Tribute

1984

I designed and fabricated this coat of arms for my studio.

The inscription reads:

"LUCEM TUAM DA NOBIS DEUS"

Translated this reads:

"Give To Us Your Light Oh God"

I found this inscription on a European coat of arms and decided to name this window, "Tribute". In the days before the privatization of stained glass studios, guilds were formed to support the craft. Private signatures were rare so the guilds shield or crest was placed at the bottom of a stained glass window. This was termed blazoning and was practiced by many of the trades. I felt compelled to name this window Tribute to honor the individual artist who comprised the guilds and were not allowed to sign their work. I could not imagine what it would be like to not sign my work, rather having to sign it with a guild’s crest.

The cloak is a red flashed yellow and when viewed up close you can see the front and back of the embroidery which undulates around the shield. Within the shield there are placed the tools of the trade. Many shields contain the tools of olde, where I decided to use a set of tools that I currently use in the studio. In the upper portion of the shield there are symbols which can be found within a deck of cards. The diamond, spade, club, and heart is my representation of how life, is like a game of cards....You play with the hand that you are dealt. Right next to the four suits there is a field of stars. This represents where we are headed when this world no longer exists. The coat and shield are floating in a field of red hence the name Redfields.

Because of the amount of work involved to produce all of the symbolic details, a generous budget is required to reproduce a coat of arms in stained glass.

Note how the glass pliers and the badger hair brush are intertwined. Upon closer inspection, the brush should be going under the pliers, instead the brush is going under one handle and over the other. A play on perspective... a tribute to the master of perspective play, M. C. Escher. Look closely and you can barely make out the painters pallet behind the glass muller. The painter’s pallet is the same pallet used for my logo since 1984. Tribute took about five weeks to complete.