Scott Swanson
Several years of fund-raising and planning came to fruition last week as stained glass artist Chuck Franklin and crew members installed the majority of a set of stained glass windows at the Sweet Home Library.
Franklin, of Portland, designed and built the scene, based on Foster Lake, he said, which depicts forests and mountains surrounding lake water.
“Oh my goodness, isn’t this amazing?” gushed Librarian Rose Peda as Franklin and two assistants, his nephew Quincy Franklin and Ron Branch, lifted the panels and screwed them into place over the east windows of the main library book room.
Franklin said the three have worked together “for years” and were all involved in building the windows.
Thus far, Peda said, the project has cost $17,000, all of it from private donations, money raised by the Friends of the Library and proceeds from the 2012 Dam Run put on by the city Youth Advisory Council.
“It’s beautiful said Jeanine Lane,” a Friends of the Library member, as she attended a reception Monday evening at the library to celebrate the installation.
The lead-process stained glass scene fits over the existing glass windows. That way they will be protected from the elements and from vandalism. They can also easily be removed for cleaning.
Franklin said his Portland-based firm, Chuck Franklin Glass Studio, which has produced art and architectural glass since 1974, began constructing the windows in early December.
He said the more elaborate end panels, which have more detail, took close to a week each to complete. The glass in the windows comes from two Portland glass manufacturers, Bullseye Glass and Uroborus Glass, both of which started about the same time as his firm.
“I’ve known the guys who started those businesses since I was young,” he said, adding that his proximity to the manufacturers gives him access to the best materials.
That includes the ripple glass that he used for the trees, which poses a challenge.
“It’s the hardest to work with because it’s hard to cut and tends to cut you,” Franklin said. “But nothing makes better trees than that ripple glass.”
He said there are other challenges in putting together a series of independent stained glass panels.
“One of the things about windows like this, when you’re laying them out, they need to flow from one panel to the next,” he said. “I’m always afraid we’ll have some water that doesn’t match, or something.”
Franklin said he designed the scene to try to allow light in through the lighter sections of sky, but at the same time screen out the power lines that are visible through the library windows.
Currently, four panels remain blank on each end of the stained glass scene.
Peda said Library Advisory Board members decided last fall to go ahead and buy as many panels as they could afford and fill in the rest when funds come in.
Franklin, a personable individual with infectious enthusiasm, said he hopes that happens, simply because he thinks the missing end panels represent the best part of the design.
“On the drawing, I’ve got a lot of design on the ends. I hope we can get to do that,” he said, adding that he’s got glass stashed away for that purpose.
His goal, he said, was to make the design “colorful.”
“I wanted to use glass that was real pretty, that had a little color. We’re going to have a lot of children come in.”
He noted he used some blue-green glass he’s been hoarding for years in the existing panels.
“I finally found the perfect place for it,” he said. “Some of it was made in early 1990. For 20-some years I’ve been holding on to it. Finally, the right project came along.”
Peda and Lane watched the glass change colors Monday evening at the reception, Peda pointing out how shifting hues of outside light from the setting sun caused the stained-landscape to take on a very different cast.
“The color is becoming more muted,” she said, as the blacks in a mountain element softened.
“The mountain is receding in the picture.”
Kevin Hill, a member of the Library Advisory Board, said Monday that he sees the stained glass windows as contributor to the community’s economic health, in the long run.
“Things like this give the city vibrancy,” he said. “I think the money was well worth it. I think it turned out beautiful.”