[New post] Casola Stained Glass Studio in Fort Myers carries on European style

Sea Point Realtors posted: " Ken Casola and the artisans he employs at Casola Stained Glass Studio in Fort Myers are among the last European stained glass artisans in the United States. Casola acquired the skills and artistry used to create the panels of an 18-meter-wide church win" Respond to this post by replying above this line New post on Sea Point Realtors Casola Stained Glass Studio in Fort Myers carries on European style by Sea Point Realtors Ken Casola and the artisans he employs at Casola Stained Glass Studio in Fort Myers are among the last European stained glass artisans in the United States. Casola acquired the skills and artistry used to create the panels of an 18-meter-wide church window in Palm Beach Gardens, for example, from a man who had made stained glass for seven decades before they met. Brad Parliman entered Casola's stained glass studio in 1985 looking for a part-time job. In addition to offering his manpower, he also offered an apprenticeship for Larry Casola's son, whom Larry had to bribe by offering fully paid tuition fees in return for helping in the family business. Ken was then 17 years old. Little did he know how lucky he was that Parliman came into his life. Larry Casola was self-taught. He had started the business in Long Island, New York, as a hobby or part-time job as a firefighter. He was skilled as a stained glass craftsman, mostly making small residential windows, but occasionally a larger project, like the large window for the New York City Fire Academy. As a child, Larry was captivated by the picture-book pictures in the stained-glass windows of his New York family church. The windows were so colorful that decades later he was inspired to learn how to make them himself. When Larry retired at the age of 41, moved his family to Cape Coral and opened the Casola Stained Glass Studio, a dream came true. But, says his son Ken, he couldn't imagine that the business he started would one day create the kind of stained-glass windows that sparked his imagination as a kid. More:The young Cape Coral resident thrives through art More:Five women who have changed the world of wine for the better Given the status of Casola Stained Glass today, Ken Casola admits that the company was happy that Brad Parliman stepped in on that day in 1985 and mentored that reluctant teenager from whom he "learned how to make stained glass properly. " One door closes and another opens Casola's apprenticeship at Parliman effectively continued into the 1990s when "the old man" was in his 90s and eventually had to stop working. He had become a beloved and adored member of this close-knit Italian family, so Ken or his father would pick him up every day after work and bring him to the store. Larry Casola is also retired, as is Ken's mother, Elaine, an accomplished artist who used to do all of the design work for the company. But Ken is not alone. In the mid-1990s, around the time Parliman was getting too old to work, even better luck came. Alexander Sidorov was an iconographer in his native Russia. He emigrated to England, where he worked in a large studio for 10 years and learned how to make stained glass. He then worked in Germany for a few years before moving to the USA and switching to Casola, who happily says: "He's been making my works of art ever since." "I also have another artist. His name is Erik Jiménez and he paints a lot for me too. "Like the others, Jiménez came up one day looking for a job and although he knew nothing about working with stained glass, he had" an amazing portfolio … he was just a great artist . So he learned from Sidorov and has been painting for me since the early 2000s. " The process Let's say you are pastor of a church and you have a vision of Christ that you want to recreate on stained glass. Or you are a restaurant owner who wants to see your logo in stained glass. Or you are a homeowner who wants to design a decorative glass to hang as a work of art in your home. You can share your design idea with Ken Casolo, who describes the process of creating a church window as an example. Since the glass is for a church, Alex Sidorov sketches the desired image on a sheet of paper. After all the desired revisions have been made and the customer is satisfied with the drawing, Sidorov paints it in watercolor. "All works of art are true to scale," explains Casola, "so we have already measured the window at this point. When the painting is approved, we will blow it up to full size. This full-size drawing is called a cartoon. It is made in black and white with pencils, charcoal, or a magic marker. Then I take the cartoon and copy it by hand using carbon paper. These are the stencils that I will put on the glass and cut out. To be honest, "he adds," it took a long time to get really good cutting in the glass. Brad Parliman was extremely patient with me. " Casola gets its best glass from Europe, more precisely from France, Germany and Poland. "It's hand-blown glass; its colors have a lot of life, a lot of shine. "Casola goes on to explain that with" painting the glass "he refers to the order that the artists make of the outlines or lines of the picture (s) on the glass. After this first application of paint, the glass is burned in an oven at around 1,300 degrees. Next, the artist colors the track lines and the glass is fired again in the kiln. This application of matt paint and kiln can be repeated up to six or seven times. "It's a long process and another reason why some consider the end product to be expensive. But the more realistic you want the picture to be, "explains Ken," the more often you have to shade and fire it. " After the finished pieces of glass are fitted into the full-size pattern, Casola attaches the leads that hold everything together. And although the window is not exposed to the outside elements, he makes the window waterproof by rubbing the edges of the leads with putty. "That makes the window very, very strong." The stained glass window is then built into a wooden or metal frame that is screwed into the window frame installed by the contractor. This inner frame also protects Casola's artwork, which cost the church "thousands and thousands of dollars", by not touching the outside, tempered, or hurricane glass. Casola also restores ancient stained glass. After about a century, he explains, the windows in very old churches have to be carefully lifted out of their frames, the old lead must be painstakingly removed and replaced with new one. Losing a window when you remove it is shockingly easy because the lead that holds it all together has essentially turned to dust. A closing door Casola admits to passing on "a lot of knowledge". His son and daughter have pursued their own careers, but he hopes one day to be able to join someone in their craft so that the art of stained glass "properly" is not lost forever. "Today," he says, "there are big studios that just want to make money." As a perfectionist, he'd rather do without a job than put his name on sloppy work. He fears that when the real artisans are gone, all stained glass will be machine cut out of colored plastic. Much is already there. Most of the "stained glass" you see on front doors today comes from factories in China that keep punching out the same things. "I can't compete with them on price. That's why I explain to people who are only looking for a small piece for their front door that everything I do is tailor-made and personalized, "says Casola. The personal perpetuates How personal Casola's work is can best be seen in the following story. Casola was commissioned a few years ago by St. Mark's Episcopal Church in Palm Beach Gardens to build a sixty-foot-wide and eight-foot-high window to illustrate the story of Jesus feeding the crowd bread and fish. Each section of this massive window was donated by a different family, and each family had an influence on the design of their own section. One of the families consulted with Casola about the memory of their daughter, who was killed in the September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center. "I thought about it a little," recalled Ken, "and I said, 'Why don't we make your daughter an angel?' They were just so happy. The mother was crying. So that's what we did. If you look at this part of the window, you can see the girl's face in two wings, hovering over her parents. " Immortalizing a girl and her parents in the stained glass window of her own church is as personal as it gets. For more information on Casola Stained Glass Studio: 11000 Metro Parkway No. 11, Fort Myers; 239-470-2881; Churcharts.com. Cynthia Williams (cwilliams1020@gmail.com) source https://seapointrealtors.com/2021/08/01/casola-stained-glass-studio-in-fort-myers-carries-on-european-style/ This free site is ad-supported. Learn more ​ Sea Point Realtors | August 1, 2021 at 11:21 am | Categories: Uncategorized | URL: https://wp.me/pd9jJd-Jg Comment    See all comments    Like Unsubscribe to no longer receive posts from Sea Point Realtors. Change your email settings at Manage Subscriptions. Trouble clicking? Copy and paste this URL into your browser: https://seapointrealtors.wordpress.com/2021/08/01/casola-stained-glass-studio-in-fort-myers-carries-on-european-style/ Thanks for flying with WordPress.com