Beirs' stained glass pieces share a Society Hill home with a 2,000-year-old Roman sculpture anda painting by French Impressionist Berthe Morisot.

Taking great panes

by Debra Nussbaum for the Philadelphia Inquirer

STAINED GLASS IN TODAY'S HOME and office has changed dramatically in shape and form over the last 10 years, but we still gravitate to this art-encased-in-architecture for the same reasons our medieval ancestors did. They brightened their vast, dark cathedrals andcastles with colored glass panels that told religious stories to their illiterate subjects and added beauty and colorful light to buildings that were otherwise ominous.

In the 90's we still want this ancient art's vivid color and brilliant light, but the craft has evolved into such a contemporary form that stained-glass artists like Philadelphia's John Beirs are now commissioned to do corporate boardrooms and modern homes.

When Beirs switched from painting to stained glass 23 years ago, he was one of few American artists who chose to use this medium in a very contemporary way: jagged and asymmetrical images, abstract and realistic elements, sometimes even typography. In The Big Bang, a window he did for a Spruce Street house, for instance, he mixed clear and textured glass with images of shells, stars and tornadoes. For a boardroom he created abstract stained-glass walls that suggested economic graphs denoting the ups and downs of product sales.

He urges his clients to think of his work as a "painting in a window". But unlike a painting, what has made glass so alluring over the centuries is that interplay with light keeps the stained-glass images in a constant state of flux. Beirs, tall,lanky, intense about his craft, talks with his hands when describing the "dynamic form" that produces a shimmering, jewelled look no other medium can reach. A naturally lit window will never look the same way twice.

The cold economic realities of the '90s may also be working to Beirs' advantage. He loves to tell about the Center City house that sat on the market for 18 months- until he installed a large stained-glass piece in the entryway. Then the house sold.

Well, OK, it might have just been a coincidence. Then again, don't be too quick to rule out the alluring power of the ages.

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