of glass that we’ve cut into that particular shape. So what we’ll do instead is use a structurally sound piece of glass and sand the design into the surface of the glass. We will only go down maybe a quarter of an inch with the sandblasting but we can sandblast that design into it and then pour into the sandblasting with our epoxy over the surface of the glass. That will give the appearance of having cut the shape that the artist wanted us to cut but knowing that it was structurally unsound we made sure instead that it was structurally sound by using this technique of sandblasting and pouring on the sandblasted area.

Can you talk about painting on the glass?

Traditionally with faceted glass there was very little or no painting on the glass it was a mosaic of color and line and that was it. It was just the raw glass and the line formed by the epoxy. You get into a rut and start thinking that’s all you can do is what you’ve learned. Everybody’s heard the phrase, “that’s the way it’s always been done.” Well unfortunately that’s what happened to us with epoxy and faceted glass also we didn’t realize that a lot of the techniques that we used in leaded glass could be translated over the faceted glass. Faceted glass was not made like leaded glass for painting on it and when you paint on leaded glass what you’re painting with is a mixture of ground glass, a coloring agent of some sort and a binder to make it liquid so you can put it on the glass. Then when you fire it in the kiln you bring it up to about 1100 degrees. What you’re doing is bringing it up just barely to the melting point so that the binder burns off and the color and glass fuse with the base glass and it becomes permanent. It can’t be scraped off if it’s done properly.

The faceted glass because it was not made specifically for that type of technique you get some interesting things that will happen to it. Some of the faceted glass we can paint on and fire other colors on to it. In other instances we’ll paint it and fire it and the whole piece of glass will just turn black. So that it’s now unusable. There are sometimes happy accidents. We paint with one color and get a different color totally so that we find something more about what we can do with it. The other thing we can do with it we found out is fuse with powdered glass called frit. Sometimes it will sometimes it won’t. It’s very interesting to see what will happen but it’s expanding our pallet significantly by being able to use some of the traditional techniques such as painting on glass and frit on glass to expand our pallet on faceted glass.

What’s the difference between faceted and stained glass?

The basic glass is made the same way. I’ve got to give you a little bit of history on glass for that. The glass we use in traditional stained glass is usually about ¼ of an inch thick. It is made in a variety of different ways. The finest glass is what’s called antique glass because it’s made in what’s called the antique method of mouth blowing with hand making of the glass. In this particular type of glass it is done with a traditional wide cheek glass blowers. A factory in Germany is where we get most of them. Basically what they do is they work as a team. A colorist will put the chemicals into a metal pot that is then put into a large furnace and fused with basic glass ingredients. The chemicals that are put in are what determine the color of the glass. As it becomes fused into a molten piece of glass a glass blowing team will gather a glob of glass on the end of a long blowpipe. With those large bulby cheeks they blow into it and create a bubble on the end of his blowpipe, which is probably about 4 or 5 feet long. He’ll start swinging it back and forth to elongate the bubble and then blow into it a form that creates this bubble into a cylinder that is about 30 inches tall and maybe about 12 to 15 inch circumference.

As a team you will work with another gentleman who will cut off the end of the bubble from the blowpipe and then cut it along the sides the cylinder. The cylinder is then open on both ends with a cut along the side put into another oven which slowly heats it up to make it soft and it can be manipulated down into a sheet that’s about 30 by 30 and then when it slowly cools and flattens it comes to us. Because it’s made by hand by mouth blowing there are these happy accidents that happen inside of it. Some of them are accidents caused on purpose but they could be bubbles, striations, anything that can cause your eye to stop at the plane of the glass. The finest glasses will have a variety of different sized happy accidents in them. They’ll usually only have one color in them when that’s all they dip into on their gather but they can create other colors by dipping into more than one color. They get a gather of red and lets say purple and then when he starts blowing it he may swirl it a little bit so that you’ll get streaky lines of purple throughout a red sheet and it will create some very interesting happy accidents with the color so that we can utilize those also.

