Restoration at Holy Cross Catholic Church, Woollahra

For the past four weeks I have been restoring a damaged stained glass window installed by Ashwin and Company in the 1930's. Once again I had chris Wellwood and Clive Hillier assisting on the excavation of the window and boarding up. After initial hesitation with the St Jame's Catholic Church project at Glebe, Clive has embraced working on scaffold with gusto.

The difficulty that presented itself with this paarticular restoration project was the obvious severe paint loss ocurring in almost all the windows in the Church: not on all the glass however, only the flesh- all the faces, hands and feet. Many of the faces have lost their trace lines and now appear as ghosts. When I eventually got the window into the studio I discovered that the paint on these pieces of glass was so flaky it could be scraped by a fingernail: very unusual.

It's a matter of conjecture as to why this might be the case. Other stained glass windows I've seen showing paint loss tend to suffer across most of the glass and I assume that the cause of this was not adequate firing in the first place. And it is possible that with the Holy Cross window the faces, hands and feet were fired as a differnet batch of glass to the remainder of the window. It would be unlikely that a different paint was used to that of the drapery and foliage. But I am convinced that it is to do with the chemistry of the particular glass, an unusual shade of pinkish/yellow brown, and a possible incompatibilty with the glass paint.

The window is booked for re-installation next week and the scaffold will come down before Easter celebrations begin the following weekend.