God in the Details

Notions about art and beauty began to form in LeCompte's soul when he was 10 or 11. "I wanted to be either a painter or an architect," he says.

A stained-glass artist, of course, is both.

In long-sleeve salmon shirt, tan sweater vest and dark blue pants such as French workingmen wear, LeCompte looks on a recent morning like a work of art himself. His watch is worn outside his shirt cuff to keep the band from slipping up and down his reedy wrist. He has wisps of white hair above his ears and spangly eyes that match his blue beret.

It's a gray, rainy day. He's at his suburban-style home in the hills of Virginia just west of Charlottesville. He doesn't really have a studio, just a tiny guest bedroom with a window, a drafting table and a gooseneck lamp. Occasionally he brings in panels of glass, but this room is for design. In most cases, a designer's window is pieced together by a fabricator and, with the help of installers, put into place.

"Goodbye, my love," he calls to Peggy, his second wife, who is stepping out for lunch. They have been married 34 years.

A compact man, he sits in a little office chair on rollers. There are vast drawings attached to the wall and sketchbooks here and there. Nearby is a watercolor and India-ink sketch of the work of the moment -- a new Isaiah window for the south side of the nave.

He sends such a sketch -- and a set of full-size drawings -- to the person who will actually cut the glass and piece it together according to LeCompte's design. From large sheets, LeCompte and the fabricator choose the colored glass, most of which comes from Europe. The design is modified according to available glass. The fabricator then arranges the cut glass to craft a temporary window -- which is divided into panels for easier handling -- using wax instead of lead to hold the pieces together.

A panel of the Isaiah work sits on scaffolding in front of the picture window in LeCompte's room. He examines the colorful panel at different times of day to see how the light slides through. If there is too much light showing through one portion, he paints linear hatch marks on the glass to control the flow of light. "It's a very subtle and difficult thing to do," he says.

When he is finally satisfied with every panel, he will send them back to the fabricator, who will fire the glass and then set it in lead. Installers will place the window in its proper location at the cathedral.

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Rowan LeCompte first saw the light of day in Baltimore on Saint Patrick's Day 1925. "We were poor," he recalls. "There was a sense of needing to not waste anything."

To make ends meet, LeCompte's father ran a small business making beaten biscuits. Beaten biscuits differ from traditional biscuits because all of the air and fluffiness is pounded out of the dough, making the results denser and more like loaf bread. LeCompte's father baked the biscuits in an oven until they were just the right color, then sold them to chefs.