Renowned glass artist and the making of a gigantic church window featured in new film

VALLE DE BRAVO, Mexico (AP) — It’s as if Narcissus Quagliata is painting with light.

He sprinkles the crushed, colorful glass onto a template of his own design before baking the powder-coated pane at nearly 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit for almost an entire day. Once cooled, a translucent, stained-glass image emerges.

“The light, with the glass, moves you to the core,” said Quagliata, an 81-year-old master of his craft, on a recent day at his studio in Valle de Bravo, near Mexico City. “It’s profound.”

Over the last five decades, Quagliata has created these stained-glass artworks for sacred spaces, private homes and public exhibitions, using a fusible glass technique he considers his most precious legacy.

The scope of Quagliata’s invention can be seen in “Holy Frit,” a documentary recently released in U.S. In the film, the Italian artist serves as a mentor-like figure for Tim Carey, a young American colleague who found himself facing the greatest challenge of his artistic career.

In 2015, Carey was appointed lead artist for a colossal project, a stained-glass window more than 90 feet long and nearly 40 feet high for a new church building in Leawood, Kansas. By 2017, “The Resurrection Window” would become the focal point in Resurrection’s sanctuary – the home base for the largest United Methodist congregation in the U.S.

“My hope is the window acts like a sacrament, as a visible means of grace through which God communicates and says: I’m here,” Hamilton said in “Holy Frit.”

But first Carey needed to figure out how he and his team would pull off the 161-panel window, with each panel measuring 4 feet by 5 feet, in a few years’ time.

Carey created 76 sketches before getting the pastor’s approval. What he kept silent, though,...