An illuminating introduction to stained glass painting

Ascend the winding stone staircase into the south triforium of Ely Cathedral and watch as rays of light ebb into this ancient building, illuminating faces and folds of drapery, ricocheting in rainbows of colour off columns and arches. Here, bathed in this sublime incandescence, there is the chance to take part in a craft that dates back more than a thousand years.

In these sanctified surroundings, where the only distractions are the melodious voices of the choir and the scratching of stippling brush on glass, six of us are here as humble students of the ancient art of stained glass painting. In the Middle Ages, stained glass served as shorthand for the illiterate, a “poor man’s bible”, where the congregation could “read” its pictures, and be literally and metaphorically illuminated. Today, we will illuminate more secular images – flora and fauna, exotic patterns – on a panel of glass to take home.

“People spent years honing their craft but, as it’s the 21st century, we’ll do it in a day,” says Pippa Blackall, our tutor, an architectural stained glass artist with 40 years of experience. “Everything we’re using would have been employed since glass-making began. The paint is powdered glass, which the Romans knew about.” The only modern kit is gas kilns (instead of peat ovens) and the lightboxes we hunch over to focus our brush strokes. “Medieval glass painters would have worked from long, white-painted tables and propped up their glass so the daylight would reflect through instead,” says Blackall.

The process we focus on involves painting earth colours on to clear glass, and then applying silver stain, a style popular with the Flemish artists. Silver stain, used from around 1310, is a pigment that imbues the surface of plain white glass in rich yellow hues ranging from lemon to a tawny amber. “The brighter colours from stained glass are not painted on, they are added to the glass when it is molten. Coloured enamels came later in the 1600s, but are less transparent and don’t have that stained glass sparkle,” says Blackall. First, we mix our paints, a versatile “bistre brown” for tracing and shading, mixed with gum arabic (a type of glue) to make it adhere to the glass. Then with a long-handled rigger brush, we practice drawing lines up and across our panels, using an armrest to avoid smudges. “Start with vertical lines. Just touch the glass with the tip of the brush, otherwise you’ll end up with a thick line of superannuated tadpoles.”

The exercise is absorbing and relaxing: paint glides on gently, and brushes tinkle in jars of water, before we refine our lines and start on the real thing. “A pathologist used to come to my classes for years,” says Blackall. “He said it was one of the only things that completely shut the world off for him.” Somewhere below, the organist revs up to momentarily interrupt our reverie.

By the end of the Medieval period, stained glass in less devotional designs started appearing in the homes of the wealthy, featuring, for example, the four seasons or 12 signs of the zodiac. For my own home, I have chosen to trace a crouching frog in a nest of leaves. Others are sketching sunflowers, petals or a bird: pupils can bring any picture to paint, stain and have fired into permanence. “People choose the fiddliest designs, but just go for it,” says Blackall. “Glass painting is very forgiving. It’s great for people who don’t normally paint.” I was never top of the class for art – this is good news.

Painted outlines complete, the panels are sent to the kilns, humming at 650C, for the first firing of the day, and left to cool. Then more bistre brown is slathered on and smoothed with a badger-hair brush. Next, a transformation – modelling and adding texture and shade to our creations using a process known as stippling: tapping off parts of the dry paint to create half tones and control the light coming through.

“It will start to look remarkably like the stuff out there,” says Blackall, gesturing optimistically towards the magnificent 19th century stained glass windows beyond us, a hundred of which illuminate the cathedral (the Reformation put paid to the originals).

My slightly gloomy frog is all the sprightlier for a bit of bashing with the stipple brush, defining arms and legs, and scraping with a stick to create a background texture for the leaves. I let messy lines shoot off at all angles, like a child let loose with a craft knife. Blissfully, there are no rules, and I can scratch and scrape as I see fit. Silver stain is then washed over the back of the panel, and then blobbed on heavily in places for intense accents of colour, before being sent for a second firing in the kiln at 620C for 10 minutes.

As we wait for our glass to fire and cool, Blackall takes us on a tour of the Stained Glass Museum, just a few steps away from our workshop in the south-west transept. It is unique in being the only museum in the UK that is solely dedicated to the art of stained glass. We peruse the 125 panels on display at eye level, which span a period of 800 years from the Medieval to the modern era. A 15th century roundel of Reynard the Fox catches our attention as it has the same features we have learnt to replicate today – a clear glass etched with paint and silver stain. A Thirties design, “The Prodigal Son”, is reminiscent of a Punch cartoon and equally as amusing. Primed with a newfound critical eye, we spot the scratching and stippling brush effects and stickwork that we had been putting to use ourselves just moments before. “You can all do that now,” says Blackall, to the group.

And now for the result of our day’s endeavours: our glass panels, hot off the kiln. We wipe off the stain to reveal the umber-tinted images below. From beneath the stain, a beautifully ornate sunflower emerges, a softly textured bird and even, to my great surprise and given my limited artistic capabilities, a fair attempt at a resting frog.

It has been a therapeutic and tranquil day’s work in a mesmerising setting, and it comes as a wrench to have to rejoin the modern world. There is so much more to learn; indeed, I’ve barely scratched the surface.