The Desire to Create is Inside Each Human Soul – Part 4

Helping to make the art of stained glass windows a popular modern trend, Tom Holdman continues to share his struggles and triumphs with us. This is part 4 of 7. 

Is Stained Glass Inherent in the Religious Medium?

Yes absolutely. It has been also now included in a lot of homes and a lot of commercial buildings. The most impact is in a religious arena. When you think about light as it enters into a stained glass window, the light makes that art piece come alive.

Glass really does inspire people. The whole history of how it was invented is intriguing. Why did it come alive? During the medieval times there were a lot of peasants who could not read. The church would illustrate the scriptures in stained glass so the normal person could relate to it like scripture. There also weren’t any handy bibles around. They were all hand-written bibles. Stained glass really came alive to tell the scripture stories.

Crystal piece cut and beveled and placed in the corners of a small window for the Rome Italy Temple. Many hundreds of pieces like this are made.

Here’s another concept for the Rome Temple. You can see that we have taken pieces of crystal and then beveled them and angled them to enhance the light more. Each piece is beveled by hand. Thousands and thousands of pieces are cut for each temple. There were approximately 40,000 pieces of glass that were cut and leaded together for the Draper temple.

Just some of the thousands of glass pieces leaded together in the Draper, Utah Temple.

Ways to Market Glass Art

With marketing and glass, I realize that these days there is such a worldwide audience, if you can tap into the internet. I sell a piece of glass every day on the internet all over the world. We auction a lot off on eBay. Because of online buying, , our glass pieces are hanging in all the fifty states. Not only does each state have pieces of our artwork, but it’s all over the world as well, Australia, Europe, Japan, Asia, etc. The internet is such a tool for good, when you harness it for good. We use the internet to sell our artwork.

Also, with eBay, we get a lot of people that actually see our work, and then hire us for commission work. There was a man who had seen our glass on eBay and he commissioned us for his home and he it was over 2,000 pieces of glass. It was a big home. It’s an advertising tool that is free.

Image of Christ created for a Presbyterian church.

The Work is Hard but Thrilling

This is a scene that I have worked on. I had made a larger window of this for the Presbyterian church, and now I’m making a smaller version of it with Christ with his arms out. Like he’s reaching for you. You can see all the many tiny pieces that are smaller than a penny.

To do stained glass is quite a bit of work. But there is no experience like spending hours and hours on a project and then holding it up to the light for the first time. When you let light enter through the art glass for the first time, it is just a thrilling experience.

This documentary will continue in Part 5