12/7-8/78 The Beacon article ARTIST FULFILLS CAYCE PREDICTION
by Mary Reid Barrow, Beacon Correspondent:
Forty-four years ago, Edgar Cayce did a reading for Fredrica
Fields when she was a youngster. He predicted that she would
work in stained glass.
"At the time he did it, it meant nothing to me," Mrs. Fields
said. "It went in one ear and out the other."
"Today, Mrs. Fields, who lives in Greenwich, Conn., is a
nationally-known artist in the field of stained glass. She
has just finished supervising the installation of her large
stained glass windows in the meditation room at the
Association for Research and Enlightenment, home of the Edgar
Cayce Foundation.
It took Mrs. Fields almost all of the 44 years to come full
circle. Cayce did the readings for her family and her in
1934. It wasn't until 1946, after her mother died, that Mrs.
Fields rediscovered what Cayce had said about her among her
mother's papers.
"At that point, I had been deep into the study of stained
glass for about five years," she said.
Surprising as the prophecy was, it still provoked no real
interest in the ARE. Mrs. Fields' brother, however, had
maintained contact with the association. Several years ago,
he told her that the ARE was collecting information on
different facets of Cayce's readings and what predictions had
come true. In March of 1977, she wrote "out of the blue" to
Hugh Lynn Cayce, Cayce's son, and told him about her reading.
"It turns out they had been searching for three years for
someone to do the stained glass work for their meditation
room," she said. "I said I would be delighted to do them as
a gift."
In selecting Mrs. Fields to do their windows, the ARE board
of directors chose an artist whose work is unique in the
country. Most artists work flat, cut glass which they weld
together with lead. Hers is a multi-layered, abstract, three
dimensional approach, the glass held together with clear
epoxy. In the flat, leaded technique, a design is
generally made first.
"I work in reverse," she said. "I gather my glass and work
with it in combinations and systems and find out what the
glass can do and then design the work.
"It has a living quality I feel is lacking in the other," she
added.
Mrs. Fields has public installations in the Greenwich Library
and Greenwich YWCA and in the Washington Cathedral in
addition to private commissions. Her techniques have been
included in several books on stained glass and she has won
awards at the Corcoran Gallery of Art and the National
Collection of Fine Arts at the Smithsonian Institution.
In the early years of her career, Mrs. Fields worked in flat,
leaded designs just like everyone else. When a bout with
arthritis made it too difficult for her to hold her work up
to the light to see the effect, her husband developed a
lighted table for her to work on.
"I began to see all these visions of how glass intermixed,"
she said. "In trying to capture this free form mix of
material, I developed the technique."
The two, 20-foot, 300-pound windows at the ARE each have
three panels. Each panel is held together by an oak frame.
Clear quarter-inch plate glass is on the back and front of
each panel. In between, is a layer of glass rods. Some of
the rods are solid colors, some clear, and some are hollow
and filled with smaller colored rods. Behind the rods are
two more layers of colored glass.
The primary colors are deep indigo blue and violet, both
meaningful colors in meditation. Other colors are yellow,
gold, orange, red, green and light blue. The abstract
designs are reminiscent of large, rippling sunbursts.
The center portion of one panel represents man reaching
upward and the center portion of the other panel is the
"power above coming down to man," she said. "The four side
panels are individual thoughts or prayer points."
Mrs. Fields said she read book after book in order to
understand meditation and spent a lot of time working with
ARE members to come up with the windows they wanted.
In some of her other works, Mrs. Fields makes use of antique
glass, marbles, nuggets and figured crystal sheets. The
glass rods were originally intended for costume jewelry and
are no longer being made. Several years ago, she purchased
her whole stock of rods from a jeweler in Czechoslovakia.
"When my present stock is gone, this will be it," she said.
"But it will last my lifetime."
Mrs. Fields now is working on two more sets of windows for
the meditation room lobby which she hopes will be installed
sometime in the next year. It took her a full year to
complete the first panels in her Greenwich studio in her home
where she lives with her husband and photographer, retired
Brig. Gen. Kenneth E. Fields.
"This is very demanding work," she said. "There are long
hours of just plain labor in putting it all together. "I'll
be 67 next January and I have to look out for my joints and
muscles."
Because of the time it takes, Mrs. Fields calls herself a
"hermit." She does, however take time "to raise a garden and
put it to bed" and to listen to music. Oddly enough, Cayce
also predicted in her reading long ago that music and nature
would be important to her.
"These three things (art, music and gardening), next to my
family and friends, are my life," she said. "Music I
couldn't live without, and I don't work happily without it.