He creates an interesting kind of glass called flash glass where he would put a piece of clear glass on the end of the glass and then dip into the red and get a clear surface over the glass. He’ll bow a cylinder cut it go through the same steps. When you look at the glass it comes out and looks red but if you look at the edge very carefully you’ll see that it is mostly clear with a flash of red on the surface. Then if we want to do something very delicate with the red we can cut away parts of it by either sandblasting or using acid to etch away parts of it. An illustration of that is when we did some work for West Point they had a small flag in one of the windows that was only about 8 inches long but they wanted to have all the stripes and all the stars in that flag. If you had to make a color change and put a piece of lead in-between each individual color you’d have all lead and little color chips showing. So what we did was take a piece of red on white flash glass. Flash away everything that was not red then we took a piece of blue on clear flash glass and flashed away the stars and everything that was not blue. Put the two of them together and we had our red white and blue flag. Then we had to paint the surface on the top to give it the realistic folds and the shading that was needed but that all went into putting together one piece of glass so that is the antique glass. You can also take that same antique glass, pour it onto a table and run a mechanical roller over it while it’s in a molten state. Doing so will give you some interesting textures. They’re not as nice and bright as happy accidents but it does give you some interesting textures that you can use, a unique American glass. American opalescence glass is made in that way too but it’s used as basically more as a white opaque background glass with every color and so consequently it is more opaque but it does give you a reflective quality that the antique glasses will not. Now, having said that about leaded glass the faceted glass is made by pouring it into a mold on a table, similar to what the cathedral glass, which is the antique glass with the mechanical texture over the top of it but here they don’t put a mechanical texture on it. The only texture you get in the faceted glass is whatever is picked up from the surface of the table but it’s basically the same glass that is used to make the mouth blown glass.

How come there are fewer colors? Do they just choose not to make more colors?

That’s exactly it. They have fewer colors because they chose not to make more than these particular colors. We can go to them with a special color if we want to provided we’ll order enough of them. In 1964 when we did the world’s fair building of 5400 panels of very very dark blue glass we had to go to them and have those made. But then we had to buy all that they made and to be on the safe side we’ve had, for almost 40 some years, we’ve had extra dark blue glasses that we cannot use on any other project because it’s too dark.

So the faceting is done with a hammer?

Yes all of that is done with a hammer. You can see part of the film that I showed you earlier there were some pieces of glass that were sitting on a light table and those pieces of glass on the table. The lower parts of those pieces have kind of a foggy edge on them. They were cut with a saw and then the top was hammered to get a rough edge. The hammered edge is what’s going to be sticking out of the epoxy the sawed edge down below will be in the epoxy and will not be seen so we can leave that textured saw mechanical edge there. We don’t like that edge to show if we can help it because we like to show it off as being a handcrafted piece of art as much as possible eliminating the appearance of the saw edges.

Is there a problem with the glass cracking when you’re cutting it?

Sometimes it’ll break in the wrong place. There are only two American manufacturers of this glass. Most of it we get from Blanco Glass Company in Milten West Virginia the other we get from Kokomo Glass Company in Kokomo, Indiana. There are also some French manufacturers of this we do not utilize them very much. We utilize the American glass studios. There have been a few other glass studios back 20 or 30 years ago that tried to make the faceted glass dalle but ones of the bad problems was that they wouldn’t crack predictably with the tools. The hammers and saws we were used to working with so consequently they weren’t used and we do know how to work with the two American companies glass. That doesn’t mean that accidents don’t happen where there’s unusable glass. It does happen from time to time but we have a lot of experience working with this particular glass and consequently it doesn’t happen too often.

If there is a mistake is it a wash?

If the pieces are large we can utilize them somewhere else. In our bins of glass at the studio we have the full bales resting in certain bins and then there’s loose half dalles and smaller pieces set in boxes directly above the individual color that’s stored bellow. So that the first thing that the glass selectors will do is look at the smaller cuts and see if there is any use for them before they break the dalle.

