In Partnership with the Sun

The Life and Work of Yvonne Williams

The scene is a busy stained glass workshop. Artists, glaziers and apprentices are all hard at work, designing, drawing, painting, cutting and leading. The pace is steady, for the workshop=s windows are high demand, and there is a long waiting list. In the midst of this activity - forming a quiet intense focus - is the master, painting uninterrupted for hours at a time.

There is a timelessness to the scene, harkening back to the great Medieval workshops and the golden age of stained glass. But the place was Canada, the time was the 1940s; and the workshop=s master was an extraordinary woman named Yvonne Williams.

Yvonne William=s accomplishments would be impressive in any era, but especially so, considering the times she worked in. She started her stained glass studio in the Adirty thirties,@ and built it up into a successful and highly respected enterprise, which created beautiful and artistically innovative windows, and fostered the development of a generation of glass artists. This took courage, tenacity, and an inexhaustible energy, but Yvonne had these in great measure. Even after her passing in 1997, her influence on the field continues to be significant. Given her unique qualities - her sharp mind, her formidable artistic talent, her supremely practical nature - Yvonne=s success at her chosen profession should be no surprise. She was destined to be a major force in any field she chose.

Yvonne Williams was born in Port-of -Spain, Trinidad in 1901 to Canadian parents. She spent her childhood there, until the family moved back to Canada in 1918. In 1922 she enrolled at the Ontario College of Art to learn sculpture, but soon moved to painting because she “missed the colour terribly.” She attributed this love of intense color to her Caribbean childhood. It was at OCA that Yvonne developed an interest in stained glass, and after graduation she stayed another year to study fine art metal and glass.

Upon graduation, Williams decided to pursue a career as a stained glass artist. This was, she acknowledges, “a peculiar choice for a career in 1927; more so for a woman, and even more so in Canada.” She made her first window at Pringle & London Glaziers in Toronto in 1926. Yvonne Williams and George London were to eventually form a life-long working relationship of artist and craftsman.

In winter of 1927, Yvonne began work at the studio of F. J. Hollister, a prominent Toronto based stained glass artist. She shortly moved on to study in studios in St. Louis and Philadelphia. After a trip to England, France and Italy, she resolved to take formal training in the art of stained glass. She apprenticed at the Charles Connick Studio in Boston from 1928 to 1930.

Yvonne found her mentor in Charles Connick. Connick was a dedicated “Gothic revivalist” whose book, Adventures in Light and Colour is a well-known classic in the stained glass field. The two had kindred ideas about stained glass, and they continued to correspond long after Yvonne had started her own business.

Finishing her apprenticeship, Yvonne returned to Toronto. She started her first studio in 1932 and set about building the business, taking time in 1936 to visit Europe and study the stained glass at Chartres Cathedral. Yvonne claimed that the Great Depression was a rather good time to start a studio. Architects weren’t very busy, and had ample time to view her portfolio. As her reputation grew and the economy picked up, business got steadily better; by 1948, there was a two year waiting list for her windows.

Looking at Williams’ windows, it is clear that her artwork was influenced from the beginning by a belief in Gothic revival ideals - even before her apprenticeship at Connick. Hollister=s tirades against the commercialism and sentimental, Victorian style of Toronto’s McCausland Studio evidently had their impact as well. Hollister believed that naturalistic painting was anathema to the basic properties of stained glass windows. The principles of canvas painting, which attempt to render perspective, do not belong on transparent glass, whose beauty lies in its ability to transmit light and colour. Endless copies of pious Good Shepherds were not to be the legacy of Yvonne Williams.

In the late 1940s, Yvonne designed and built a large studio on Caribou Road in North Toronto. The studio, which was in operation for nearly thirty years, is legendary among the Canadian stained glass community. It is known not only for the quality of work it produced, but for its unique organization, which was a departure from the strict hierarchy and sharply defined tasks of a traditional glass studio. Faced with a growing number of commissions, Yvonne had to decide how complete them while maintaining her high standards. Her solution was to bring other talented artists into the studio and share the commissions with them, thus distributing the work, and at the same time providing an opportunity to collaborate and learn from each other.

