Brenda Belfield's Stained-Glass Exuberance

Beginning of article

Painter and stained-glass designer Brenda Belfield speaks about the colors of stained glass as if she were describing a wealth of luscious ripe fruit. "Lavenders, turquoise, peaches, rusts, violets, opal, the color range is enormous. For every shade of pink, there is a piece of glass somewhere. Each batch of hand-blown glass has an individual variety that makes it beautiful." The Reston, Virginia-based artist and winner of six national design awards for major commissions from a chapel in Marin County, California, to the American Embassy in Saudi Arabia launched her career in glass at the Washington National Cathedral. Just published by the Washington National Cathedral, Jewels of Light: The Stained Glass of Washington National Cathedral includes the sixty windows she designed there from 1974 to 1987.

In what she describes as a life-transforming moment, Belfield met Rowan LeCompte, a principal stained-glass artist for the Washington National Cathedral windows, in the early seventies at an exhibition of her paintings. "He told me I should be designing glass. The cathedral wasn't looking for craftsmen to replicate fourteenth-century designs; they wanted artists to come to glass with a fresh point of view.

"I was a young mother stuck in a house with clerestory windows. I could only paint what I saw outside my small world, so I painted …