LOS ANGELES — In 1893, an itinerant plein-air English painter
came to the West Coast to die. At 51, William Lees Judson could look back on a
life full of adventure: trans-Atlantic crossings, farming Ontario’s plains,
fighting under Ulysses Saint Grant in the Civil War, beaux-arts immersion at
Paris’ Académie Julian. When his wife died suddenly and his own health soured,
doctors advised him to take the “California cure” and spend his last days in
the Golden State’s hot, dry air.
اضافة اعلان
“Instead, he lived another 35 years, started
University of Southern California’s (USC) College of Fine Arts in this building, and helped
launch the Arts and Crafts movement,” his great-great-grandchild David Judson
said recently at the stained glass studio the elder Judson founded in 1897.
From the studio in Highland Park, with its views of the San
Gabriel Mountains and Arroyo Seco, its original crown moldings, terra cotta
portico, light fixtures and over 500 types of colored glass on display — a
palette of sorts for the studio’s artisans to choose from — one can nearly
picture Los Angeles as the sleepy cow town it once was.
Five generations of Judsons would fabricate stained glass
windows for Craftsman homes in Pasadena and Hollywood, including Frank Lloyd
Wright’s Ennis and Hollyhock Houses —
The United Nations Educational,Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) sites whose windows were
angle-heavy glass abstractions that Wright called “light screens” — as well as
glass murals at Grauman’s Egyptian Theater, the globe chandelier at the historic
Central Public Library in Los Angeles and countless churches, synagogues and
museums.
Beyond California, the studio’s best known work includes the
space-age glass at the US Air Force Academy’s Cadet Chapel, a midcentury marvel
in Colorado; and the 100-foot-wide, $3.4 million fused-glass window at the
Church of the Resurrection in Leawood, Kansas. Artisans created 14,000 kg of 17
colored glass pieces for the Burj Al-Arab hotel’s lavish atrium fountain in
Dubai — and bronze-colored glass for Kelly Wearstler-designed cabinets and
sliced-agate glass door panels for Christina Aguilera.
Stained glass was born in the churches of medieval Europe and is
mouth blown, then hand-cut and assembled with strips of lead. Judson is steeped
in the tradition of leaded glass, but also excels at a process in
which glass is heated to more than 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit, which fuses
multiple pieces and forms new colors. The most expensive color is pink, Judson
said, because it is made using gold flakes.
The studio has over the last four years teamed up with a cadre
of local emerging and established artists who designed murals, streetscapes,
even sculpture, which Judson fabricated for a debut show that was scuttled
because of the pandemic.
“World War I, the 1918 pandemic, World War II, we were open for
all of that,” said Judson, who closed for three months last year because of
COVID-19. (The staff was cut to 18 employees from 30.)
This pause presented something unexpected which helped the show
come to fruition: time to perfect the multiyear, labor-intensive undertakings,
which take eight to 10 hours to design and paint per square foot. Next week,
those pieces that the artists started years ago will be unveiled in the debut
exhibition, at Forest Lawn, a museum that doubles as a memorial cemetery and
park, and is also known as a Los Angeles landmark.
Glass portraits of a deified
Kobe Bryant, gothic script mosaics
and abstract sculptures are among the fusions from Tim Carey, who worked with
the Mexican-Italian artist Narcissus Quagliata on the Resurrection window;
David Flores, known for pop art murals and commercial work; Miles MacGregor,
aka EL MAC, an acrylic painter with murals in Cuba and Cambodia; Marco Zamora,
known for paintings of the blue-collar side of town; and the experimental
filmmaker Alice Wang, whose work is influenced by the La Brea Tar Pits.
The collaborations break “all the rules of stained glass,” said
James Fishburne, the director of the Forest Lawn Museum. The venue breaks rules
too, said Zamora, who called Forest Lawn an “unexpected place to show” in an “unexpected”
year.
The show, which is free, runs from April 28 to September 12 and
includes nearly 100 original pieces. It also reveals the medieval stained glass
built into Forest Lawn’s walls, including some designed by Albrecht Dürer. Many
of the glass pieces in Forest Lawn’s collection that will be part of the show
were created between the 12th and 16th centuries in France and Germany and
bought from the collection of William Randolph Hearst.
“We’re a hidden gem and we’re trying to unhide it,” Fishburne
said.
Judson Studios began working with Forest Lawn in 1920 on a group
of ceiling lights and windows for its Great Mausoleum.
There are many steps in creating windows, Judson explained, and
that means ample room for errors. That was especially pointed for what may be
the studio’s most ambitious project: “Pagoda,” a massive glass dome from
Taiwanese American fine artist James Jean. Design, framing, materials,
construction, data analysis and structural engineering brought the
out-of-pocket cost to $1.5 million.
“When I started working with Judson, we used the technique of
water-jet cutting and bringing in airbrushing and building 3D elements,” said
Jean, who worked with Judson on an earlier project, a glass sculpture, “Gaia,”
which is now at a South Korean museum. The partnership led to the immersive “Pagoda”
that allows viewers “to step in and be completely enveloped in color and light
and it will shift and change as the light changes,” Jean said. Panels from that
work will be shown by late summer.
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