This type of vessel shares its name with the town of its origin, near Bar Harbor, Maine. The original Quaker shipwrights who founded the place moved on at the end of the 17th century, when they were driven out by their Puritan neighbors. Most of them moved to Maryland, but their heritage remains in the name of this sailing vessel. The Friendship design evolved at the beginning of the nineteenth century as a “fast fisherman”, able to take on a perishable cargo and speed back to harbor before its limited cargo of ice could melt. These were working vessels, mostly used in the lobster trade. Today, owing to the classic beauty, dignity and usefulness of the Friendship, a few original boats and many copies are still used as pleasure boats. More information can be found in Howard Chapelle’s book American Small Sailing Craft. My Friendship is made from German antique glass for the very transparent sky, and American “waterglass” cathedral glass for the sea. The sails are made of wispy translucent white opal glass. I make these hanging panels with a brass rim, just porthole sized, and I finish the metal with a copper patina to add the proper nautical feel. The fine detail of the rigging is done with brass wire. Care for this piece by putting a little spray furniture wax on a terrycloth rag and buffing it down about once a year. Or leave it unpolished and watch it slowly get green like brass on a ship. Please hang it securely, no suction cups. Small screw eyes or cup hooks are best. Hanging chain is supplied with each panel. Size: 12-1/2″ Diameter Price: $125.00 Packing and shipping:...

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When I was a kid growing up in Brooklyn, I got introduced to 12th and 13th century stained glass in a Museum called The Cloisters, a branch of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was wonderful to see the bright colors, the ancient materials, the whiff of history, the stories told by the glass. I was young, and I wanted to see the world in such a simple, idealistic, maybe even naive way. After I took up stained glass myself in 1969, I build my first kiln so I could duplicate the black trace paint which was fired onto the glass in medieval times. It is this which gives the detail between the lead lines, and I’ve used here in this panel a number of early French and English mannerisms, the orderly fields, the trees like broccoli, the perfect neat order of houses within the walls. It is my own design, and I drew it from pure imagination. Now, for the story. A young woman walked into my shop a number of years ago and looked at this medallion. “I know this place,” she said. “My mother was born there.” And she named a village in the south of France. I told her I hadn’t drawn it that way, had never been there, but she told me I had got it just right. I just smiled and sold the piece to her and made a promise to go there one day. And I did, eventually. One day a year or two later an older man born in Germany came in and looked at a panel made from the same design. “I know this place,” he said, naming a town on the Rhine River famous for its castle. But I told him it wasn’t, had not been, my idea to draw that. He was not convinced. And he was followed by an Italian fellow, who located the town in Sicily. And lately it was identified by a well-travelled American who knows exactly where it is, somewhere in Spain. I think I figured it out, finally. I think it is just an icon, a kind of an image of serenity and order and peace, of everything in its place and the colors bright and joyous. It is, maybe, just a place familiar to the heart. Size: 16 Inches in Diameter Price: $250.00 Packing and Shipping:...

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A series of portraits in stained glass of some of the greatest American musicians of the 20th century. Dimensions 36″ x 42″ framed in Mahogany with inlaid strips of exotic African hardwoods. I started this a few years ago, probably because these singers, players and composers were people whose music I listened to as a child when my father played his vinyl LP records. I have it in mind to do several more portraits in this series, of Benny Goodman, Django Reinhardt, Dizzy Gillespie and others. (Duke Ellington & Billie Holiday shown)   Call for information and...

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