STAINED

GLASS TRADITION

sunday news

Newsroom 985-2131

FASHION - FOOD
TRAVEL

Keeping alive art of the past

NORTH VANCOUVER

artist Brad McFarlane

used to only admire stained glass work, thinking
of it as a lost art, but today he carries on the

craft, keeping the beauty alive.

After two months of
detailed manual work,
McFarlane, with assistance
from Karen Lister, has just
finished a large Tiffany
lamp, made to order for
Puccini’s Restaurant in Van-
couver. The time-consuming
art of cutting glass to fit in-
tricate patterns and sodder-
ing the pieces together takes
a great deal of skill and pa-

tience which are finally
rewarded by the finished
product.

The Tiffany lamp
McFarlane recently com-
pleted is a copy of an ex-
isting lamp in Puccini’s,

which he duplicated by tak-
ing a paper rubbing of the
Oonginal. He then traced the
design from the paper onto a
large plexiglass dome, which
the new lamp was built
upon.

Molds for Tiffany lamps
were once only made from
wood, McFarlane explained,
but now companies use -
styrofoam, since it is less ex-
pensive and can be made in
sections and put together.
But for lamps the size
McFarlane made (36"’ in
diameter at the base), plex-
iglass is the most realistic
mold material to use.

Once the lamp’s pattern _

has been transferred to the
mold, McFarlane then
retraces individual designs
on paper, puts them onto a
light table, and cuts the glass
on top, following the pattern
freehand. He attributes the
freehand method to. the
English, whereas the Ger-
man method has an extra
step, making cardboard
cut-outs from the traced

paper, and then cutting the
glass from that.

‘‘Using the cardboard
method is an extra step that
isn’t necessary for me. Why
spend time on another
step?”’

McFarlane then smooths
the rough edges of the glass

BRAD McFarlane stands beside the Tiffany lamp he recently completed,
after about two months work, with help from assistant Karen Lister. The
extra large lamp has a diameter of 36 inches, weighs about 28 pounds,

BARRETT FISHER

pieces with a grinding wheel
and wraps each piece with
coppér foil, which is sticky
on one side so it clings to the
glass. The glass pieces gre
then fitted together on the
mold. Starting at the top of
the half globe, the pattern
evolves as each piece is sod-
dered to the next.

The soddering steps in-

chide tacking, tinning and
beading, McFarlane says. A
tack of sodder holds the
pieces of glass together,
joined by the copper foil.
Tinning is where a thin layer
of sodder is done over all the
seams for strength, and
beading is where a thicker
layer of sodder is built up on
the seams for appearance.
When the lamp is sod-
dered together, the mold is
removed and the piece of art

‘

is cleaned. Then, to make
the metal, which is presently
bright silver, more subtle,
McFarlane uses a patina, an
antiquing agent, to make the
metal seams copper colored
or black.

Finally, the completed
lamp will be placed inside a
metal framework, an = ar-
mature, where it will hang
and radiate its beauty.

McFarlane laughs when he
remembers how he first

became interested in stained
glass. ‘‘When I was about 10
years old, | always wanted to
send away for those cast
resin lamps they had in the
back of comic books, where
you made colored plastic in
trays, like grapes and things,
and fit them into a frame.’’
When he was a little older
he used Dippity Glass and

See page C2

oto lan Smith

EWS. p
and will hang inverted held by a brass armature in Puccini’s Restaurant,
to match an original lamp it was modelled after.

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