Princeton artisan creates wonders using stained glass
by Caroline Calogero - Special Writer
Somewhere between cathedral windows and sun catchers lies the stained glass art of Leah Targon.
Ms. Targon, who learned her craft at the now defunct Princeton Stained Glass, has been working with glass for three years. Her work covers a broad spectrum and includes panels for windows or walls, lamp shades and uncommonly shaped boxes. She does both customized designs and restorations, and signs her work using solder in distinctive block letters.
Glass,"creates a reaction, creates a strong impact on people," says Ms. Targon, "It's my passion."
Ms. Targon has long enjoyed working with her hands and is an accomplished seamstress. She likens making a work of stained glass to sewing a dress and notes one uses the "same process in glass" as in sewing.
But glass is, as she puts it,"a harsher medium...unyielding. If you don't deal with it properly, it breaks." Working with stained glass, which she characterizes as "a man's medium, traditionally," also helped her make peace with a childhood desire to work with her grandfather, who taught woodworking to her brother and not her.
As Ms. Targon describes it, both dressmaking and stained glass requires conceiving a design, creating a pattern, and the cutting and assembling of materials, while always keeping the end product in mind. Creating a work in stained glass is also a multi-step endeavor. Ms. Targon has modified the traditional process a bit to suit her own style.
Her pattern is first drawn on kraft paper. Ms. Targon then sticks clear contact paper onto the pattern. A mylar sheet is placed atop the pattern and the pattern is thentraced on the mylar. This yields a mylar template to aid in the final assembly. The latter two procedures, reinforcing the pattern and making a mylar template, are steps she devised herself.
The pattern, on reinforced kraft paper, is then cut into its pieces. To cut the glass according to the pattern, it is first scored, then ground to smooth the edges. The individual pieces are subsequently wrapped with copper foil tape, assembled on the mylar, and then soldered, usually twice.
Ms. Targon has embarked on some unusual projects including, 600 stained glass coasters for Henri Bendel, an exclusive Manhattan retailer, and her own rendition of the crown of Glinda, the good witch of the Land of Oz. She created the crown along with a matching ball gown for a Halloween costume.
The stained glass windows in the entry foyer of a Lawrence Victorian are what she considers her piece de resistance.
The work consists of four glass panels-the front door, the transom window above it, and two identical side windows flanking
the door.
A large white carousel horse with a lavender saddle, gold mane and tail, and an elaborate copper feather decorating its head dominates the door.
The transom features a design more traditionally associated with Victorian homes and resembles an orchid
like flower embellished with irridescent glass.
The side windows are also traditional, featuring stylized crests, circles and leaves.
Cecilia Mann, owner of the home, describes Ms. Targon glowingly as a "very incredibly talented young woman" and said
she believes to produce good stained glass "you have to be a craftsman as well as an artist."
Leah Targon works on stained glass for 20 to 30 hours a week and uses her tiny but well-organized kitchen as a workshop. She averages completing three projects each month. Commissions come from word of mouth recommendations and from two ads in local classified sections.
By day Ms. Targon is employed as a secretary for a local pharmaceutical company. She credits her job with inspiring one of her most impressive pieces. "Blizzard is a large white, blue and silver abstract measuring 42 x 42 inches square. The work contains elements reminiscent of her firm's corporate logo and evokes images of snowflakes and winter storms.
"It's as if you're looking through a telephoto lens so it's larger than life." Ms. Targon notes in describing "Blizzard."
Her more recent works tend to be large, "larger pieces are more powerful," she puts it, and the subjects, although they can be highly traditional tend to take unusual slants.
Illustrating Bible scenes has long been a focus of stained glass artisans and also intrigues Ms. Targon. "Glass has a wonderful association with religion. That association is really important to me." Ms. Targon comments.
Yet Ms. Targon's version of the serpent in the Garden of Eden appears a far cry from a scene in a church window. Entitled "Before the Fall," this trapezoidal piece depicts a lithe green serpent languorously coiled around a highly stylized tree. In the words of Ms. Targon, the serpent is shown "just as it's about to come down and approach Eve in the Garden of Eden."
The piece is 35 inches long and 29 inches at its widest point. It is designed to be viewed from both sides.
"I love the serpent because he gave us this knowledge. He was what was so enticing and marvelous about the place (Eden)," says Ms. Targon. The back side of the serpent is black to symbolize not only knowledge but also evil.
The scales of the serpent appear to be hundreds of individually soldered pieces of glass but they are not. The serpent's body is one large piece of glass. Copper foil solder is used as ornament rather than structural support to define each scale. With this technique Ms. Targon was able to achieve a delicate look for the creature's body, which she claims is generally not possible with a series of soldered joints.
Ms. Targon's goals in stained glass are many. She is currently applying for grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and from the Ella Lyman Cabot Trust to help her fund her work. Most immediately she wants to" increase my body of work" and to exhibit it in Manhattan galleries. She has also recently acquired a student apprentice and looks forward to enlarging her crafts by teaching it to another. "I have the opinion that I can broaden medium," Ms. Targon comments. Her wildest dreams include a MacArthur Fellowship or the appearance of a Medici-type patron who would allow her to pursue the limits of this rather expensive craft without financial constraint.
"I want to explore the boundaries of glass. I want to work with both glass and ceramics basically experimenting with the two mediums," she explains.
Her aim is to make three-dimensional ceramic tiles which can be incorporated into a work of stained glass to add depth and dimension. The border of the tiles would be the same thickness as the stained glass so the two could be joined via soldering.
A stained glass Pinocchio with a protruding ceramic nose is the example Ms. Kopcsandy uses to illustrate her vision of combining the two mediums. To expand in this direction she seeks a kiln for firing ceramics and more work space than her kitchen affords.
Ms. Targon grew up on the north shore of Long Island. She has studies at the Fashion Institute of Technology and worked in the fashion industry in New York City. She has a degree in English from the State University of New York at Stony Brook.