Colour, light and narrative

In a small antechapel in Hereford Cathedral, tucked away to the right of the organ pipes and the chancel, blazes the work of an exceptional artist and craftsman. I first saw his contemporary stained glass a few years ago, while popping in to avoid the rain. Four windows flamed at me in visceral colours.

They told a story left to right. A long-haired man hurries up a path, surrounded by the distinctive shape of the Herefordshire hillsides. An oak tree glows gold in the shape of a cross. The same man from the first panel stands in beams of transformational sunlight, his arms wide, his eyes fixing me in their gaze. Finally, a city – noticeably Hereford, full of medieval buildings – twitches and bustles with life.

This was my first encounter with the work of contemporary stained glass artist and painter Thomas Denny: his 2007 windows in the Audley Chapel, celebrating the 17th-century Herefordshire preacher and poet, Thomas Traherne. I soon discovered that, for almost 40 years, Denny has made windows that bristle with a febrile, almost psychedelic energy, while also belonging beautifully to the buildings in which they’re installed.

I’ve visited many more of Denny’s windows since, noticing how deeply he incorporates local people, nature and history in his work. I’ve stood before his windows for poet Ivor Gurney and composer Gerald Finzi in Gloucester Cathedral, full of glowing wheat, Cotswolds sheep and midnight-blue starry skies. I’ve trekked to Denny’s window for the free miners of the Forest of Dean at the tiny St Michael’s Church in Abenhall, to which access is only via a key-holder, feeling moved by the drama of the coal shaft, of each flaming headlamp.

I even took my family to his only international window in Trinity Church Wall Street, while visiting my brother in New York: a work that can only be seen from the sidewalk, parables in purples and reds calling out to the people rushing outside. These colours, of course, alter further in the changing light of the day, as well as the weather, and the seasons.

Many biblical references in his work speak to his Christian faith, but Denny also widens the worlds of his work to every viewer. “It is my hope that they communicate something to everyone,” he tells me when we meet, thanks to a magical accident of research and serendipity, in September 2025. Like they absolutely communicated to me, a long-lapsed Baptist chapel Sunday school girl, who is now nevertheless on a pilgrimage to experience all his work in person. Each encounter has lingered long in my mind, encouraging me to return.

In early September, Thomas Denny – Tom, in person – is on his way home to Dorset from Dublin, where he has been presenting a new design for a window at St Patrick’s Cathedral. He’s crossed Wales from the Holyhead ferry to lecture in Hay-on-Wye, half an hour away from Hereford and from me, for the Thomas Traherne Association.

In person, Denny, 69, is generous and warm. He’s also a great lecturer, beginning his talk with a definition of what he calls the “dual nature” of stained glass, which “operates simultaneously as colour and light, and as narrative”. He’s here to give a tour, in slides, of his most recently installed work for St John’s Church in Tisbury, Wiltshire, which was commissioned to replace a fragile Victorian window. Its theme is seeing “and what that means,” Denny explains, “wonder, delight, understanding, realisation”. This feels like a motto for his work as a whole.

The Tisbury window is also “a specifically Wiltshire epiphany” about ways of seeing, he adds. There are visual references to Neolithic long barrows, sweeping spaces that recall the Salisbury Plain, and an “astonishingly ancient yew” in Tisbury churchyard; Denny hopes it leads us to consider “all that [the yew] means in myth, mystery and history”. He also mentions the often-overlooked elements of nature, such as weeds emerging through cobbles, that he’s included. “All of these modest things are attended to with the same reverence as the hands and the faces of the figures.”

He’s also included local people from across the centuries. Seventeenth-century Wiltshire poet George Herbert and eighteenth-century antiquary William Stukeley (who made engravings of the stone circles at Avebury) sit alongside contemporary characters having revelatory moments in nature: two women noticing a gathering of butterflies, and a father and son looking at two bucks, which look back, calmly, at them.

Denny also talks about the inspiration of religious buildings themselves, about how they “hold layers and layers of time in a very moving and evocative way.” His works belong to the places they’re in by recognising this idea, and expanding it in revelatory, magical ways.

Denny was brought up surrounded by art. His mother, Catherine, was a painter, while his father, Anthony, was a baronet and architect who started his career in theatre design. Denny then studied painting at the Edinburgh College of Art in the mid-1970s, moving into stained glass later that decade.

We speak on the phone a few days after Hay-on-Wye about his inspirations, which include the “freshness and colour” of medieval stained glass design and the paintings of Rembrandt and Albrecht Dührer. He also mentions many twentieth-century influences, including, the drawings of Samuel Palmer and Henry Moore, the installations of Chagall, and the work of Irish stained glass artists like Harry Clarke (“whose work is absolutely sumptuous, but sort of slightly creepy”) and Wilhelmina Geddes (“who is wonderful, more muscular and vigorous in her drawings”).

Denny’s first windows were commissioned for a small, post-war church, St Christopher’s, in Cheltenham’s Warden Hill. Making one a year from 1985 helped him “develop a way of working”, he explains. He did not grow up going to church, but his faith deepened as he worked. “Work for me is like a state of prayer and contemplation.”

His methods are detailed and diverse. Firstly, he enjoys researching the places, people and texts which relate to his commission (“or,” he smiles, “I spend a long time coasting around looking for a way in”). His designs come from experiments in drawing (a discipline which was prioritised in his painting course at the Edinburgh College of Art) and by mixing pigment and gum arabica to create vivid colours which act, he explains, like “wet pastel”.

Then comes the craft. Denny uses flashed glass, a 14th-century invention where clear glass is given a thin extra layer of colour, but crucially layers two different pieces together: such as one red and one blue, to expand the potential of his palette. He then uses acid-etching to remove the surface colour to different degrees. This creates a kaleidoscope of indigos, violets, pinks, bright and pale variations. He also uses silver stain, a medieval invention painted on the back of the glass and then fired in a kiln, to achieve a range of transparent yet intense yellows and golds.

Denny loves how coloured glass encourages people to accept more non-naturalistic ideas or images. “People are much more responsive to colour for its own glory in windows. With painting, people find it difficult to see a head painted in blue!” Then he paints. Denny makes marks with sticks, pins and blades (“so you're cutting back to the light”) and also uses feathered brushes for texture, even fingers and thumbs (glass painting, to him, is about “line and tone…and I would say that glass painting works well when what it does is develop and refine what the colour is already doing”).

He especially loves the possibilities of very pale colours. “They have a strange sort of fragility and broken character, akin to very, very ancient glass – I like that connection to its history.” His finished windows are then transported to a stained glass conservator for leading and fixing (on the Traherne windows, he worked with long-time collaborator, the late Patrick Costeloe, while many recent projects have been made with Lizzy Hippisley-Cox).

A few weeks after we speak, a new window of his will be installed in Christ Church Cathedral in Oxford; he's also being kept busy with the possibility of new work in the City of London. I wonder what hopes Denny has for the reception of his work when he is beginning to make it. “I am very relaxed about what people might feel when it’s first installed, because it’s such a long-term medium,” he says. “I like the idea of people seeing something simple that they like – oh, that colour is nice – then maybe pondering that over time. I like people exploring its ideas. Stained glass is quite meditative. It’s a gateway into other things.”

Then out of nowhere, he laughs. “Windows are the antithesis of contemporary culture. They’re slow art. Nothing has to happen straightaway, but hopefully people will get there.” I think about the windows I'll see next, about the depth I will find in their colours, how I'll hold the consideration and the respect that glows within them, in a new light.