Glass is the closest other form to music. It has a singing
quality."
2/24/70 From an article written for the Stained Glass Journal
by Stephen Bridges, New York:
"That a woman should design stained glass causes little
surprise. That she should manipulate basic materials as Mrs.
Fields does might astonish some. Her manner of working is to
design directly with glass in full size, making sure that it
is both fluid and yet controlled in its growth, strong with a
hidden discipline, and with a deceptive appearance of
spontaneity when finished.
"Mrs. Fields pursues her art with meticulous craftsmanship.
Using glass of many types and textures she builds up
compositions in several layers improvising during the entire
process. Diffusion and distortion of the color areas defies
analysis in the finished work because of the complex variety
of materials employed. In addition to familiar colored sheet
glasses she also uses textured glass of many types, rods,
tubes, beads, jewels and ornaments. The panels are assembled
over light boxes and the composition can be changed as the
artist wishes until the final covering glass is in place.
"...In the new Public Library of Greenwich, Connecticut...
The brick wall in the foyer of the auditorium was especially
built to receive her work. Each recessed opening is
surrounded with faceted planes of masonry subtly integrating
the asymmetrically placed panels with their background. The
effect is one of complete harmony as if the wall and glass
had been designed with one stroke... Color differences are
as varied as the sizes but with a unity which makes the whole
wall seem to glow."
See Source File Key #499 for photographs of Mrs. Fields'
three-dimensional stained-glass work.
3/12/92 Newspaper article, Greenwich, Connecticut:
Obituaries
Fredrica H. Fields, 80, glass artist
Fredrica H. Fields, 80 a nationally known and widely
exhibited stained glass artist, died of natural causes
March 4 at Greenwich Hospital.
A resident of Greenwich for 33 years, she was creating
stained glass windows up to the time of her death. Her most
recent installations were two windows at The Church of the
Holy Comforter in Kenilworth, Ill.
Regarded as a pioneer and innovator in the field of abstract
stained glass windows, Mrs. Fields received inquiries and
requests for her windows from as far away as Saudi Arabia and
India. While stained glass windows are usually associated
with cathedral windows depicting biblical scenes, hers are
abstract designs using layers of different types of glass of
varied shapes and colors.
Mrs. Fields had taught classes at the Greenwich YWCA and her
work was shown in exhibits of The Greenwich Art Society and
the Stamford Art Association.
She was a member of the Stained Glass Association of America,
from which she received several first-place commendations.
Locations of her glass installations include the Greenwich
YWCA, the Cole Auditorium of the Greenwich Library, St.
John's Episcopal Church in Stamford, The National Cathedral
in Washington, D.C., The Connecticut Hospice in Branford,
Concordia College in Bronxville, N.Y., and the Association
for Research and Enlightenment Meditation Center in Virginia
Beach, Va. Additionally, her works are part of the permanent
collection of glass at the Corning Museum in Corning, N.Y.
Mrs. Fields studied stained glass with Mrs. Orin Skinner in
Boston and later with George Sotter. Arthritis in her arms
made it difficult to hold the glass up to the light so she
worked over a light table. As the pieces of colored glass
became stacked, she noticed how they took on different
characteristics.
She was a contributor to several publications and reference
books on the art of stained glass. For the past several
years she had been selected to appear in The Guild, a
sourcebook of American Craft Artists.
Born Jan. 10, 1912, in Philadelphia, Pa., she was the
daughter of the late Theodore Mitchell Hastings, a New York
architect, and the late Carolyn Corliss Bailey Hastings. She
attended Wellesley College and studied at the Art Students'
League in New York.
Her eldest son, David Edward Fields, a Commander in the U.S.
Navy, died in 1973.
She was married to Brig. Gen. (ret.) Kenneth E. Fields, a
West Point graduate who was appointed by President Eisenhower
to be general manager of the Atomic Energy Commission. As
the wife of an Army officer, she moved 19 times in four
decades before settling in Greenwich and developing her art
after raising her children.
In addition to her husband, she is survived by a daughter,
Luellen Fields of Stamford; a son, Stephen Francis Fields of
Wilmette, Ill., and his wife, Mary Fields; a brother, T.
Mitchell Hastings of Martha's Vineyard, Mass.; six
grandchildren; and one nephew.
The funeral was Saturday.
Donations may be made in her memory to The Church of the Holy
Comforter, Kenilworth, Ill., or to The Connecticut Hospice in
Branford.
Edgar Cayce Readings © 1971, 1993, 1994, 1995 by the Edgar Cayce Foundation