You mentioned that one of the companies that you use is in financial turmoil.

The Blenko Company use natural gas for making their glass and consequently they’ve had some problems because natural gas has gone up in price over the last two or three years and they had a problem with their gas supplier for a while. And consequently they did go into chapter 11 I believe it was and are working their way out of it. We’re hopeful that they will do that. The Kokomo Company has said that they can pick up the slack if they have to. But the biggest amount of glass that we get is from the Blenko Company.

What was the first station that you did for MTA and what kind of input did you have?

I don’t remember the particular station. I do remember a couple of artists that we worked with that were probably the first ones that we worked with. The two first artists were Yumi Heo and Al Loving. Al Loving’s designs had a linear quality to them that was pretty much already determined to be faceted glass very easily from the quality of his design work. I think maybe he had studied a little bit about faceted glass before he did his artwork. Yumi on the other hand had a very primitive style. And here stations that she worked with were in Queens and I remember she had the alphabet there. Q is for queens. She used the alphabet for the different groupings of panels that she designed and they could be animals they could be folk images they could be an oriental dragon dance. All of them were exciting to work with. She again knew a little bit about the faceted glass so her designs were pretty easy to translate into faceted glass. It wasn’t until about the fourth or fifth project that we started getting some artists that were determined that they were going to have some things that we didn’t think we could do but found out we could. It was extremely interesting at first just to get our feet wet in the project because we hadn’t worked that much in public art and then a transition came at the right time so we started being the go to person for artists when the arts board of the arts for transit people recognized that there was perhaps going to be a problem in translating that to glass. When they didn’t want to make too many changes they started coming to us with problem projects and fortunately it’s been good for us. We’ve worked them out. Sometimes it’s yelling back and forth.

What kind of artistic input do you have?

The biggest artistic input would be tuning of the design because very often the artists don’t realize that we’re going to have to break up the background of the project, larger pieces into smaller pieces and so that there’s going to be a linear quality to the design. We have to one work with the original artist and make sure that there is a flow to the design. I’ve done a couple of those cartoons myself. What I try to do is that even though I might see something that makes me say I wish I could do it this way I will always try to interpret from what the artist has indicated and what the artist says to me over the telephone or through emails as to what their intent is. I try to interpret that into the linear quality that we add to the fine-tuning by adding the epoxy lines to the piece. It’s the artist’s work. It’s not our work. We’re a part of it but what we’re adding to it is the technical part of it in making his or her art the best we can with our knowledge of the technique of faceted glass and the knowledge of what our limitations are. Even though we’ve found ways to create other colors and textures there are still a lot of limitations of faceted glass so we have to make sure that we do the best we can within those limitations to create what the artist intended.

How long does it take to create one of these pieces?

Usually the MTA will come to us with a project and tell us that it’s due about a year from the time that they originally ask us to give them a price on a project. It would be easier if we were designing it ourselves. It would probably take half the time. Not that we’re working on it all the time but being an agency that we’re working from a studio in Minnesota with and artist that is usually in New York City and with an arts board of the MTA that has to approve different things. They have a manager there that has to approve things too. There are levels of approval that we have to go through with the MTA that we don’t have to go through with our normal projects. It doesn’t mean that it’s bad it just means that it’s different and it does add time.

What about delivering these things? Have you had any disasters?

Yeah we’ve had some problems. We haven’t had problems with transportation and crating. Where we have had problems is in a few instances we’ve had the crates stacked and ready for the MTA installers and a month later the MTA would call us and say you have to do a panel over. What happened is that someone put a forklift fork through one of the panels? So then we’d have to take what’s left of it. Try to take whatever glass we could out of it and try to make it into new glass.

How does it get transported?

There’s two different ways that we can transport it. We have racks in our trucks if we transport them ourselves. Otherwise we put them into crates with Styrofoam around them. Put a couple of panels to a crate put Styrofoam between and around them.

