Please excuse this completely subjective comment on an obscure art form...

As I was reading Wade article I found myself relating strongly to his description of Gestalt psychology derived from mosaics. It harkened back to conference week of last year’s Narrative Neuropsychology and the challenges I faced with communicating the significance of the correlation between my paper on The Diving Bell and The Butterfly with the stained glass I had made to go along with it. Had I read this article then (or had just familiarized myself with Gestalt psychology), it would have been a far easier task. I often failed to draw the viewer’s attention to the fact that there are more dimensions of perceptual stimuli than immediately meets the eye, and, further, that it was this element of layers of stimuli that mirrored the layers of my intentions as an artist. The elements of stained glass that are most salient to the eye are the color and shape of the pieces and the overall picture. It is interesting to apply Gestalt to the actual design of a stained glass, because the individual pieces themselves are the fundamental building block of the piece yet they are integrally tied to their context. Indeed, it is rarely the piece itself but what surrounds it that gives a piece its significance. For example, if you remove a piece from the template, say you decided you wanted to change it, you have no choice but to make an identical piece to replace it, or else you have to change every other piece you have made. You could change the color or the opacity of the glass, but the shape is forced by it surrounding pieces. Another option would be to cut the piece into smaller ones and thus create more grout lines to distract from an off shape. A piece may itself be defined by the pieces around it, but the grout lines define the relationship between the pieces. The impact a stained glass has is reliant on the viewer’s perception of lines, giving the borders of the glass pieces an equal amount of importance as the pieces themselves. As Wade remarks when comparing pixels to tesserae as individual components of a whole, “They were not laid out with the linear regularity of pixels in computer images, but often were arranged in curves to convey the continuity of contours in the scene represented”. In my own work, I like my lines to be graceful, flowing, and indefinite. It is important to me that I can follow my grout lines from any point in the mosaic to almost any other point. Because that is my aesthetic, my individual glass pieces mirror that, and are themselves flowing, alternating rounded and pointed. The whole is perceived to have a fluid dynamic to it because it is inherently composed of parts with identical characteristics. To illustrate this point, I converted a picture of one of my glasses to grayscale. Although the vibrant colors that more clearly demarcated the outline of the tree are gone, the shapes and the lines characteristic of the ground, tree, and sky remain, making the design visible even though the theme of all the parts are very similar. Also noticeable are the variety in opacity, another element of stained glass that relates interestingly to Gestalt.
The reason I think it is appropriate for me to lecture about the artistic virtues of stained glass is that the significance, at least in my pieces, lies in neither the perception of the whole nor the attention to the individual components, but to the relationship between them. As I mentioned above, the perception of the whole is dictated by the parts because the parts have the same aesthetic as a whole. This is unlike some of the examples given in the Wade article such as the portrait of Max Wertheimer made of open and filled dots or the mosaic of lozenges that create ambiguous cubes. I am fascinated by the phenomenon of Gestalt grouping when applied here, and hope that I am not finding meaning here that is undeserved!