Stained-Glass Craftsman Well-Schooled In Solitude

PORTLAND, Ore. - The school was a derelict. Most of the windows were broken. The heating system was beyond repair. Vandals had spilled paint, scrawled graffiti and gouged the linoleum floors. The roof leaked.

Gerry Veley knew it was perfect. He paid cash and the cinder-block school was his. He was the proud owner of three big classrooms, one set of boys and girls bathrooms, a tiny kitchen, a teachers lounge and a library too small to swing a paperback in.

It was big and cold and lonely, and it suited him to the ground. He had been looking for a place to set up a stained-glass studio, and now he had it.

Veley, a compact, big-shouldered man with a dark mustache and a direct stare, had something else he craved - solitude. The school is in a rural setting, surrounded by fields of wildflowers that Veley has painstakingly planted.

Once in a while, a former student, now a grown-up, pokes a nose in the door and asks to be shown around. Veley, who is busy and artistic, resents even those intrusions.

That is why he doesn't want the school identified or its location described. It's somewhere out in the rolling hills of western Washington County, and that description is precise enough for him.

LIVES WITH TWO CATS

Veley lives alone in the old school with just two cats and a young empress tree on the blacktop play area out back for company. He doesn't mind because he has plenty to do.

His current project: Design, build and install all the stained and colored glass for a new church in Albany.

On Oct. 29, 1989, flames consumed the historic, 91-year-old St. Mary's Roman Catholic Church with heat so intense that it melted the church's nearly 100 stained-glass windows. A transient angered at being thrown out of the church's soup kitchen for fighting later was convicted of starting the fire.

A new church has risen on the site of the old one and services began there June 17. Veley is still finishing and installing the last of nearly 100 windows created in the colors of the saint the church is named for: blue, white and red.

It's a massive, two-year effort, but Veley is nearly done with it. The big main windows already are mounted in the church's sanctuary in Albany. Now he's working on the 48 arrow-shaped windows that will light the clerestory.

Veley owns a school but he doesn't live in the classrooms. His bedroom and office occupy the library and teachers' lounge. The classrooms he keeps free for his work.

One of them is devoted to glass storage. In it may be found large sheets of mouth-blown glass, wavy with intentionally induced texture, carefully shelved in vertical racks.

Veley, who trained in Germany, prefers German glass, although he also has some glass made in Portland.

Another classroom is for storage and overflow, leaving the last one for a workroom. This is the room where Veley has put the woodstove, the school's only source of heat, and it is where he cuts, bevels and fits glass into predetermined patterns.

STARTED AS A YOUNG MAN

He first started working with colored glass as a young man, fresh from a modern language degree at the University of Portland. He made a glass candleholder for a friend. Next thing he knew, someone had asked him to make a lamp. Then there was another commission.

"Pretty soon," he jokes with his characteristic deadpan, "I was up to 60 cents an hour."

So he went back to Germany, determined to become a stained-glass apprentice. He just kept knocking on doors until someone took him on.

He passed his apprenticeship test in which he copied a piece of medieval stained glass, earning what amounts to an A for his effort. He has had no formal training either in drawing or in glass work.

Germany requires a six-year journeyman period before an apprentice can advance to master craftsman. So Veley returned to the United States and went to work for someone else.

The six years up, he went back to Germany. This time, half his master craftsman training was in glass work. But the other, weirder half was in all the business aspects of running a shop.

He survived, passed his tests in 1988 and is now a master craftsman. He celebrated by returning to the States and setting himself up in business.

The whole art of stained glass is continually changing and expanding. What seems like a simple, traditional craft is full of its own surprises.

Just one of the clerestory windows for St. Mary's, for instance, might include colored glass, painted glass, beveled glass, textured glass and pieces of swirling, multicolored glass.

The design, different for each window, is abstract, full of geometric shapes with no discernible pattern. Just when the eye has decided that most of the lines are straight, a curved piece of leading meanders into the consciousness.

Just when the eye is convinced that the windows are all opaque white and blue and gray and clear glass, it is struck with a rare glimpse of ruby.

FIRE DESTROYED GLASS

When St. Mary's burned, its stained-glass windows were broken and melted beyond repair. All that remains of the old structure are a small piece of molding that had been removed from the church for repair and a battered, marble angel rescued by a firefighter.

In the new church, the visitor has to look up to see the large windows in the sanctuary. Each has its theme, in abstract terms.

The glass design directly over the altar, with its flashes of red glass, represents the Resurrection - in this case, explains Kathy Gyovai, the pastoral assistant, both the rising of Christ and the rebirth of St. Mary's from the ashes of the old church.

The swirling patterns on the panels in the east gable come together in an abstract expression of community. In the west wall, the lines diverge in a pattern of diversity.

The small clerestory windows, lined up in a neat, uniform row below, pick up and extend the metaphors of the larger windows.

Veley arises each morning and, apart from time out for chores and meals and weeding the wildflowers, works steadily on the windows until late in the evening, often until after midnight. He might listen to the radio or switch on the television while he's working, but the reception in the foothills of the Coast Range makes that venture of dubious use.

The work is engrossing and, ultimately, exhausting.

"It taxes a person heavily," he said, "the sheer volume of it."

Stained glass is his game, and churches are the most constant source of commissions. "I'm booked solid for a year," he said.

NEXT PROJECT PLANNED

His next project, already in the planning stage, is for St. Therese Catholic Church in northeast Portland. The designs combine the modern with the traditional, including glass painting.

For fun, Veley sees his friends, weeds his flower patch, cans the produce from his garden and enjoys the clematis that he has trained all over the old swing set behind the school.

The rooms in the old school, built in the long, low style of the 1940s, are lined with windows: hundreds of panes of glass, many of them broken by vandals, replaced by Veley when he moved in two years ago.

The cobbler's children, the old saying goes, have no shoes. All of the glass in the home of Gerry Veley, master glass craftsman, is clear.