Stained Glass Artists well worth looking up

You will find listed here the websites of some amazing glass artists around the world. By no means exhaustive, these are artists whose work I hold in high esteem. Many of these artists do work in other media or other methods of manipulating glass but essentially they are stained glass practitioners. And you will find some interesting historical pages here as well. Enjoy.

Australia

Frans Kat Adelaide Artistic Glass; very creative exploration of design ideas engaging with many different techniques in glass decoration. Frans' European heritage is evident in the sophisticated work he makes.
Paddy Robinson Finglinna Studios; in 2016 Paddy glazed the entire nave and apse of St Bedes Catholic Church at Pyrmont in a beautiful pattern of sweeping lines and sheaves of wheat. She lives and works in Sofala NSW.
Geoffrey Wallace, in Melbourne, has only recently retired from active restoration work, and now pursues a renewed career in the creation of new windows, both contemporary and traditional

HISTORICAL

Jean Orval This site is very interesting from a historical point of view. Jean Orval arr. in Australia from Holland 1953. He died in Hamilton in 1987, after completing many stained glass commissions throughout Victoria. Jean's son Noel Orval has built this website as a tribute to his father. Orval had a very strong design aesthetic.

Leadlight in Inner Western Sydney is a fascinating website created by Colin Webb, an enthusiastic photographer and avid walker. He undertook a hobbyist leadlight course with Cherry Phillips, one of the founding partners of Sydney Stained Glass (later Australian Stained Glass Supplies) in Pier St Ultimo. This engendered a love of leadlight which eventually blossomed into a brilliant and informative historical survey of Sydney's heritage leadlighting across 6x suburbs.
Klaus Zimmer Migrating to Australia from Germany in 1952, Klaus died in 2007. He was an outstanding artist, constantly exploring techniques and expanding the vocabulary of the medium. Zimmer's final commission was a cycle of 78 windows for the new Parramatta Cathedral, Sydney, completed in 2003 after fire destroyed the original building.

Marc Grunseit and Lance Feeney, whose work is featured in the headline images above, have both retired since I published this version of my website, quite some years ago now. But as they have been very important figures in the Sydney scene over the past few decades I wanted to keep their images on display.

canada

Sarah Hall Studio "By forging art with a source of energy, we create a powerful image about how we can live in this world- it enables us to dream about who we can be in this world and how we articulate our stories". Sarah is referring here to the stained glass windows she has created which incorporate solar panels. Sarah was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada in Dec 2019. I believe she is now stepping back somewhat from commission work. her latest book, "A Thousand Colours" is a beautiful publication illustrating her output over the past 30 years.
Lutz Haufschild "Collaboration is the way to achieve the most meaningful solutions" Lutz has collaborated over many years with builders and architects to achieve quite wonderful and rather large public installations. He also paints exciting abstract work, paintings which possess "a kind of radiant colour we associate with glass works, and an independence, a life of its own" according to art critic John Moir. Haufschild led a master's workshop in stained glass the late 1980's in Sydney at the behest of Ausglass.

France

Jean-Dominique Fleury
L'Artisan Du Vitrail The personal website of Pascal Rieu, a phenomenally talented glass painter who asserts he has only embraced the medium of stained glass in the past couple of years! I discovered Pascal's work via the IGGA- Internationl Guild of Glass Artists Facebook page and managed to meet up with the man when I visited Paris in 2017, just before he moved to Marseille.

Germany

There are so many superb stained glass artists in Germany. It is considered the birth place of the contemporary stained glass movement. Here are just three I hold in high regard:

Jochem Poensgen Poensgen sees his glass works as being an integral part of the architecture in which they reside. His stated priority is to make windows you can live with, not windows to look at

Ludwig Schaffrath 1923-2011; Schaffrath has had an enormous influence on contemporary stained glass around the world. He visited Australia in 1981. I was awed by his presentation when I attended a public lecture sponsored by Ausglass that year. We spoke briefly and he said he would remember me... Ludwig Schaffrath died of a stroke in Feb 2011; while I was building this website Ludwig passed on his desire, via his daughter, for me to use the above image to represent German contemporary stained glass.
Johannes Schreiter one of the most important and prolific stained glass artists in Germany, spearheading the rebirth of the medium as a contemporary artform

Great Britain

Brian Clarke Brian Clarke has done much to challenge the preconceptions of stained glass as only a medieaval religious art. Always at the forefront of contemporary trends (he was a punk rocker!), his Instagram a/c is a joy to follow.
Jonathan Cooke Jonathan is a very talented traditional glass painter who has worked on very prestigious restoration projects. His small treatise titled Time and Temperature, published in 2013 is a definitive analysis of the mechanics of glass painting
Amber Hiscott uncompromisingly contemporary work approaching watercolour in effect
Andrew Moor AMA is a specialist art consultancy, focusing entirely on architectural glass art. Moor has written several excellent books on Architectural Glass

iceland

Leifur Breidfjord I was fortunate to assist Leifer in an Architectural Glass workshop at the Ausglass Conference, Sydney College of the Arts, 1997; a charming and eloquent man and a brilliant artist with some beautiful and monumental works to his credit. His personal iconography is both dramatic and unique, often exploring Nordic myth and legend

South Africa

Anika van der Merwe Anika is without doubt one of the best practitioners working in stained glass in the world today. She operates out of Cape Town in South Africa, and trades under the name Silver Stain Studios. Derek Hunt, UK glass artist who produces the podcast Talking Out Your Glass, interviewed her for Episode 13 of Season 5.

Switzerland

Ursula Knoblauch visited my studio in May 2014. She has an Aunt living in Sydney, who looked up my website and they came over the day before Ursula was due to fly out. If you visit her website you will see she has such a tidy studio. (mine could best be described as ordered chaos). We met up in Sydney again in 2016 and I visited her studio in Bern, Switzerland in October 2017.

uSA

Joseph Cavalieri: I met Joseph during his residency at Sydney College of the Arts in 2010; lovely guy and very talented glass painter. His illuminated boxes are a clever solution to an inherent problem in displaying the autonomous glass panel; his irreverent humour is a joy. His website is currently under construction.
Linda Lichtman Linda Lichtman sadly died in 2021. Her legacy is the Linda Lichtman Fellowship, where successful applicants take up a residency in her former studio at 11 Miller Street. Linda took a very painterly approach to contemporary glass making, often dispensing with lead altogether.
Ellen Mandelbaum "I work in glass and paint with color and light." Beautiful abstract work
Peter McGrain Mcgrain's work sits within the school of graphic illustration. Beautifully detailed, intensely coloured and and expertly modelled
Judith Schaechter I find Schaechter's imagery very inspiring and completely original. Her technique is masterful and her imagery brutally poetic.

NB: images above are reproduced with kind permission of the artist or their representative