- John 15:5
GREAT FALLS - You could see the muscles in Dana Boussard's face and neck tense, time and time again, as if she had just handed her newborn over to a pair of total strangers.
The baby, in this case, came in the form of 19 intricately crafted stained glass windows and the pregnancy, to carry the metaphor perhaps too far, lasted two years.
But last week, Boussard and husband Stan Reifel finally saw the final result as the stained glass was installed in Holy Spirit Catholic Parish's new church in Great Falls.
Boussard, the renowned Missoula artist, was commissioned to design and build the massive, 700-square-foot stained glass project before Holy Spirit was built.
There are four separate components. The smallest of the four is impressive in its own right: a large round window, 7 1/2 feet in diameter, to go high above the entryway in the church's vestibule.
Then there are twin four-window areas on either side of the altar.
But the eye is instantly drawn to the V-shaped, four-story-high space at the center of the rear of the altar, where the largest of Boussard's stained glass designs climbs toward the heavens between towers of flagstone rock in 10 mirrored pieces.
Dark purple vines wind their way up through the design, which starts at the bottom with grasses and stalks of wind-blown wheat, incorporates leaves, branches, flowers, sawtooth-like flames of light and red doves on the way up, and culminates with a pair of angels whose wings surround and support the Blessed Virgin Mary, her head framed by a starry night.
Mary's head and the stars poke out above the church's roofline. When it's eventually lit from the inside at night, they will, to passers-by, appear to float in the sky above the church.
Boussard's marching orders from Holy Spirit Catholic Parish were minimal at best.
“It's a contemporary church, so they wanted a contemporary look to the design,” Boussard says. “After that they only had two suggestions, that I incorporate wind and wheat into the pieces. The vision I kept having came from the Scriptures: ‘I am the vine and you are the branches.' ”
And so she began sketching out her designs, employing far more twisting and turning lines that you normally find in stained glass.
By the time they were finished, 10 people had been employed at various times during the two years of the project - including master fabricator Dennis Lippert of Lippert Studio in Missoula and master cutter Roy Carpenter - in order to finish it.
“It took a whole team to put together,” Boussard says. “If I'd tried to do it by myself, I'd still be chipping away.”
Locked inside the 19 windows that were two years in the making: 15,000 individual pieces of hand-cut colored glass.
Best known for her work in textiles, Boussard first branched out into stained glass in 1986 - the year her father died - at the request of her mother.
Charles Boussard was a longtime Choteau dentist, and Dana's mother wanted her to replace the windows in the St. Joseph Catholic Church there, where their family had worshiped, with stained glass designs.
“She thought it would be a nice thing,” Boussard says, “and so I did a set of 14 windows based on the creation.”
Into an empty sky, Boussard's stained glass windows in Choteau show, God introduced birds; into waters, fish; unto land, animals; from night He made day.
“Having not done glass before, I found it to be very painterly,” she goes on. “It was really a continuance of the way I work in my head artistically.”
Since then, Boussard has completed other large stained glass pieces, for Big Bend College in Moses Lake, Wash.; for the entrance to the library at Rocky Mountain College in Billings; and inside the Alaska State Public Health Laboratory in Anchorage.
But it was the original work in Choteau that Father Dick Schlosser of Holy Spirit saw and liked.
When the three Great Falls parishes Schlosser serves were combined into one, and a brand-new single large church was built to hold them, he recommended Boussard be hired to design the stained glass windows.
“This one consumed our lives more than any of the others,” Reifel, Boussard's husband, says of the Great Falls project. “The others weren't as delicate as this. This is Tiffany stuff. She's never done one of this magnitude, or that's taken so long.”
It was, Boussard says, her first chance to work with architects on issues regarding light and size as space for the stained glass was created in the church, whose construction otherwise finished a year ago.
That also created delays for her, as shifting angles and changing window sizes slowed what she could do.
“We couldn't cut anything until I had precise sizes,” Boussard explains.
And with the 42-foot-high centerpiece, she never saw the whole thing together until, well, the whole thing was together in the church.
Reifel built light tables for her to work on, but there wasn't room in her studio to put 10 of them five deep and two tables wide.
So they went two tables by two, and as pieces were finished the lower section would be removed and the tables repositioned so work could continue on connecting sections.
The glass came from all over the nation as Boussard searched for just the right types and colors for all the varying elements in the pieces: Atlanta, Portland, Seattle, Denver, Indiana, all provided glass as Boussard scoured the country for just the right deep rust oranges, bright golds, mauves, reds and others she wanted.
“I had to search all over to get pieces that could look like wheat,” Boussard says. “And you want them to throw in different chemicals, some gold, silver and black, into interesting combinations so that when the sun hits, it will glint in different ways.
“It's like painting with glass,” she explains.
And so it was that Jim Hedges and John Laverdure of TC Glass in Great Falls found themselves toting around Dana Boussard's 19 babies, one at a time, and installing them in the new church.
It took them eight days.
Professional movers brought the 19 windows to Great Falls in crates built by Reifel, and not one of the 15,000 pieces of glass broke - no surprise, given that Reifel also built the shipping crates for his wife's earlier project for Anchorage, and they had survived the truck ride to Seattle and ocean journey north intact.
The massive circular piece at Holy Spirit took a full day in and of itself to be installed, and was carried to its permanent location on a scissor-lift inside the church.
The twin side pieces on either side of the altar, eight in all, were also installed from the inside, using scaffolding.
But the four-story pieces had to be put in from the outside with the man-lift. Hedges and Laverdure had to remove, one by one, the 10 Thermopane glass panels that have been in place for a year, install the stained glass, then replace the Thermopane.
Each one took a minimum of 2 1/2 hours to complete, and the ever-present wind sometimes delayed things.
But as it slowly went in, piece by piece, Boussard finally got to see the sum of her creation.
“The church was very cooperative,” she says. “I was sort of given free reign.”
Holy Spirit also commissioned work from two other Montana artists for the new church: wall hangings depicting the Stations of the Cross (by Joe Halko of Choteau), and a 7-foot-tall bronze of Christ (by Terry Mimnaugh of Great Falls) to hang on a crucifix.
“It's always been a part of the church tradition to support the arts,” Father Schlosser told the Great Falls Tribune. The art, he explained, can be the viewer's “own window into the Lord.”
Boussard agrees.
“I believe in the story line of art, that there's a story to be told by all art,” she says. “Hopefully each viewer will find the story they want.”
“It's a great honor, as an artist, to work on a piece in a cohesive, developed way,” she goes on. “I love doing public art, because people who might not have an interest in art are exposed to it, and perhaps it will enrich them, or give them food for thought.”
Before it could do that, however, the stained glass had to survive the installation.
“You can accurately report,” Boussard said, “that the artist's fingernails were scraping the church pews every step of the way.”
And if she said a little prayer each time Hedges and Laverdure took another piece of the stained glass puzzle into the sky, well, they were all answered.
Reach reporter Vince Devlin at 1-800-366-7186 or by e-mail at vdevlin@missoulian.com. Reach photographer Kurt Wilson at (406) 523-5244 or at kwilson@missoulian.com.
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Aaron wrote on Oct 27, 2008 9:05 PM: