Watkins stained glass has window on Colorado history

The sound of snapping glass is usually a bad thing, but not in the Colorado studio of Watkins Stained Glass. To Phil Watkins, breaking glass is an essential part of the creative process.

"The craft is the actual cutting an pieceing of the glass with lead into a cohesive object like a suncatcher, window, or whatever," said Watkins. He describes himself as both a craftsman and an artist. "The artistry part, you're drawing the design thinking 'how am I going to make a window out of this?'"

Phil started learning how to make stained glass windows when he was 8 years old. It's a skill he learned from his father Phil Watkins Sr., who learned it from his father Frank Watkins, who learned it from his father Clarence Watkins. In fact, there are at least nine documented generations of stained glass artists in the Watkins family, possibly more. The family has traced their roots in stained glass back to Liverpool and London. Clarence emigrated to the United States in the mid-1800s and made his way west, arriving in Denver in 1868. The family studio is now located in Englewood.

"I honestly don't know what they did here in the 1860s because there wasn't any buildings. And if they were, they burned down."

Denver at that time was just getting its feet under it. But growth would soon follow, bringing with it the need for skilled craftsmen to create and assemble stained glass windows for various new buildings, including churches like Trinity United Methodist Church, which sits at 18th and Broadway in Denver, and was built in 1887.

"There's five generations of Watkins that made windows in there," recalls Phil's daughter Kitt Watkins representing the fifth generation of family artisans whose windows hang in the church. "Not cool that rocks broke them, but cool that my dad had to fix some Kitt Watkins windows."

Watkins stained glass windows also hang in the state capitol, Fairmount Cemetery, the Federal Reserve building, Molly Brown House, and many other residences.

"It is neat to be like 'there's a Watkins window, there's a Watkins window, we restored that one...'" said Kitt.

Her graduate capstone project began to catalog and document the thousands of drawings of the windows called "cartoons" which lie rolled up in the rafters of the Englewood studio.

"It's really eye-opening to see the amount and scope of work this family has done through the generations."

Much of the studio's work these days involves restoring older stained glass windows -- those done by the early generations of Watkins as well as other artists. The family restored the stained glass windows in the rotunda of the state capitol as well as the glass globe atop the dome.

"It was really nice to go into a church and find out that my grandfather or dad or great grandather had made them and I got a chance to work on them."

CBS Colorado caught up with Phil as he was working on restoring a window which originally hung in a casino in Vail, one of the first buildings built in the ski town. The windows were built by Phil and his dad, Phil senior. The windows disappeared when the building was torn down, but turned up in a collection which the Watkins studio was able to purchase. Phil recalls cutting each small diamond shape for the windows, and still has some of the original diamonds somewhere in the workshop, though they remained well hidden forcing Phil to find new glass to match the old colors.

"I have maybe 50 different shades of blue, green, maybe thirty."

The sheets of glass stand on racks all around the studio, numbered in reference to each specific color. Some of the sheets are close to 100 years old.

In fact, there's a lot in the studio that's old, because the craft itself hasn't changed much over the centuries.

"It's still done the same ways," said Phil. "The cement is still the same wher we have to cement the windows to waterproof them."

In fact, the cement bucket itself was used by Phil's grandfather, and is coated with layers upon layers of old dried cement. About the only thing that's changed? "My grandfather didn't have an electric soldering iron."

So maybe some things do change in the centuries-old craft, but one thing for certain, when it's in your blood, you're destined not to stray too far. Phil got a fine arts degree from the University of Colorado and at the time wondered where that would take him. But as he reflects back on a lifetime of creating and restoring Colorado history in living color, he ponders "there's a lot of things I was going to do, but I just ended up here."