We managed to dodge the April showers and get a dry day last week to install our St Jude window. As always, John and Jim did an awesome job despite the tricky access, but this time they were carefully supervised by Coda (Jim’s daughter’s dog)! St Jude is looking very handsome, if a bit lonely up there. […]

It seems appropriate in March to post a photo of a hare painted on glass!  We have just finished this lovely little project for a long standing client. She is a William Morris fan and wanted us to create three door panes inspired by his hare design and chrysanthemum wallpaper design. For those who may not […]

As a painter, be it in whatever medium, when you develop a certain style you can be pigeon-holed as producing that and very little else. The truth is polar opposite, as you’ve spent years, decades even, studying, practising and sometimes failing before you find that elusive style. We recently took this little beauty out of storage, […]

John has just finished leading our residential window for the Okanagan, named “Bonsai Rock” by the client.  It’s over 5 feet in diameter and made in three sections so we have only been able to lay it on the light table to view, we won’t see it as fully envisaged with daylight until it’s installed. I’m so looking forward […]

Waiting for the spring….well, at least better weather. Generally speaking, we are pretty lucky (weather wise) here in Vancouver but to install our patiently waiting St Jude we need to reach an awkward window space that is accessible only by going over a steep sloping roof to a flat roof and then building a platform […]

We have a lot of painting on the go in the studio for our residential window “Bonsai Rock” (a local landmark named by our client for the small but perfectly formed trees that grow on top) . Bigger projects require the painting to be divided into manageable sections on multiple easels so that we can work on […]

New Year progress in the studio! Tracing “Bonsai Rock” Painting on the easel

  John is making considerable progress painting our St Jude window. The pieces are held with bees wax to the tempered glass easel during the painting process to ensure that all of the highlights and tones follow through correctly. We use various hogs hair brushes, sticks and needles to achieve the desired effect and to […]

I have finished the full size cartoon for our residential project in the Okanagan, which I drafted by hand using Indian ink and various types of soft pencil, determining the positioning of the leads and all the details and tonal values to be painted. I use a grid system to loosely draft all the elements from my […]

                                    John is busy getting the first of our 12 Apostles windows underway for St Joseph’s Langley. We’re starting with St Jude; each piece of glass has been cut by hand and the first painting stage of tracing […]

  I really enjoyed creating the water colour design for this near 5 ft diameter window for a new home being built in the Okanagan. Our client wanted to depict a local landmark that he has named “Bonzai Rock”, and I had fun introducing some strong flow of line and colour to the foreground and sky. I’ll […]

Mosaic and Glass Arts International Exhibition, CEPA Gallery , Buffalo, NY Outside the CEPA Gallery, Buffalo, NY We are recently back from the Stained Glass Association of America’s (in collaboration with the Society of American Mosaic Artists) conference “Forging New Paths” held in their home town of Buffalo NY for their 120th anniversary.  This was our first year attending but […]

We have just installed our St Phocas window for St Mary’s Kerrisdale. It is the last clerestory window, the 22nd that we have done for this church since 2007. We will miss woking on a couple of these little windows each year, but I’m pretty sure that John won’t miss accessing the cedar shingle roof for the […]

In my last post I had just finished the design for our 22nd (and last) clerestory window for St Mary’s Kerrisdale. Since then we have been pretty busy progressing the project; the full size hand drawn cartoon was completed, then the structural drawing or cutline was created from that and then the glass selected and cut. […]

We have the go ahead for the last of 22 windows at St Mary’s Kerrisdale! We started off with St Brigid in 2007 and we will end with St Phocas the Gardener. I have just finished the watercolour design at my preferred scale of 2” to 1 ft, but these windows are not very big so […]

As some of you may remember, I’ve discussed previously about how restoration can sometimes be as much forensic as artistic; the need to ascertain exactly how a piece was originally painted in order to recreate it as accurately as possible. In the case of these windows the challenge was to identify the causes of the excessive bowing […]

We are really pleased to have recently installed our 20th and 21st clerestory windows for St Mary’s Kerrisdale – only one left now waiting for a special benefactor.   The first of these windows that we were commissioned to make was back in 2007 and depicted St Brigid. Over the years since, we have had […]

Painting in the style of another artist is one way to practice and hone glass painting skills. When we apprenticed in England, repeated work on damaged windows was a mainstay of our education. Creating a new piece that accurately matches an original painted by an artist who has been dead for over a hundred years […]

We’re so happy to have installed the last five windows in our sequence of twelve Old Testament windows in St Joseph’s, Langley! We have been working on and off with this project since 2019 (designed in 2017 but took a while to gain momentum) windows were commissioned one or two at a time as benefactors […]

I was looking back through some older images and I came across one that made me smile. This image of a menorah always reminds me of when we first arrived in Canada in 2005. It reminds me of difficulties because our belongings got stuck in a strike and so we couldn’t set up our home […]