A Simple Beauty

Biomedical scientist turns his hand to stained-glass creations

BY ANDREW VOWLES

The near-disaster happened one night early last year. Prof. Brad Hanna, Biomedical Sciences, had spent hours assembling a stained-glass panel, the first piece in his most ambitious project yet. He'd left the completed two-by-four-foot panel to set overnight on a chest-high shelf in his shed. Later, fumbling in the dark for a garbage can, he knocked against something. Too late, he realized he'd dislodged the window.

“It sent the first window tumbling onto the floor. I could hear rattling and banging, I was sure it was smashed.”

His luck held — and so did the window. Last spring, that panel, along with four companion stained-glass windows, was installed in newly renovated quarters in Hanna's department at the Ontario Veterinary College. “They're surprisingly tough,” he says, eyeing the array of windows a year later.

Besides providing a colourful focal point for visitors passing through that part of the building, the glasswork is a testament to a three-year-old pastime that now sees Hanna spending more than a few off-hours wielding a diamond cutter and a soldering gun in his basement workshop.

Visit the northeast corner of OVC and enter through the first doorway facing College Avenue. Down a flight of stairs and directly ahead is a white wood-framed door surrounded on both sides and overhead by those five stained-glass panels.

Each of the matching panels on both sides of the door sports a white rooster set into a circle — one green with a yellow border, the other with the colours reversed. The three smaller panels above the doorway contain unadorned grids of translucent leaded panes. All five windows are trimmed with blue-flecked glass, an effect achieved by melting white and blue fragments directly onto the glass.

Spanning 42 square feet, the array contains almost 700 individual pieces of glass knitted together with about 350 feet of zinc and lead stripping. Hanna spent about 100 hours in that home workshop as his volunteer contribution to a multi-million-dollar renovation for the new Institute for Animal-Human Links in Health Science Research.

Pass through that glass-framed doorway, turn left and you're standing outside the laboratory he shares with Prof. Glen Pyle.

The shared space formerly housed OVC's first poultry pathology lab, one reason Hanna chose roosters for his stained-glass motif. Today in that lab, he studies the workings of ion channels — conduits in cell membranes that allow selective passage of sodium, potassium and other key ions. More specifically, he's interested in what happens when mutant genes create dysfunctional channels, leading to a variety of diseases in animals and people.

As a graduate student here in biophysics during the early 1990s, Hanna helped identify the first sodium ion channel disease in veterinary medicine. By then, he'd already done a biology undergraduate degree and his DVM at Guelph and had worked in a mixed practice in northern Ontario. That experience confirmed an earlier conviction that what he really wanted to do was teach and study, so he returned to Guelph to do graduate work with physics professor George Renninger. He earned a master's degree in 1992 and a PhD in 1997, doing research for the latter at Johns Hopkins University. He joined OVC as a lecturer in 1999 and became a faculty member two years later.

Turn to the right at the stained-glass doorway and you pass along a corridor lined with offices belonging to members of the Enhanced Health Assessment Lab. Among them, Hanna's is easy to spot, with its narrow vertical window filled with stained glass depicting a dog's meandering red paw prints.

Inside, collections of journal articles arrayed on his desk point to today's research interests. For example, Hanna is collaborating with Prof. Andrew Bendall, Molecular and Cellular Biology, on studies of myotonia. They hope this summer to develop a blood test for this muscle disease in dogs. Along with Bendall and other OVC faculty, he hopes to acquire funding to study what causes atrial fibrillation in standardbred horses.

Framed photos of Hanna wearing a hockey helmet and telltale black-and-white-striped jersey attest to his other extracurricular interest. He began refereeing hockey games on campus as a grad student. Since then, he's officiated at about 1,400 games, mostly on a volunteer basis, from house-league hockey to charity fundraisers to intramural matchups. It was while refereeing a women's hockey game on campus that he met his wife, Lynae Harris, then completing her DVM.

He doesn't play much now compared with his own intramural days. He played defence, having learned to skate only after arriving at Guelph for his undergraduate degree. He laughs as he recalls his early outings on the ice. “I was terrible. I loved it.”

