Posted on

A Different Approach To Working With Stained Glass

Studio Pass

by

Today I want to invite you into our studio to look at an approach we used on some windows we recently installed.

Maybe you’ll use this method exactly as you see it here today.

Or maybe you’ll make changes, giving it a life that’s all your own.

Whatever you do, I’m sure you’ll find the demonstration useful.

The Science Of Glass

iTunes
27th May 2015

Here’s a great podcast for you my fellow glass painters. But art is not the subject here. Nor is it craft. No, this time it’s science.

The episode begins with a brief discussion of the history of glass e.g.

  • The Ancient Egyptians who originally made beads and jewellery
  • The Romans who introduced glass works across their Empire
  • The Venetians who discovered (amongst many other facts) that adding manganese oxide made glass clearer.

And then the main focus becomes both fascinating and more technical e.g.

  • Glass is a “disordered” substance with an often ill-defined transition from liquid to solid
  • Transparency results from disorder i.e. disorder is necessary for transparency
  • Colour results from (technical) “impurities”.
Myself, I took comfort from the observation that annealing is a strange phenomenon – even to scientists … You take this material (glass), and hold it at a certain temperature, and, just by holding it, you change some of its fundamental properties.

The discussion jumps around a lot. But stick with it and you’re bound to hear some fascinating scientific facts about this gorgeous material on which we paint.

Most writing on art is by people who are not artists: thus all the misconceptions

Eugène Delacroix, quoted in Der Blaue Reiter Almanach (Edited by Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, 1911)