Little or big, metal sculptor and stained glass artist Barney Zeitz can make it. Small pieces are his bread and butter. His handmade chandeliers, bowls, wall hangings, torchieres, closet doors, fireplace screens, and stove hoods find their way into people’s homes on the Vineyard and across the country. West Tisbury’s Granary Gallery has a standing order for a glass-and-metal bowl he designed – once one sells, he makes another.

His large, public works may be fewer in number, but they are the most satisfying projects for this protean artist, who has supported himself with his art since he arrived on-Island in 1972. A massive, fifteen-by-seventeen-foot stained glass window is his latest and perhaps grandest public achievement. Finished this spring, it is due to be installed at the new spiritual center for Maple Grove Cemetery in Queens, New York, in time for the building’s dedication on September 28. A commission valued at well over $100,000, it illustrates how the reach of this Vineyard artist is expanding. And that makes Barney very happy.

Though public art is the closest to his heart, occasions for creating it don’t pop up here very often. The Island’s summer season is short, with an art market geared to pastoral or nautical painting designed for private appreciation. Barney occasionally threatens to move back to the mainland – he grew up in Fall River – but with his wife, Phyllis Vecchia, teaching creative drama for various groups including Island schools, and their daughter, Kaela, attending the Tisbury School, that doesn’t seem likely to happen.

So he applies for competitive commissions. They take hours of his time to develop, and the proposals are done purely on speculation, but hundreds of artists line up for the big-bucks projects.

“If I had to depend on public commissions, I would have starved,” he says. Still, he has won his share.

The first came in 1993, when he won an open competition to design a Holocaust-memorial sculpture for the Rhode Island Holocaust Memorial Museum in Providence. Grounded in a Star of David, the eloquent, abstract steel and bronze sculpture rises twelve feet high on six steel beams encircled by shields and reaching up to a cluster of leaflike, spiritual shapes.

In 2001, Barney won the competition to design an Immigrant Memorial for the town of Plymouth, and the handsome, twelve-foot stainless steel work with bronze lettering stands in Brewster Gardens, a seventeenth-century park across from Plymouth Rock. Barney used direct welding, rather than casting, to create the memorial’s figures, something few sculptors attempt. Most send wax models to a foundry, but Barney likes to work by hand – a far more labor-intensive process that involves welding, grinding to create surface texture, and forging, which adds material to a sculpture’s surface.

He assiduously mines nearby opportunities for public art. A Vineyard committee of Vietnam veterans and protesters joined forces in 1996 and commissioned him to make the Vietnam Era Memorial to embrace the positions of both sides. That iron and stainless steel sculpture stood on the corner of Main Street and Beach Road in Vineyard Haven until the Tisbury Inn burned to the ground in 2001. Since the rebuilt hotel, now called the Mansion House, doesn’t have room for the memorial, it sits in Barney’s back yard for the time being.

“We’re going to find a place for it,” he says. “It’s not a pro- or anti-war piece. It’s about the reality of war.”

Coming of age in the sixties, Barney has long felt a commitment to art that addresses social issues. He spent two years at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst during the period when student protestors shut down that institution. After moving to Denmark for six months, he never went back to college. “I was kind of a hippie,” he says.

As he’s developed a following on the Vineyard, Barney finds that personal connections have brought him more work. A Zeitz sculpture was commissioned by the Walter Suskind Memorial Education Fund for Boston’s Wang Center for the Performing Arts (now the Citi Performing Arts Center) after Edgartown summer residents Maurice and Netty Vanderpol saw Barney’s work and proposed him for the project to honor the German Holocaust hero. Using a combination of fused stained glass and steel, Barney incorporated a shield to symbolize the sacrifices made by Suskind, who smuggled nearly a thousand Dutch children out of an Amsterdam child-care center before he was sent to Auschwitz, where he died. Barney inscribed the shield with a poem that had been on the wall of the niche where the sculpture sits.

The commission for Barney’s giant stained glass window wall in Queens arrived by way of Linda Mayo-Perez, who is president and chief executive officer of Maple Grove Cemetery and vacations regularly in Oak Bluffs. She saw Barney’s stained glass windows and his sculptural piece Book of Remembrance at the Martha’s Vineyard Hebrew Center and knew Barney was the artist for her new, $10 million building.

“This one is very special to me,” he says, “because the commission came in just after my parents died six weeks apart in the fall of 2002.” It took four years from start to finish, including the time spent getting project approvals and building a new studio that could accommodate the window and the new kiln necessary for it.

The fusion process Barney used is more like painting on glass than conventional stained glass. “There’s layers to what I do,” he explains. After beginning with a clear base of glass, he used metal oxide glazes, which look like brush strokes on the work, to form the images that ultimately appeared under the stained glass. Colored glass is on top – in all sizes, from large, hard shards and pebbles to glass powder.

Early in his career, Barney began making stained glass by teaching himself how to make simple crafts projects like lamp shades. Before long, he was working on more ambitious projects that required welding skills, so he could fit his stained glass pieces into their metal framework. In 1979, a welding course through the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School’s adult education program – once a week for six weeks – gave Barney the training he needed, and he added metal sculpture to his repertoire. Twice he also took himself to the Art Students League of New York in the early 1980s for month-long series of drawing and anatomy classes.

“And we had a drawing group here,” he adds. From 1982 to 1990, the group, which included artists Bernie Fierro (then of Tisbury), Ann Margetson of Oak Bluffs, and Barney’s former wife Michele Ratté of Oak Bluffs, met once a week in Vineyard Haven on the campus of the Nathan Mayhew Seminars or at the old Crispin’s Landing (now the home of LeRoux).

The thirty-five two-by-three-foot stained glass panels that are his latest public work are finished and have been on display at his State Road studio in Tisbury. He expects the move to Queens to happen in mid-September. Barney is now working on a design for funeral urns and a series of architectural lighting projects. Each is inspired, beautiful. But when the sun hits the surface of that magnificent wall of stained glass, its swirling pastel scene of earth, water, humanity, sky, and clouds lights up and glows. That’s when Barney Zeitz’s vision of how the spiritual and the physical connect most sublimely comes alive.