The medieval art of stained glass painting is seeing some new light in some Prince Edward Island churches lately, thanks to one local artisan who practises this skill of oldBY MARY MACKAY as published in The Guardian, March 14, 2009
Susana Rutherford is in for the long haul.
This Charlottetown artist’s work is the most recent addition to the stained glass spectrum at a new United Church in Murray Harbour. And like the windows created by artisans before her, she hopes her work will provide decades more of spiritual inspiration.
Her uplifting piece joins two 1960s works by New Brunswick glass artist Paul Blaney and a 1990s panel by Island artist John Burden that were carefully saved from two of three now decommissioned churches in Murray Harbour, Murray River and Little Sands and that have now become part of this United Church congregation’s future.
“It’s nice to be a part of something that is going to be around for a hundred years. People don’t make anything that is going to last that amount of time these days,” says Rutherford, who through her Firehorse Studios in Charlottetown has also restored and repaired a multitude of historic windows in Island churches.
“When you work on the restoration of these old windows, you’re part of a legacy. Most people who have done restoration and do painted glass say that more than anything they’ve learned from the repairs and restorations that they did . . . .
“You take it all apart and you see things. You see a thumbprint of a painter from where they picked the piece up to put it in the kiln or you’ll see a spot where they splashed (paint) on the back and so you feel this connection with someone who was doing that work a hundred years ago. And that’s a pretty special feeling.”
Craftspersons specializing in architectural stained glass and glass painting are a pretty special sector of artisans. Rutherford is one of only a few in the Maritimes active in this rarified field. She is now teaching beginner traditional stained glass painting.
And when it comes to painted stained glass pieces for a spiritual setting, the number of individual artists who do this refined art is even smaller due to the fact that about 75 per cent of stained glass windows in Canadian churches have been done by the historic McCausland Studios in Toronto, Ont.
Rutherford comes by her artistic nature naturally. Her parents, Ambika Gail Rutherford and the late Erica Rutherford, have made art in its various forms their life’s work.
Born in Spain, Rutherford came to P.E.I. from the midwest with her parents when she was five.
“There’s a family story that my mother likes to tell: we went back to Europe to pick up some belongings (that year) . . . and they went to visit Chartres (Cathedral in France to see) all its stained glass windows,”Rutherford remembers.
“My mother said I was absolutely entranced. They couldn’t get me out of there. I kept going and dancing around the light from the glass on the floor and staring at the glass . . . . I think some of the windows there are 1,000 years old. Big huge, huge pieces — that was my first exposure to seeing glass on that scale.”
Years later when she was in her second year in the theatre tech program at Ryerson University in Toronto, she got an apprentice position at a stained glass studio.?She had been secretly vying for it for more than a year
.“Actually, much to the consternation of my parents I dropped out of college. It was something that I really wanted to do so I took the job. I don’t know whether that was the best financial decision of my life, but I did it,”
she laughs.
That was the true start of her love affair with glass art in all its forms.
“I had taken a six-week night course type of thing at somebody’s studio and learned a little bit (before that) but I really got thrown in there. It was an architectural stained glass firm so we did all high-end homes. We also did big architectural projects. That first year I was there we did the windows for the lobby for the Eaton’s Centre building that was going in then.”
Rutherford worked there for 10 years doing large-scale home, church, school and business projects but did eventually enrol in and graduate from the Ontario College of Art and Design in 1995.
With a small inheritance from her grandmother, she headed north.
“I thought if I do something really quiet and don’t do anything, I can afford to paint for a few years and work on my glass craft,” s
he smiles.
There she met Gary Torlone who became her husband and they started a family which now includes Isabella, nine, and Willow, six. They moved to the Rutherford homestead in Pinette when their first daughter was just eight months old. She set up a studio there.
She formed Firehorse Studios in 2004 where she works in all types of glass, including the restoration of antique stained glass windows.
“We try with those old windows to do as little as possible, not in the sense that you don’t want to do any work but you don’t want to change the artistic integrity of them,”she says.
Some of these windows are focal points in heritage churches, such as those designed by the renowned P.E.I. architect William Critchlow Harris.
St. Malachy’s in Kinkora and St. John’s Anglican Church in Milton are two examples.
“Classically designed churches are designed with all those gothic arches and everything that intentionally lead the eye upward. Everything about the interior of the church is designed to make us look up and think about what’s above us. In a traditional church design, you’re not looking out at your day-to-day life at your ordinary level; you’re looking at these representations from the Bible stories around you (in the stained glass windows),”Rutherford says.
“And there’s a huge psychological impact behind the colour, to have all that colour around you. So most people feel uplifted when they are surrounded by colour and light. And then the windows themselves are designed to draw the eye upward and remind us that we’re in a sacred place. So there are lots of things at work there. It’s not just an accident.”
Historically, traditional glass painting in Europe was a closely guarded secret within specially formed stained glass guilds who would do the work.
“(That stained glass painter) would pick an apprentice and pass the information on to him. But what’s happened through the 1970s and 1980s since stained glass has become a hobby and has been picked up by the masses, the (art of) traditional stained glass painting has not been passed along,”
Rutherford says.
Fortunately there are a number of avenues open to those who want to learn. So in her 25 years of working with glass, Rutherford had studied this fine art and put her techniques into practise. In recent years, she has taken advanced glass painting courses and has recently received an invitation to study at The Antrim School in New Hampshire.
The consolidation of the Little Sands, Murray Harbour and Murray River churches into one as-yet-to-be-named spiritual space marked the end of one era and the beginning of the next.
“There is nothing that has probably affected our congregation more than the closure of the other churches,”says Linda MacNeill, who is a member of the church building committee.
However, the reinstallation of the three windows — the two Blaneys from the Murray Harbour church and the Burden from the Murray River church, Little Sands had no stained glass — and other significant objects from the former churches has made the transition a bit easier.
“We’re very pleased that we stumbled upon Susana,” says Elmer MacNeill, who is head of the building committee.
“Because there’s just nobody left on the Island much that does anything like this. So we were very fortunate,”
his wife, Linda, adds.
The concept for Rutherford’s new piece for the church came from the MacNeills’ daughter, Kimberly Dudley, which the stained glass artist then adapted to the church committee’s requirements.
The octagonal window features the three decommissioned churches with a dove above to represent the Holy Spirit.
“We wanted to bring the three together in some way,”Linda says.
Rutherford used some of the colours and other elements in the Burden and Blaney windows to tie all the windows together.
“It’s a feeling of being part of a heritage and a legacy that you can go back and work on restoring windows that were made about the time that I was born. I learned a lot from doing those restorations and having a chance to look at those artisans as well and then to be part of that,"says Rutherford, who did some restoration work on the other windows before they were put in the new church.
“Also, part of it is that it’s in a sacred place, a special place. It’s more important than (just) the everyday. It’s nice to know that the work is not only being appreciated for its esthetic but there is also a spiritual element to it, too.”
Fast facts
- At Firehorse Studios in Charlottetown on April 18 there will be a one-day workshop with Laura Cole of Random Pieces, www.randompieces.ca, with her glass-on-glass mosaic class.
- On April 25, there will be a one-day workshop introduction to glass fusing with Susana Rutherford.
- This stained glass artist will also have a booth at the P.E.I. Home Show, April 3-5.
- Rutherford’s next session of classes for traditional stained glass painting starts in November 2009.
- For more information, visit www.firehorsestudios.ca.
