Case Study
Our Lady of the Angels Church, Paradise Valley, Arizona
The Woman Clothed with the Sun, 2017. Mouth-blown antique glass with silver stain, acid etching, sandblasting, and vitreous enamels, laminated to safety glass. 31 ft 8 in × 10 ft 4 in.
A Stained Glass Case Study
I was sitting at the Dairy Queen in Colorado with my family when the call came. It was Mark Joseph Costello, a Capuchin friar and liturgical design consultant. He wanted to know if I might take a look at designing the stained glass for a new church at the Franciscan Renewal Center in Arizona. The church was still being designed and there would be nine windows. They had seen my website and loved my contemporary watercolor approach to stained glass, especially the windows I made for Gloria Dei. He asked if I could come down and visit with the art committee. Mark Joseph then began to describe a community with a clear and beautifully articulated Franciscan vision for their new church. The art program provided a theological structure, where the stained glass would serve the architecture as a vertical axis connecting earth with heaven. The church would be round, inclusive, and demarcated by walls of texture and light: earth and sky.
For the Woman Clothed with the Sun, I was asked to design a window that moved like leaves in a whirlwind or a feather on the breath of God. The committee’s guidance described Mary as “present to and one of us,” never a medieval queen. When I came back to present my initial designs, I decided to show this window first, since it was the largest. The room fell silent. Then the committee members began to speak, one after the other, with emotion and conviction. They said they hadn’t known ahead of time what they were looking for, but when they saw it, they knew this was it. I continued presenting the Canticle stanza windows, and when I showed the last one, Sister Death, people in the room began to cry.
The Vision
The heart of the vision is a Franciscan understanding of creation as gift, relationship, and return. The building itself expresses this: a grounded masonry base giving way to a luminous upper volume, earth reaching toward heaven.
Saint Francis saw a profound kinship with all creatures and creation. Written in the 13th century, his Canticle of Creation, with stanzas addressed to Brother Sun, Sister Water, Brother Wind, Mother Earth, Fire, Stars, and Sister Death, became the thematic structure for the stained glass. The windows create a sense of upward movement, of everything participating in praise and return.
The large window on the south side of the sanctuary rises nearly 32 feet. You see this window from Lincoln Drive as you approach the Franciscan Renewal Center. The window is Mary ascending as the Woman Clothed with the Sun, accompanied by angels, surrounded by Hubble-inspired galaxies in a swirling field of color and light. Saint Bonaventure’s image of the circle, with creation proceeding from and returning to its divine source, shaped the entire composition.
The Greccio Window
What inspired me about the Greccio window was not to do a typical nativity, but, like Advent, to create a window of waiting and hoping, to anticipate the coming of the Christ child. I imagined the shepherds coming down from the hills outside Bethlehem toward something they could not yet fully see, something announced to them by angels, something that had no precedent in human experience.
This reredos window presented a particular challenge, and is probably the most complex window I have ever designed. At the time I was reading A Wrinkle in Time to my daughters, and the idea of the tesseract stayed with me. If God became human, truly became human, in a specific place and moment in history, it had to have been like a warping of the universe. A folding of space and time around a single impossible event, unlike anything before or since. The vortex of circular white light that appears in the Woman Clothed with the Sun is shown here as a cosmic singularity, the universe bending toward a manger.
Fabrication
I have worked with Derix Glasstudios in Germany for twenty years to fabricate my designs. They are a five-generation, world-class studio whose stained glass is in the Cologne and Strasbourg cathedrals, and other significant sacred commissions worldwide.
The windows are made from mouth-blown antique glass, a process UNESCO recognized as Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2023. What Derix has done with this is to introduce techniques, like laminating on float glass, so that shape, and not lead lines, can carry the movement in the glass.
Olaf Hanweg, a master glass painter at Derix, painted the windows. I have worked with him on all my windows since the first one. He has a deep understanding of how I think, and I understand how he paints. Each window passes through multiple sessions of painting and firing, building the surface layer by layer into a subtle relief, so that it becomes alive with mark-making and carries what I feel is a presence.
Four members of the committee traveled to Germany to see the glass in production at the studio.
The Completed Work
The Canticle of Creation unfolds across the whole of the space, from the Marian window visible at the entrance to the cosmic humility of the Greccio reredos, from Brother Sun and Sister Water to Sister Death. Each window builds with the others. The sacramental axis Mark Joseph described for the stained glass program is conveyed to the community through the rhythms of the liturgy and the hours of the day. The windows project colors of dappled light across walls and floors that shift and deepen over time.
For the dedication, the Franciscan Renewal Center paid to have the glass painter Olaf Hanweg and glass etcher Roman Olichowski travel from Germany to Arizona to be present for the blessing of the church.
An architect on the committee wrote afterward: “Your art continues to take my breath away. You create such beautiful, dynamic, lyrical work. Thank you for your part in making beauty present.”
Recognition
The project received a number of significant awards following its completion, including the CODAawards Merit Winner and Top 100 in 2023, and Honor Awards from Faith & Form and the Interfaith Forum on Religion, Art, and Architecture in 2018 and 2019.
For Building Committees
Every project receives a detailed quote that accounts for every aspect of the work, design through installation. I have never added any charges beyond an accepted quote.
For many parishes, the renderings and presentation materials developed during design have proven to be among the most effective tools for a capital campaign. At Our Lady of the Angels, a single donor saw the digital rendering of the Marian window and funded the entire window based on that image alone. In another case, one panel of the Mother Earth window was completed and installed. A donor saw it in the space, understood immediately what the full program could be, and funded all the remaining panels.
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