A New Kent resident turns salvaged windows into simple art
Picture Windows
“Butterfly” by artist Lee Dail
Picture Windows
“Flight of the Dove” by artist Lee Dail
Picture Windows
“Flowers on the Pond” by artist Lee Dail
Six years ago, Lee Dail and his wife moved into an old hunting house in New Kent County. The house had not been renovated since its original construction, in 1962, and in particular needed to be made more energy-efficient. Dail (rhymes with “mail”), a grant administrator for the National White Collar Crime Center, pulled out all 22 of the windows—each with two sashes and hence two single panes of glass—and then kept them. “I couldn’t crunch them in a compactor,” he says. “They had too much character.”
The windows sat for years, until this past winter when a storm left snowflake stencils all over the panes. Inspired, Dail began to paint images on the windows using Plaid Gallery Glass paint, designed to replicate stained glass. Since his epiphany, Dail, who has no art training, has painted 17 images on old glass—among them, a dove, a turtle, a beach. He’s been showing his picture windows in festivals and has sold a couple at prices between $300 and $550. He says they can be suspended in front of a picture window or even hung on a wall. “There is no theme or agenda,” Dail explains. “I’m trying to express what appeals to me. This has become a passion.”
He won’t run out of windows anytime soon. “I still have about 20 from the renovation,” he says, and he picked up another 30 large salvaged windows recently from a thrift shop. He painted two discarded standard double panes, “but I prefer the old single-pane wooden windows.” Those from his home “have 50 years of character in the form of paint, varnish, sun bleach, water stains, scratches and dips. I didn’t want to change them with repairs, simply transform them [into objects] that are viewed rather than viewed through.”
