Artist

Rod Friend is a well established British stained glass artist working both in Alozaina, Andalucia (Southern Spain) and England, with over 30 years' experience of designing and making stained glass windows.

He was born in 1939 in Buckinghamshire UK and educated at Canford School, Dorset.

Rod attended two London Art colleges in the 60's. Hammersmith (now part of Chelsea School of Art) and the Royal College of Art.

Since 1972, two years after leaving the RCA with a M.A. degree, Rod has been producing architectural stained glass, mostly painted, leaded glass work for public and private buildings.

As a child, music played a greater part in Rod's life than art. He studied violin from the age of 7 to 17, and is still a keen pianist today, occasionally professionally.

Rod says: 'Music is very close to home and all the visual work unfolds from it'. The studio is often alive with a wide variety of wonderful recorded music and the studio piano gets played everyday.

Ninety percent of the studio's work is commissioned. Stained glass is a very environmental art form and is best designed and made for its own particular place.

Rod has a lifelong fascination with transmitted light since his innovative kinetic work using light and liquids at the Royal College of Art.

This has led to a deep commitment to designing and making stained glass for private and public buildings as well as a variety of therapeutic and sacred environments. When there is space in between commissioned work, Rod makes his own pieces and runs four/ five day courses for people who wish to learn stained glass, glass painting, etching and glass Mosaic skills. (See the Stained Glass Courses Page).

Rod is excited and inspired by the mystery and wonder of light and by the darkness that throws it forth, by luminosity, by the incredible dynamism of coloured light powered by the sun and how it informs and affects the spaces that humans create.

On Earth, darkness is the complementary twin to light, and the earliest practitioners of the Stained Glass craft were also master weavers of light and darkness.

How can a jewel-like luminosity be created in the relative world without its rising out of darkness? Goethe turned his poet's eye on the solar spectrum and discovered that colours are generated from the meetings of light and darkness... and all along the solar spectrum live the light-vibration speeds of all the chemical elements that we recognise and use on our planet.

That's inspiring to Rod - to be able to wonder at that closest relationship between what is 'material and what is immaterial'.

As an art student for three years at The Royal College of Art in the 60's Rod had the opportunity of marvelling at optics - reflection, refraction, illusions and movement.

Stained Glass is an art form that had its greatest flowering in the 12th and 13th centuries, before the Renaissance began.  It was an age where the spiritual nature of light and luminosity was widely regarded and studied, along with alchemy.

In the late 20th century there has been a strong revival of interest in light and colour and artists like Marc Chagall have used Stained Glass to rekindle a source of mystical beauty that has been lost for several centuries behind rigid stylisms.

Among other artists I admire are Evie Hone and Harry Clarke. Both these artists created jewel-like windows and an idea that I like is that Stained Glass is jewellery on an architectural scale.

Stained Glass and the use of coloured light is a continuity from the age where alchemy was widely studied.  The fact that projected coloured light affects living tissue physiologically as well as in ways shared by other art forms is one that interests Rod deeply, He feels that he is not here to help fill up the world with yet more objects but to hopefully affect people for the better.

Rod's watchword is 'Healing Through Beauty'.

The new studio, opened in 2007 in Southern Spain, is an inspiring place in a mountain olive grove that is slowly becoming a fruit and flower garden.

Click on image to enlarge

New Studio "ARBOL DE LUZ" in Alozaina, Malaga, Spain - Opened 2007