How do the crates get there?

Most of the time we will take them in one of our transport trucks. If they’re crated they would perhaps be taken in one of our tracker trailer trucks to our Philadelphia studio and then transport them from there to the site in New York.

How long does that take?

We actually have trucks going back and forth between our studios so that doesn’t take long at all. The actual transportation time is a day and a half to get from one studio to another and a couple of hours from Philadelphia to New York as long as we don’t hit rush hour.

Do you have a small mockup of the glass before you start the large panel?

As part of working with the MTA we have a number of approvals. We’re transforming the artist’s work into glass and the artist hasn’t seen his or her work in glass yet. We do have to send samples of the pallet of glass that we select based on the artist’s paintings and we send the samples both to the MTA and the artist color-coded and we keep a sample of the pallet for ourselves. We also send samples of the cartoons that have to be approved but then before we actually start cutting the full sized glass we take a section of a panel for a sample. The sample is 18 inches by 18 inches and actually cut the glass that we’ve selected from our pallet and put it in position, paint on the glass do anything we have to do to make it look like it’s going to look in the final work. We send that to the MTA. The MTA project manager and the artist get together to critique it at that particular point. Especially for color and texture that has to be chosen and give us the input on that. The next step one they approve that is to fine tune it so we can start cutting the glasses and prepare for a visit by the artist. After the panel has been approved by both the artist and the MTA manager then the artist will very often visit our studio for a day or two to see some of the glasses that we’ve cut laid out on light tables so that he or she will get a good idea of what the glass will look like. In some instances we’ll put a bed of dark sand on the light table between the individual glasses so they can see what it’ll look like with the epoxy surrounding it and they can fine-tune it. We fine tune on all of the glasses while the artist is up there so that we can then go into the actual fabrication and go into detailed cutting of the glass and start pouring panels. Usually what we end up doing after that for the panels that the artist hasn’t seen is take photographs on a light table and send them to the artist and the MTA manager so they see what progress is being made as we go along with the project. We’re working from a design that is always evolving into a piece of glass. We have to educate them along the way and educate ourselves.

Does it ever get very frustrating?

That’s why my hair looks like this. It can get frustrating at times but we’ve been able to work it out. If it got too frustrating we’d say forget it we’re not that interested in those kind of projects but we have found them to be very rewarding projects. We enjoy the final results and we’ve been able to expand our pallet and our ability to use different techniques on faceted glass because of what we’ve learned in working with the problems that we’ve developed with these projects.

Do you ever ride on the subway and admire your work?

One of the enjoyable parts of the job that I do is that unlike most of our crafts people who never get a chance to see the panels as windscreens is that I do get to see these. I travel a lot and visit with the clients and consequently can go to see them and take photographs so that people in our studio can see them. I do every now and then, in New York get on the subway, ride the line that we’ve got a number of panels at each one of them get off at every stop and take fresh photographs for our archives.

Some of the stations have had problems with graffiti and other damage.

Unfortunately there’s been damage to some of the panels. It’s been limited which is very nice. I guess being glass people sometimes think they need to break it, the glass if they possibly can. It’s been limited to a few stations. But there are a few stations where it looks like someone took a large sledgehammer and deliberately went after the panels broke off individual pieces of glass and smashed the epoxy in some instances. The MTA is looking into different ways to protect the panels. They haven’t come up with a method yet but we are working with them on that. Also they’ve had graffiti in the form of scratching in some instances and in the form of paint on top of the glass. In the case of the paint they’ve come up with some techniques where they can take that off and they’ve been able to be pretty successful with that.

What about Van Siclen?

They put up the wood there because someone had taken a hammer to one of the panels and broken it. We’re to them now. They have to work like everybody else in this economy they’ve got economic problems right now and they’ve got to find the money to repair those particular panels. We’ve got the cartoons and the color selection but what we’d like to do is take the panels out, bring them back to the studio and if there’s a way to reuse some of the original glass we’d like to do that for the history of it. So we maintain the original glass as much as possible.

