Thomas Denny
ABOUT
All of my windows are made with materials and techniques largely the same as those used in 14th century stained glass, with the addition of much acid etching of flashed glass, a technique that developed in the 19th century. This helps, I believe, to incorporate them in their settings; treatment of imagery can be very different, but colour, texture and the intransigence of lead and glass all make connections with what is already there, whether it is other stained glass, or the forms and surfaces of surrounding architecture and artifacts. Stained glass must be interesting and beautiful in its own right, but it must always acknowledge its context.
Tom's website is worth a long browse, filled with images of his work and video interviews. www.thomasdenny.co.uk
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The nearest installed window for you to visit is at All Saints, Woodford, Salisbury. It was also the subject of a Country Life editorial in 2018.
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Tom's current work is for Trinity Church, New York. A short video describing the vision this installation is here.
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All photos of Tom Denny's work © James O Davies
TOM DENNY
“Thomas Denny is a stained-glass artist and painter, educated at Edinburgh College of Art in the 1970s. In the 1980s and 1990‘s he exhibited his paintings in London and New York. Latterly, Denny has concentrated on stained-glass and has now made some fifty windows for churches and cathedrals, almost entirely in England but with a few projects in Germany, Scotland and the USA. Recent commissions include a pair of windows at Hereford Cathedral and, installed in August 2010, a huge window for Durham Cathedral. Other commissions are found in extraordinary buildings all over the country including Gloucester Cathedral, Tewkesbury Abbey and Malvern Priory. The new edition of Pevsner’s ‘Gloucestershire’ refers to Denny’s windows at St Christopher’s, Cheltenham, as ‘quite astonishing’. Mary Miers, in Country Life (July 2003) speaks of ‘a radiance that defies beating rain and fading light’, and windows that are ‘many layered, rich in meaning and not immediately fully comprehensible.’ Ann Wroe, writing in The Tablet (2006) and ‘Intelligent Life’ (2010) finds ‘hues and images that both feed the soul and take the breath away….his glass lives and moves like no one else’s.” – From an exhibition at The Art Stable, Dorset
Durham Cathedral, The Transfiguration Window