Free 2 Pane of Death by Sarah Atwell

next few days Peter, Maddy, and I came up with a schedule that worked. Maddy did whatever she did, and I didn’t ask about the details. She and I went out together to see Peter a couple of times over the following week or two, to see the new pieces as they were uncrated and to present Peter with the concepts we had come up with. Maddy’s efforts were predictably trite, but I managed to steer her away from the worst of her ideas without ruffling her feathers too badly. I was proud of myself for my restraint.
    Peter and I carefully did not mention that I had been making my own trips out to his place so that I could spend quality time with the glass. These excursions had fallen into a pattern. Peter would disable his electronic watchdogs, let me in, and offer me something cold to drink. I would accept. We would then drift to whatever room he had assigned the newly revealed piece to. We would spend some time in rapt silence, absorbing the artwork. Then slowly I would begin to offer comments, make suggestions. Only once did I think he had chosen the wrong setting, for a delicate William Morris panel that was overwhelmed by the blazing Arizona sun. I thought it would benefit from more subtle lighting, and Peter agreed quickly, proposing a more sheltered position.
    We avoided talking about Maddy for the most part, which I took as tacit approval of how I had been handling our joint effort. In truth, there was little for Maddy to do, beyond installing the panels and working up a few designs for the minor windows in the room. This was clearly a charity gesture on Peter’s part. I in fact had much more to do. He could have opted for high-tech but unobtrusive halogen spotlighting, or gone with muted sconces that all but receded into the walls, but he gave me my head and let me play with forms and colors, trying to create pieces that harmonized with the windows without stealing any of their thunder. It was an interesting challenge—and our discussions were equally interesting.
    The single largest piece was to be a chandelier in what would become the dining room, eventually. Given the layout of the house, one saw the hanging fixture from the hallway before entering the room to confront the incredible Tiffany panel, a variation of The River of Life , that dominated the exterior wall. The fixture’s position would showcase my art, but I wanted to stay miles away from any kitschy pseudo Tiffany dome—there were far too many cheap knockoffs on the market these days. We spent a couple of hours one afternoon debating about alternatives.
    “I love the way you’re injecting some humor here—the image of water juxtaposed to the Arizona desert,” I said. “I’d like to play off that—the feeling of water. Cool, flowing, if you know what I mean, and I want to keep it simple, clean, but make sure that the colors in the glass are tied in with the ones in the window. Not easy.”
    “Because he used his own glass?”
    “That’s part of it.” Tiffany had experimented with techniques for glassmaking, and they weren’t always easy to recreate. “But what he did with the glass—heck, you know as well as I do—it’s practically three-dimensional sculpture.” I ran a reverent finger over a particular fragment in the window, whose surface irregularities mimicked rippling water. “And because of that, it’s too thick to use for a fixture with much lower light levels. If I’m not careful, it will look muddy and chunky. But I can’t just do it thinner, because then you lose the sculptural quality. So I’m playing with some ideas about layering the glass, to kind of fool the eye. As Tiffany did.”
    “Interesting approach,” he said, nodding. “What about supports? Do you plan to go with the traditional leading?”
    “I haven’t decided. The window is part of the wall, the structure of a space, so it’s appropriate that it be substantial, both visually and for strength. But the light fixture floats in space and has to be more