the COOMBS method of glasspainting
Stained glass shifts from brilliant to sombre in a single day, and changes colour with the seasons. Transparent windows plant images into the real world, creating a web of connection between Nature, human imagination, and the experience of looking at art. They sparkle as the viewer moves, and shifts focus. It’s magical.
I have developed a recipe and techniques that allow me to preserve maximum transparency when applying traditional kiln-fired stained glass paints. It’s a slow-drying mixture that can be moved across the surface while wet to reveal the bright sparkle of unpainted glass, even while shading and adding textures. Many different types of marks, including handwriting, brushwork, and textures like stone, wood, fur and fabric, may be painted with ease.
trace, texture & transparency
I paint glass in three stages. Each stage serves a specific purpose and plays an essential role in the creation of a transparent stained glass window.
Tracing, where lines are ‘traced’ onto the glass from an image laid underneath, creates solid graphic elements that merge painted imagery with soldered seams and won’t bleach out in sunlight. Tracing is the foundation for painted stained glass and specific design skills are required to design tracelines. This first stage of glasspainting is common to most historic and contemporary styles of stained glass.
Texture is the stage where I add detail and pattern, combining graphic elements with transparency and the natural brilliance of unpainted glass. Painting texture over fired tracelines is a joyful and creative activity, a time for individual expression and pleasure.
Transparency is where I add shadows and half-tones; adjust opacity; render form; and create depth of field in a stained glass picture. I focus on transparency, work wet, and rarely cover the entire piece of glass with paint. In traditional glasspainting a smooth ‘badgered matte’ is laid down and stippled away when dry. In place of this I leave areas of glass untouched when laying grounds or matte, and I rarely work dry, because dust fogs transparency.
a fluid story
The first time I painted glass was at Edinburgh College of Art in 1978. I was a student of Sax Shaw in the stained glass department and we were using water and gum Arabic as a binder. I found the mixture clumsy and difficult to work with. Fresh brushstrokes clumped up against those applied just moments ago (or so it seemed) and often ‘fried’ in the kiln to form bubbly lumps. I hated it.
1978 was pre-Internet, so I asked around for advice. But there wasn’t any.
I dug through old books in the college library and tried out ancient recipes for mixing glasspaints with wine, vinegar, pee, fat turpentine, and various gums and oils. Eventually, determined to find a way, I settled for grinding my paint laboriously in a pestle and mortar to get a finer texture, and adding drops of lavender or clove oil to stop it drying out. I painted as fast as I could, before the paint dried on me.
This technique carried me through fairly well for the first 15 years of my work in stained glass with one notable exception. The Crafts Council of Great Britain, rejecting my application to become a member, noted that my glasspainting was “unnecessarily crude in the sample provided.” Oh dear!
Battered, I continued to paint glass.
The panel I submitted, Mask IV, was a self-portrait from an early exhibition series called One Woman’s Narrative. My work sold, and is now in private collections, with one exception. Mask IV has been on exhibition at the Stained Glass Museum at Ely Cathedral in Cambridgeshire, England, since 1995 and is now part of their permanent collection.
The seed of an idea for mixing glasspaints with propylene glycol came in 1994 when I was awarded a Teaching Assistant position at the Pilchuck Glass School near Seattle, Washington for Albinus Elskus. Unfortunately, Albinus suffered a stroke, and Seattle artists Dick Weiss and Walter Lieberman stepped up to co-teach the workshop, bravely substituting for Albinus as best they could. They kept me as their Teaching Assistant.
Both Dick and Walt painted glass, and Walt knew a lot about different application techniques. He taught how to make pastels from glasspaint, about pine oil and ‘fat turpentine’ for screen-printing. He watched me tediously grind my lavender-scented paint for hours. Try antifreeze he said. It might work better. It did.
Antifreeze gave me precisely the viscosity, fluidity and long working time that I had always wanted. It flows beautifully from a pen nib; allows ample time to apply a perfect matte; fires to a gorgeous gloss; does not “fry” in the kiln; and washes off with water. It was the perfect glasspainting medium. There was just one drawback: it’s poisonous.
Antifreeze contains neurotoxins that are absorbed through skin contact. For someone who paints with her hands (watch this 2 minute video for a zippy demo) that was quite a problem. I had discovered the Holy Grail of glasspainting with hazardous side effects. It felt like taking a life-preserving medicine that would eventually kill me. I weighed the benefits against the risk and decided to go ahead. I painted exclusively with antifreeze between 1994-2004, including over 1,000 square feet of handpainted stained glass windows for St Mary’s Cathedral in Portland, Oregon. It was thrilling. I developed a pantheon of new textural effects and application techniques. At the same time, I stopped teaching. It felt unethical. Ten years passed before I met master glasspainter Richard (Dick) Millard, and chemist Warren Porter, and began teaching glasspainting again.
Dick was a wonderful friend and supporter. He had seen my windows in person during a tour of the UK in 1993, and championed my work with enthusiasm. Dick lived in Antrim New Hampshire, not far from my new home in Vermont. He introduced me to the extended ‘family’ of American stained glass people, many of whom are now longtime friends. Dick taught me many things, and advised me on how to survive in the New World. He also assisted me directly on the cartooning for St Mary’s Cathedral. I owe some of my most significant commissions, including two 25ft windows for Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan, to Dick Millard, and he, indirectly, got me back into teaching.
It was at Dick Millard’s during the summer of 2004 that I met Warren Porter, a stained glass enthusiast and biochemist from Montgomery Village, Maryland. Warren suggested I replace antifreeze with propylene glycol, a cosmetic lubricant and food additive. It would, he said, provide similar results without destroying my nervous system. It worked. Beautifully. The two-stage mixing process I’d developed, and all my creative application techniques, survived. I had lost nothing.
I started teaching again in 2005. And the safety of glasspainting with propylene glycol was assured in 2009 when NY State Schools gave me permission to paint with first-grade children.
I have taught the Coombs method to hundreds of glasspainters, and today, thanks to Warren Porter, Walt Lieberman, and Dick Millard, my recipe and techniques are used world-wide.