The 16 lancet stained glass windows that I made In 1962, titled ‘The Creation’, have been replaced by new ones made by somebody else sometime between 1973, when I left California, and 1992, when I visited the church again.

I discovered this change when, during my visit, rang the church to ask when would be the best time to go to make photographs of the windows and the fresco paintings. The person who answered the call , the rector, said after a silence that my windows had been damaged some years back by children throwing stones from the school yard and had to be replaced. He was reluctant to let me in and made all sorts of very dry and dismissive comments. I went nevertheless to see what had happened. The priest was very defensive, nervous and a bit unpleasant. I said that to replace all the windows must have been much more expensive than to repair the damaged ones. Furthermore, I said, why didn’t he install some protection on the outside of the windows when the damage started to happen, as is done in old churches in Europe, which would have, again, been much cheaper. It was obvious to me -and to my wife and her mother who were with me at the time- that the priest didn’t like the windows. After all, the new ones had not been damaged with stones during the years that they had been there!

The long window covering the facade of the building -see previous page- is still there. This one Is more vulnerable than the others because it is facing the street and it is in a poor area of the city, but this window has a theme (is representative rather than abstract as the replaced ones were) and I am sure this fact somehow protected the large window from the rector’s unscrupulous action. The same is true of the small window, 2.5 x 2.5 m. of the baptistry at the entrance of the church.

At the time of my visit to the church I was very depressed and annoyed. I had considered those windows (the 16 destroyed) my best work. The one remaining was not at the same level of quality. Details of this one have been reproduced in a survey of glass windows in the book “Stained Glass, music for the eye” The Scrimshaw Press, 1976, by Robert and Jill Hill Hans Halberstadt. I suspect that the others had already been replaced by then, otherwise I am sure that the destroyed windows would have been selected in preference to the one (details) reproduced.

The fresco paintings, the 14 stations of the cross, are keeping the same colour as originally. The only deterioration is in some very fine and long cracks running through some of them and this, I guess, is the result of the earthquake in the area some years earlier. Again it is surprising that these paintings, being all of them at some 1.6 m. from the floor, have not been damaged with scratches or graffiti...