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A detail from a stained-glass restoration by artist Margaret Pederson at St. Augustine Church, South San Francisco. (Photo by Christina Gray/Catholic San Francisco)
December 13, 2018
Christina Gray
“You should really come back and see this wall in the morning,” stained-glass artist Margaret Pederson told Catholic San Francisco Dec. 6 during an afternoon visit to St. Augustine Church. “When the sun rises it becomes just like a kaleidoscope.”
This was Pederson’s final visit to the South San Francisco parish after spending the better part of two years meticulously restoring two large banks of stained glass windows originally designed for and installed at the parish a few years after it opened in 1970.
One bank of windows near the altar serves as a backdrop for the choir and was completed in time for Christmas Mass last year; the second larger window was unveiled at a Mass for the feast of St. Augustine on Aug. 26.
The project was clearly a labor of love for Pederson, whose Sea of Glass studio in San Leandro was hired to restore the aging church windows as part of a major sanctuary remodel completed in 2017.
“I put my heart and soul into this,” she said stretching her arms out toward a lively floor-to-ceiling swirl of orange, gold, leaf green, cerise and cobalt blue flowers or flames or both.
Part of her attachment to the project, she said, came from the discovery that stained-glass master and friend Nick Lucas and his late father of Church Art Glass in San Francisco designed the windows in 1976. The business closed with Nick’s retirement.
“They were initially going to remove these walls and discard them,” said Pederson, who deconstructed the original glass design and failing lead structure which was leaking, and painstakingly replicated the design using 85 percent of the original glass. The remaining 15 percent of the glass, broken or damaged beyond repair, was replaced with rare vintage mouth-blown glass from Germany and France.
Lucas “has all of the best historic vintage glass,” she said. He gave Pederson access to it for the restoration project. She spoke in reverential terms of the precious glass.
“This glass is so rare, you can’t even get it anymore,” Pederson said, as she pointed to a vivid piece of aqua blue glass and offered a short lesson in the quality and character of stained glass.
Stained-glass artist Margaret Pederson is seen in silhouette in front of one of two banks of windows she restored and installed in St. Augustine Church in 2017. (Photo by Christina Gray/Catholic San Francisco)
What is commonly called “cathedral glass” is machine-made glass that is less expensive to use in stained glass projects but is visibly less intense and textured than mouth-blown glass, she said. The St. Augustine window is a combination of cathedral and mouth-blown glass.
“You see these striations and bubbles in here?” she asked. “This is the German and French glass.”
Pederson resized each individual window panel and “shuffled them” into a new order than the originals. “It’s the same design but I put my flair on it,” she said. She was religious about matching the original design.
“If a broken piece was a German glass I replaced it with German glass,” she said.
She pointed to three slightly larger windows in the wall of the choir area, an artist’s secret detail. “The Father, Son and Holy Ghost, that was my idea,” she said.
Stained glass projects have a typical lifespan of 70-100 years before they have to be re-leaded, said Pederson. “What happens is the lead matrix starts to fail over time and the glass ends up taking the load and can break.”
Pederson worked closely with parochial vicar Father Eduardo Dura, who saw the spiritual value of the parish spending the money to restore the windows.
“Stained glass is the patrimony of St. Augustine for almost 50 years, we have to take care of it,” he said. “If I objected to it, it would have been like violence against the people.”
Neither he nor Pederson would say what the actual cost of the project was, but the cost included a whole new framing system and double door. Unlike the original work, the new windows were installed from the inside and backed by double-paned glass on the exterior for protection.
“Environmentally, there are lots of things to consider with breaking lead,” a toxic heavy metal, Father Dura said.
The old window panels had to be dismantled carefully by hand under water because of the airborne toxicity of lead, according to Pederson. She used butcher paper to make an impression of the glass design of each panel, catalogued the composition of each panel and did precise mathematical measurements to assure no waste.
Pederson, a commercial art major who grew up in Castro Valley, began doing stained glass design when she was a college student and opened her Sea of Glass studio in 1985. While she specializes in historic restoration, she also does her own design and fabrication.
She was chosen to restore the 670 stained glass windows in architect Julia Morgan’s Chapel of the Chimes in Oakland when the job was bid in 2003. More recently she installed a restored window at St. Mark Catholic Church in Richmond.
Pederson, a Lutheran, nodded when asked if her own faith informed her work. Quoting from the Bible’s Book of Revelation, she described how she arrived at the name for her business.
“They refer to the throne around God, ‘like a sea of glass under crystal,’” she said. “This is all for him. He just gave me good hands.”