On the five day stained glass course at West Dean College students sometimes make panels which are particularly good because of the way that the painting and sandblasting combine with the leading. There is no set way of doing this as you can see from the variety of examples I have chosen below.
Panels by students at West Dean College. Top: Gillian, Helen’s workbench, Zahra. Bottom Karl, Sarah, Julie.
Top left (Gillian) used a silhouette of black paint around the edges of the pieces thus disguising the lead lines, which is good practice. Bottom left (Karl) used lines of black paint and sandblasted areas in the foreground to link the separate glass pieces, which is also good practice. Top left (Zahra) framed interesting pieces of chunky glass with off cuts, collage style. Bottom right (Julie) combined the collage style with lines and spatters of paint worked across the lead lines. The panel at bottom centre was a particular triumph in its use of a colour palette where nothing jumps out and where the lead lines describe the objects while also making a pattern. This student (Sarah) did all the painting on one evening when she was able to put the glass pieces next to each other on a light box, it’s really hard to do good glass painting when you haven’t got the space to do this.
West Dean House, window with portrait of Edward James by Patrick Reyntiens 1990s and foliage detail.
The Patrick Reyntiens window in the oak hall at West Dean House is useful for showing students some of these glass painting techniques. They are usually amazed to discover that you can’t really make out from a distance what is lead line and what is black paint. This is loosely applied, with scraffito details, on the green glass that makes up the tree trunks and the foliage (above right).
Panel by Susan, 2023, with inspiration from Louis David.
Sometimes a student’s panel references a particular window, like Susan’s version of a Louis David figure from a window in Colmonell, Ayrshire. In the photos above you can see the stages in between, with a fabulous drawing on black paper where details from the illustration of the window were moved around to make something new. On another of last year’s courses, Benedikt found a Harry Clarke illustration of the mealstrom and combined it (hooray for originality) with his version of the stick man from the album cover of Led Zeppelin IV (below right).
Panel by Benedikt, 2023, with inspiration from Led Zeppelin and Harry Clarke.
On this year’s course Helen finished her large (600 x 500 mm) door panel of Thunderbird 2 flying over the sea. Her originality was in the working process, with the overall design in her head rather than on paper. The separate elements - sea, sky and copper foiled Thunderbird came together over a few courses like magic, trailing lead lines through the broken pieces of sky.
Thunderbird 2, made by Helen completed in 2024.
