Stained glass artist Joan Phillips returns to the Kent Art and Wine Festival for her 14th year

Image of a 66-year-old white woman in a brown sweater, smiling and holding up a three-dimensional stained glass star ornament
Joan Phillips will be showing her stained glass art at her 14th Kent Art and Wine Festival. Jeremy Brown/The Portager

This profile is part of our series of stories about local artists at the Kent Art and Wine Festival on June 4.

Stained glass artist and Kent resident Joan Phillips, 66, will be attending the 14th annual Kent Art and Wine Festival in downtown Kent on June 4, from noon to 9 p.m. She has attended the festival since its inception in 2007.

Phillips’ interest in crafts began in Stow, where her mother showed her how to sew when Phillips was 4 years old. At that age, she couldn’t reach the pedals on the foot-powered sewing machine, so she reciprocated the treadle by hand. Phillips dabbled in various crafts throughout adulthood until 1998, when she found herself at the library researching stained glass art. That year, she began creating her own stained glass pieces and has been doing it ever since. 

The themes of Phillips’ work reflect her own personal interests and often take the form of angels, flowers, butterflies, dragonflies, stars, hearts, black squirrels, seashells and holiday motifs, to name a few. She also likes to use repurposed items when she can, such as the silver spoon handles on the tails of her dragonflies. 

Jeremy Brown/The Portager

Phillips’ stained glass process begins with a design template glued to a piece of stained glass. Guided by the template, she cuts each piece into a crude shape with a glass cutter, using kerosene as a lubricating oil. She then refines the shape with a diamond glass grinder to its final dimensions. The glass is then cleaned with Dawn dish soap and baking soda.

Perhaps the most interesting step of Phillips’ process is binding the glass in copper foil. Each piece of glass gets bound with 7/32 copper foil tape, or foil of similar width. The foil is purposely wider than the glass so that the excess foil tape hanging over the edges on both sides can be bent over to create enough binding to provide strength when the piece is soldered. 

She then brushes flux onto the bound glass, enabling the solder to flow more smoothly into the far reaches of the binding. After the solder has been applied to the binding and is wicked into the spaces between the foil and the glass, a small plume of smoke rises. 

Jeremy Brown/The Portager

Phillips repeats this step until the glass is completely soldered in place. This procedure substantially strengthens the copper foil, but the heat diminishes the foil’s color.

“When you solder, (the copper foil) turns silver, and then if you want it a different color, which I would want on this piece because I prefer the copper color, I clean it and then I patina it that color,” Phillips said. “There’s a chemical that I just brush on; it just makes it a different color.”

Jeremy Brown/The Portager

After Phillips has bound and soldered all the individual pieces of a given design, they get soldered together into a colorful transparent sculpture. Lastly, she solders a wire loop to the top. When her stained glass pieces are hung in a sunny window, she said they fill the room with “razzle dazzle” colors. 

The stained glass process requires a diverse skill set to produce a quality finished product. After 24 years of honing her craft, Phillips’ colorful artwork features durability punctuated by sensible themes.

Phillips’ stained glass creations are on display at McKay Bricker Framing in Kent, located at 141 E. Main St. #101.

Jeremy Brown
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