About
Rod Friend
Rod Friend is a well established British stained glass artist working both in Alozaina, Andalucia and in England, with over 50 years’ experience of designing and making stained glass windows
Artist’s Statement
There was a pre-Newtonian time when it was thought that we saw the world through light that flowed from our eyes. The more mechanistic view that we hold today is that light is reflected from objects and then forms an image on the retina which the brain via the optic nerve then interprets.
Despite this accepted scientific theory of optics as it applies to the world of form, I believe that the deeper truth is that we project our individually conditioned perception outwards, thus creating our visual experience of a world ‘out there’. This notion suggests that we are powerfully creative and not merely passive recipients or the victims of an established, pre-existing order.
But who is free from the constraints of childhood conditioning, from the ‘sins of the fathers’? Who sees the world through the faultless lense of innocence and not ‘through a glass darkly’? Consequently, how much of what we see ‘out there’ is illusion?
There may be realms of existence where the experience of light is absolute and not relative but here on Earth with its myriad of polar opposites, light is made more dynamic by the juxtaposition of darkness….and vice versa. I believe, however, that of the two. Only light is real, as darkness is merely the absence of light, not its opposite…..just as fear is only the absence of love, not its opposite.
In all art forms there are the twin poles of sensory experience between which the work takes its form. In ceramics the dynamic is between the earth-clay and the space which it encloses, In stained glass that dynamic is between light and darkness which could be seen as the ‘bookends’ between which lie the spectrum of coloured light.
In architectural glass one does not really make objects as with the other crafts….this thin skin of vitreous material scarcely qualifies for that but instead the result is an experience of light, colour and darkness that informs all the volume of an architectural space.
For me, the experience of glass-painting, of moving light and darkness around on coloured glass, has been one of the greatest sensory experiences of my life, both mystical and sensual, and when wedded to the satisfaction of the craftsman aiming for the top of his skill it can bring about an altered state of consciousness.
Rod’s Story
Rod was born in 1939 in Buckinghamshire, UK and educated at Canford School, Dorset. He attended two London Art Colleges in the 1960’s, Hammersmith (now part of Chelsea School of Art) and the Royal College of Art from where he graduated in 1970 with M.(Art)RCA.
At the RCA he first joined the Stained Glass Department under Lawrence Lee who had been the main designer of the famous nave windows of Sir Basil Spence’s rebuilt Coventry Cathedral. This department was very soon restyled as Glass and Acrylics, still within the School of Interior Design under the Professorship of Sir Hugh Casson.
Architectural stained glass was still included but the accent was now more on the creative manipulation of existing and totally new transparent materials.
This was the Age of kinetic art. Rod entered the heady atmosphere of the RCA and immediately engaged with all aspects of kinetic art, focussing on reflection, refraction, optical illusion, vibration and movement, interference patterns, lenses, motors, lights and liquids. Having Imperial College just next door with its department of Applied Optics was a definite plus and in addition there was the famous Signals Gallery in Wigmore Street which showed new work by the kinetic stars of the day such as Carlos Cruz Diez, J.R. Soto, Gerhard von Graevenitz and Takis, to name just a few.
At this time Rod designed and made the first-ever colour-change fibre optic lamp, also designing furniture in machined acrylics, glass and lacquered steel. Of this period Rod says, “Many of my original drawings for kinetic constructions remain in notebooks, never having been built. Now, in my eighties, I still plan to implement these ideas, using very superior technology than was then available.”
Upon leaving the RCA with its formidable array of technical support, Rod first taught glass-painting and Interior Design at two London Art Schools and then started accepting commissions for stained glass, an art form which he considers the original kinetic one.