There hadn't been enough money to pay for minor hockey when he was younger. Hanna grew up as one of seven children and five foster children on a 35-acre farm in Mount Hope near Hamilton. Instead, he learned early to use his hands during frequent visits to a woodworking and welding shop just down the road.

Having picked up everything from electrical wiring to metalworking, he had considered becoming an engineer. That notion was quickly dispelled after a visit to a university campus, where he realized the last thing he wanted to study was engineering.

By then, the family had moved to Waterloo, where his father founded the School of Accountancy at the University of Waterloo. He decided to become a vet instead (an uncle, Gordon Campbell, was an immunologist and associate dean at the School of Veterinary Medicine at Cornell University).

Having kept his hand in with woodworking — designing and building furniture and bookcases — Hanna was inspired in 2003 by a photograph of a set of stained-glass windows at the University of Cambridge. He bought tools, glass and an armload of instruction books and set to work on his first project.

That original window now graces the backyard shed of his Guelph home. “I was surprised at how much I liked it,” he says. Some of that appreciation had to do with his lifelong attraction to heritage buildings and their simple materials: stone, wood, glass.

“I like old stone buildings and the simplicity of some of their windows. The simpler the window, the more beautiful.”

Gesturing in the direction of War Memorial Hall, he says: “They're just rectangles, but when the light hits them, they're just beautiful.”

It was that sentiment that made him act when he realized the OVC renovation project might well see demolition of that old wooden doorway. Standing before his stained-glass panels, he recalls that this entryway formerly connected an area at the bottom of the stairwell occupied by student mailboxes and locker rooms with a hallway leading to a former cafeteria. “I went through here thousands of times,” he says, explaining the appeal that the spot holds for him all these years later.

Approaching administrators involved with the renovation, he suggested using stained glass to preserve the doorway. Eventually he found himself broaching the idea with the architect. His response: “Are you going to make it?” Hanna didn't waste much time. “Without thinking too much about it, I said: ‘Sure, I could do that.'”

Starting at the end of January 2005, he took 3½ months to complete the project, working for one or two hours at a time. He says he likes to take his time on his creations, using the hand tools of the traditional craftsperson rather than the power equipment favoured by many glass-makers.

He traces a design drawn on paper onto the glass sheet, then cuts out the shapes with a diamond-tipped knife. Using zinc and lead strips, he solders the glass pieces together, starting at one corner and working diagonally toward the opposite corner. Flipping the pane over, he repeats the process on the other side — a feat requiring dexterity and practice to prevent the half-soldered panel from falling apart.

To make that “jiggly window” more rigid, he needs to pack in cementing material between the solder and the glass. The smelly cement compound leaves the glass looking irretrievably smeared and blackened. The remedy is close at hand: sawdust stored from his woodworking. Rubbed onto the panes, sawdust lifts the cement compound and shines the glass.

Not all glass is alike, says Hanna, pointing out a few of the 22 types he used in the OVC project, from smooth water glass to “hammered” pieces with a knubbly texture.

Then comes make-or-break time. “The most satisfying and most nervous moment is when it's all welded and I hold it up to the light for the first time.”

Only once so far has he found a finished colour that he disliked, necessitating some surgery to replace the offending glass.

A contractor installed the array around the OVC doorway in mid-May. Hanna is generally satisfied with the results, although he believes the effect was marred by new ceiling ductwork that ends just inches from the inner side of the doorway. The lowered ceiling partially obscures the upper panels from inside the corridor and muddies the view of the glass from outside in the stairwell. Still, he says, “I like the way the light hits it. I like the colour.”

So does his colleague Prof. John Armstrong, who happens by while Hanna is showing off his creation. Armstrong points out a practical benefit of the piece for visitors arriving at that outer entrance. “I always tell students: Turn right before you hit the stained-glass roosters. It's definitely a landmark.”

Hanna has completed pieces for friends and colleagues, including a transom window that adorns the home of Prof. Peter Conlon, OVC assistant dean (student affairs). He's also made pieces to accent his homemade bookcases. Surprisingly, he has not tackled any of the windows in his home, although he says it's time to replace the original windows in the 50-year-old bungalow. Meanwhile, he's working on projects for three clients' homes and has suggested a few other ideas for OVC.

“I don't consider myself a real professional at this; I'm a learner. I hope at the end that it's reasonably good.”