Many of the Williams Studio commissions were done collaboratively; others, Yvonne would assign some to a single artist. Artists working at the studio could also execute their own commissions there, with complete autonomy. Although the designs, cartoons and glass painting were done by the artists, the cutting, glazing and installations were done by craftsman George London, who Yvonne had met while making her first window. In dividing up the work at the studio, Yvonne relied on her Amagic formula,@ which was based on percentages for each part of the job of making a window. Thus the artist who cartooned a work would be paid for that part, while another would receive the portion for the painting, and so on.

The newly hired artist at Williams Studio is nervous. Although well-versed in painting and drawing, he has never worked in stained glass before. Now he’s toiled steadily for four weeks on a large cartoon, and has been given no guidance or instruction whatsoever. Finally, he asks Yvonne how he is doing. She responds, “Fine. Continue.”

Gus Weisman laughs at this memory from his first months at the studio. He notes that Yvonne was more interested in experimenting and learning from others than she was in playing the role of teacher or mentor.

Outside the studio, however, Yvonne Williams was notable for her writing and lecturing. She wrote articles explaining the value of artistically creative stained glass, spoke frequently at public meetings and brought her clients into her studio so that they could see how their windows were made. She also hosted may tours for students of architecture and the arts. She was in constant demand as speaker, tour guide, and public educator. These tours and speeches sometimes slowed the work of the studio, but Yvonne considered it an important part of her studio's existence - to increase the general knowledge of the art with the public.

Through education, practice and evolution, Yvonne attained a distinct cohesion of technique and inspired artistic vision. Her impressive career resulted in over four hundred private and public commissions in churches, schools, hospitals and residences. Yvonne's work is known throughout Canada, and recognition within the artistic and architectural communities of her many accomplishments brought her several prestigious awards, including the Allied Arts Medal from the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada, and in 1965, election to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.

Yvonne's artwork was highly influential in the development of modern stained glass in Canada. Her early work in the 1930s and '40s was inspired by firsthand observation of Medieval stained glass, and by her mentor, Charles Connick. She went on to develop her own unique and contemporary style throughout the 1950s and '60s. Her windows show a continuous progress over the years, moving through various painting techniques, while the designs themselves move progressively towards abstraction. Her work continued to evolve, and her experimentation with light and colour extended to and through her "retirement" in the 1980s.

It sometime in the 1980s, and Yvonne is working on one of her commissions at the country studio of glass artist Rosemary Kilbourn. A fire breaks out in another part of the studio. Intent on her glass painting, Yvonne doesn’t notice. Finally, distracted by the hubbub around her, she looks up. She decides that the situation, while not actually under control, can be resolved without her help, and she continues working.

Even into her 90s, Yvonne Williams continued to design windows, and maintained an active interest in the work and ideas of the generations that followed her pioneering career. In later years, I had the opportunity to fabricate some of Yvonne’s windows in my studio. Even near the end of her life, her artistic sensibility, high standards, and attention to detail were undiminished.

I’m tidying up my studio in anticipation of a visit from Yvonne Williams. Looking around at the stark, white space, I decide it needs some color. I quickly pull out a few sheets of richly colored antique glass and set them up along the window ledge. As soon as Yvonne enters the studio, the sheets of color catch her eye. Turning her cool gaze on me, she says, “You’re not intending to use those two reds together are you? They do nothing for each other.” I look at the sheets - one, a bright, selenium red and the other a sombre copper red, and resolve next time to consider more carefully any welcoming gesture I make for Yvonne.

Yvonne Williams= >peculiar choice,= and the extraordinary career that followed, are both inspiring and humbling. Her four hundred commissions, her many awards, her pioneering reputation - all of these reveal a woman with a vision, and the determination to follow it through. Underlying it all was a profound artistry, and an understanding and love for light and colour. In her own words:

Sunlight actually becomes part of a window; for while a painting is made visible by light falling on its surface, stained glass is revealed by outdoor light passing through the glass to the interior of the building. To paint a window so that it accepts this Apartnership with the sun,@ and is responsive to every passing cloud - even to the sparkle of light reflected from leaves moving in the wind, is to give it its full interest. It is then alive, and leaving the class of static art, becomes something not only in Space, but in Time.