I'll never forget my first experience of seeing a stained glass window.

I was 17. My family, fleeing the Soviet Union as refugees, landed briefly in Vienna. Free open-air spaces and cathedrals where the only things within our empty wallet’s reach. And in one of those unassuming cathedrals there it was, a huge rose window in rich delicious color, hitting my retinas straight on through to my heart and ripping it open with the harmony and force of light. The feeling was so immediate and intense, my throat closed, my eyes filled with burning salty water and I had to sit down. I think I landed on the floor.

Oh, it was not love and adoration I was experiencing at that moment. It was raw Divine, in all its intensity, unapologetically declaring its presence. It took my heart, and I was done in.

Having grown up in the Soviet Union, my idea of the Divine was synonymous with "religion," which every schoolchild in USSR automatically paired with "opium for the masses.” My religious education at that point was equivalent to that of an alien visiting Earth from some galaxy far-far away. The subjects in the images I saw in glass in that cathedral made no sense to me. But that was irrelevant. It was not about concepts and ideas. There was an irresistible precision to how transparency and color of the glass played with the intensity of the filtered light. The grace of lead lines and the powerful force streaming through the lattices those lines created sounded like music in my head. I was being “tuned” to a specific frequency, whether I chose to submit to it or not. And I knew then and there that I wanted to become a member of that special tribe which held the secrets to the magic of making the unseen - the Divine Light - seen.

My work is about creating, through painted stained-glass construction, all sorts of devices to tune you in to this Divine energy of light. We are all like musical instruments when the light hits us, and it is a given to me that each one of us will be vibrating at your own frequency. The subjects I choose are meant to slow you down mentally for just long enough to have the light start working its magic. To me the purpose of my art about the whole energetic “re-tunement” of the person viewing the work. I feel that there is no bottom to the myriads of ways glass allows me to do this.