Is it upsetting?

Certainly it is. You put a lot of work into it and any artist hates to see their work destroyed but any artist also hates to see anyone else’s work destroyed whether they liked it or not. It’s something that makes our world better by having it there for all of us to appreciate. The artist and arts for transit is trying to make subway riding and commuting a little bit better for everybody there and unfortunately some people see that as targets.

Tell me about the video.

The artist shown in the video is a gentleman named Michael Miller. He won one of the arts for transit contests to be able to create the art for one of the windows. Interesting enough the particular panels we show on the video do not show his interest, which is surfing. The other panels will show that. In rockaway near the beach these panels are going to be where you can see the ocean in some of them. So he’s got surfing figures in some of his panels. Somewhat abstract but there’s a lot of interesting water spray coming off of the surfers. A lot of different things that created a lot of the problems that created those happy accidents. Michael is a teach and an artist that won his contest with the MTA to create the art for that particular section of the line and he visiting our studio in Minnesota to fine tune the first design to make sure we were on the right track with the colors and all. He also took time out to cut one piece of glass so that he could say that he did apart of the cutting of one of his panels also.

And the other panel?

The panel that was fabricated shown from design stage to the actual fabrication of the panel was by Joseph Cavalieri and Joseph is an artist that has worked in stained glass before but it was all in leaded glass. He had never worked with faceted glass before and he was familiar with the idea of plating and the idea of painting on the glass so that our designs that are painted on his particular glass. There’s a rather detailed border that he created that we stenciled on the glass and replicated it on a number of pieces of glass. He liked the appearance of the glass when the design is on the inside rather than the outside so you have to look through an inch of glass in order to see this idea. And of course it’s wavy, it’s muted in its color. That’s for the border. In the flower like symbol the round piece of glass in the center. That was painted on the front side with the white piece of glass with red paint. Hand painted onto the surface of that. Again, a stencil was created but then before it was fired the designing artist Joseph came in and with brushes and needles he sharpened the edges and took out areas of deep color where he wanted to so that he could get his input on how he wanted that area to appear.

Have you had other artists do that?

In some instances artists have done some painting on the glass. In most cases they leave it to us. Some of them want to be hands on. Joseph has worked with glass paint before so he was very familiar with the technique and doesn’t have to learn a new skill to work with it.

Your dad created the company. What kind of knowledge did he have in glass?

He was an entrepreneur. My dad did not cut apiece of glass ever. He would smash his finger if he picked up a hammer to cut a piece of faceted glass and he’d probably cut himself on a piece of leaded glass. He saw an opportunity after the end of the Second World War to service small churches that had been neglected because of the shortage of raw materials during that particular period of time. There was a big boom in church building and church restoration and the studios were extremely busy. They had backlogs that were years old so if a small country church had a few pieces of glass that they wanted to have repaired or replaced and they went to one of the larger studios at the time they’d be told, “you take out the window, you ship it to us and maybe in a year or two you might get it back with the repairs.” My dad said, we have people that could do that in a day or two at the church. So, he hired the appropriate crafts people and started around southern Minnesota going out and repairing small projects. Along the way we learned how to repair and restore projects and by 1966 our firm, the Hauser Art Glass Company was the largest studio in the country. 85% of our business was repairing and restoring and protecting older stained glass windows. At that time in 1977 Crosby Willet of the willet studios contacted us. That studio had been around since 1898 his grandfather founded it for the express purpose of creating new stained glass windows. His grandfather was an artist who wanted to create his work. When Crosby called us 85% of the business of the willet studios was in creating new stained glass windows. He said he wanted to get rid of the problems of running the studio. He also admitted to us that there were financial problems that he and his father were having with the studio and it would probably close if we didn’t buy it. It had a tremendous history in American stained glass. I could talk for 50 minutes just on their history. We talked for a while and after about 2 months of investigation we did agree to purchase the studio…