From Fragments to First Light
After a traumatic injury, Kyle Baughman found his calling in stained glass.
In a small shop in West Hattiesburg, strewn about a dusty work table, are the tools of Kyle Baughman’s trade. There are needle-nose pliers, stray pieces of lead, discarded fragments of colored glass, a razor and a pencil or two. Amongst it all sits a miniature Rubik’s cube, symbolic—I thought to myself—of the puzzles Baughman engages in. Nearby stands a five-gallon bucket of old Coca-Cola bottles.
On the day I visited, at the center of it all, on top of a white sheet of paper, was a large unfinished frame of stained glass that Baughman had been commissioned to create for a Hattiesburg resident. It was big—more than six feet long, a foot and a half wide—and its colors were warm green, milky yellow, and occasions of tender brown. If the piece had a theme it was this: Good dreams. Baughman stood there at the table and, using the piece as an example, did his best to explain his process.
Thirty four years old and slight, Baughman’s appearance is dominated by a great beard reaching down to his chest. In early 2015, he worked as an extra in the movie The Free State of Jones, and a producer asked that he stop shaving. No razor has touched his face since. In conversation he is considerate and open to humor. He is good company. Just below the laidback surface, though, is the suggestion of a ready intensity.
Out of the hospital, [Baughman] struggled. He needed some light.
Before cutting the first piece of glass, he explained, he draws everything out with pencil and paper. By his estimation the more drawing that occurs in the beginning, the fewer mistakes that happen near the end. When he does bring out a razor to begin cutting, each slice of glass is done by hand and numbered. The piece he was working on that day consisted of 133 individual pieces of glass—and each one was already assigned its own space. Then, after his measurements are accurate and his cuts true, Baughman brings all the fragments together into their final image, using lead. It is a long, tedious process. As Baughman spoke, I noticed that his hands are rough, with a Band-Aid wrapped around one finger.
The path to stained glass
Growing up, becoming a stained glass artist wasn’t exactly where Baughman imagined life would take him. He had tried to play life straight—attending college after high school, taking a full-time job with benefits in the medical field in Hattiesburg, a city near where he grew up, over the river in Petal, Mississippi. The work did not agree with him. So he traded in scrubs and security for the calloused hands and uncertainty of menial labor.
He eventually found stained glass in a place called Eastabuchie, working for an artist there. For a decade, off and on, Baughman made and installed glass at country churches across the Bible Belt, among other tasks like feeding chickens and mowing grass.
Then, on October 14, 2014, he was asked to replace the rotting pine roof of a greenhouse. Baughman remembers being up there, working, when at some point, as he tossed down a battery, the wood beneath him gave way, and he crashed twenty-five feet to the ground.
The fall broke one of Baughman’s clavicles and four ribs. It cracked his skull, front to back. During a week-long stay in a hospital’s intensive care unit, he spoke in what he now calls “word salad”—stray phrases and utterings that indicated he had suffered a traumatic brain injury.
Out of the hospital, he struggled. He needed some light.
Baughman knew he had always enjoyed working with stained glass, so in early 2015, when a friend mentioned that he knew someone with stained glass supplies for sale, Baughman cobbled money together and bought the equipment. When he sat down alone with the glass, he was prepared for the cutting, the soldering of the lead, and all of the rest. His time in Eastabuchie had prepared him for the sweaty work. He realized, though, that before he could begin engaging his hands, there were measurements to consider, equations to work, puzzles of design to negotiate. These puzzles, which he worked out via pencil on paper and trial and error, engrossed him. The process allowed him, for the first time in a long time, to forget his trouble. “I could focus on my art,” he said, “instead of focusing on my injury.”
In that moment, he said, as he lifts the completed piece up, light passes through every single pane of glass at the same time, for the first time. This is when all the colors finally have a chance to blend, when dominant hues emerge, and a piece’s personality is revealed.
As the puzzles became less intimidating and Baughman’s confidence grew, what began as a form of therapy crossed into joy’s territory. He slowly started to build a pool of customers, and in April 2016, he opened his one-man business—Hub City Stained Glass—and his art officially became his daily work. “Now,” he said, “it’s my passion.”
In the last three years Baughman has completed roughly a hundred commissioned pieces. With a vision one might describe as eclectic, he has built traditional patterns of triangular, square and rectangle mosaics, of varying colors and sizes, designed to fit into existing architecture and color schemes. He has also created ornamental guitars and leg lamps, Christmas trees and hollies for the holidays, mushrooms for planters, stand-alone flowers big and small, and several kinds of birds.
[Read this: Megan Barra creates works of art from fabric she sews by hand.]
While Baughman’s work certainly possesses the brooding quality stained-glass art is known for, it exudes a subtle and approachable levity, too. For a downtown eatery called GrateFull Soul, he crafted a Grateful Dead-inspired skeleton of a red-headed woman (Deadheads will know her as “Bertha”) whose look seems intended to tempt the viewer into a dance. And last year, when David Gustafson, a local newspaper publisher and editor originally from Oklahoma, wanted an Okie-inspired creation, Baughman delivered a piece that features a buffalo set against a sunrise. The colors are bright and lighthearted—orange, blue and white—yet the image, in a deceptive way, exudes the powerful stoicism of the plains.
“It’s a beautiful piece that I’m proud to own,” said Gustafson. “Kyle’s work stands out because of the way he manages to merge a traditional art form with a style more reminiscent of contemporary folk art.”
Grounded inspiration
Around the time Baughman started Hub City Stained Glass, a friend of his made a discovery while walking a dog in downtown Hattiesburg. There were tiny, broken pieces of green glass that formed a sort of path leading toward a washout near Gordon’s Creek. When he got closer he found, tucked away between two non-descript parking lots, dozens and dozens of old and discarded Coca-Cola bottles. Most had “Hattiesburg” emblazoned on the bottom, while others featured the names of other nearby towns: New Orleans, Mobile, Baton Rouge, Laurel. Intrigued, Baughman went to the spot and picked up a few. He did not have a plan at the time, but, he told me, “I knew I could do something with them.”
When he cleaned the dirt from the bottles, their original deep green tint was revealed, and he removed their thick bases—discovering an invigorating opportunity to ground a sense of place into his work.
To this day, after a good rain, Baughman goes back to the spot looking for more. “I’ve never really dug for them,” he said. “I let the water do the work for me.”
[Read this: Three hundred years of history, held together with duct tape]
He has a theory for how so many bottles have made their way to that washout, musing that they were discarded from Hattiesburg’s century-old Coca-Cola bottling facility. These days the facility is located off of a busy highway on the city’s west side, but during the first half of the twentieth century the facility was downtown. Baughman has come to believe that years ago when people brought old Coca-Cola bottles to the facility for a refund, the ones that were broken or chipped or otherwise unusable were taken to that location and dumped.
He figures he has picked up around a hundred of the bottles so far. Broken and discarded as they are, when Baughman finishes with them, they are perfect adornments for many of his pieces.
Discovering a new light
Back in his shop, Baughman tries to describe to me the feeling of finishing a piece. His favorite part comes when he finally gets to take a new creation off of his work table. In that moment, he said, as he lifts the completed piece up, light passes through every single pane of glass at the same time, for the first time. This is when all the colors finally have a chance to blend, when dominant hues emerge, and a piece’s personality is revealed.
“I call it ‘first light,’” said Baughman.
The following week, he finished the piece I had first seen in his workshop. I was not there when he installed it, but he said he stepped back six feet or so and spent a few moments looking at it. I imagine Baughman there, in the presence of the new light of his work, cast throughout the room, a slight glow of satisfaction illuminating him.