Living: Stained Glass, Back and Blooming

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More than a thousand courses in stained glass are now available in public schools, museums, Y.M.C.A.s, art centers, colleges and private studios throughout the U.S. After Artist Don Davidson started teaching stained-glass works as a pilot project for 25 fifth-and sixth-graders at Houston's Luther Burbank elementary school, parents clamored successfully for their own afterschool classes. Louisiana State University is offering a full-time course in the medium for undergraduates. At North Adams, Mass., an institute sponsored by the Hoosuck Corporation, a nonprofit organization that promotes design-oriented manufacturing businesses, has just completed a two-week, $330 class in rudimentary technique; it was sold out. Another course in April will teach painting on glass; in June under Albinas Elskus, there will be a course in design. At the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, four-year students can take a major in stained glass. Later this year a special class will be taught there by West Germany's Ludwig Schaffrath, 54, a master of design who is regarded as the greatest single influence on Americans working in the medium.

Artist Otto B. Rigan notes in his book New Glass (Ballantine; $7.95): "The pioneering, limit-shattering art of the new glass springs up at a time when the American middle class has more leisure, is better educated and more diversified in interests than ever before, and when the search for expansive ideals and lifestyles is at an all-time high."

The craft's appeal to the tyro lies partly in the fact that it need not be expensive. Basic equipment, in addition to the glass, can be bought for less than $50. It includes: a glass cutter, a breaker (for splitting the glass), a grozier (to grind off errors), copper foil or lead (to hold the pieces together), a lathekin (a wooden tool) to flatten the foil on the glass, a soldering iron, a lubricant (usually kerosene) to make the cutter run smoothly on the glass, a flux (a solution to make the solder adhere to the foil or lead). New techniques, such as sandblasting, silk-screen painting, laminating and the use of epoxy resins, enable artists to achieve subtle tactile and visual effects. Even so, stained glass demands infinite patience; a single lamp shade may be composed of 2,400 meticulously assembled pieces.

Most beginners putter with machine-made glass, which costs from $2 to $5 per sq. ft. and comes in some 300 hues. Once hooked, the hobbyist will gravitate to blown glass (up to $20 per sq. ft.), which has a special mystique: each sheet is unique, with bubbles, streaks, ripples, tints, curves and a translucency that seems to give it a life of its own. This so-called "antique" glass, obtainable in some 3,000 colors and shadings, is imported almost exclusively from European makers, who cannot produce enough to feed the American market.

The demand for finished works has secularized most professional studios.