Combining beauty with practicality

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This article was published 05/02/2018 (3036 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Light shining through the turquoise glass door panel highlights the Prairie Studio Glass logo cast into the panel — one of the business’ showpieces created by owner and vice-president Matthew McMillan.

McMillan, who lives with his wife Alesha and three children in St. Francois Xavier, grew up in the Winnipeg studio and gallery located at 587 Sargent Ave., which is celebrating its 40th anniversary.

“I was one when it opened. I was born and raised around glass,” he said.

His parents founded what was then called Prairie Stained Glass in 1978. Since that time, thousands of people have taken classes there and learned to create stained glass and fused glass pieces. The company has completed thousands of custom commissions as well.

The business includes two galleries with colourful glass creations hanging in the windows and displayed on lighted shelving units. McMillan is especially proud of the gallery that contains examples of the custom work done by himself, his business partner Lucinda Doran, and other staff members. These include a fused glass countertop created by layering various colours of glass sheets, a live edge wooden coffee table that features a blue glass insert, and decorative vessels that can be customized and used as receptacles for cremated remains.

McMillan said, when he was a teenager, working at the studio gave him some spending money, but after graduating from Westwood Collegiate, he started to see the family business as a career.

“I was drawn in by the material.”

He learned on the job and was able to train with a staff member who worked on residential commissions.

McMillan said the passing four decades have seen a shift in the business’ focus from primarily offering classes and selling stained glass supplies to doing custom work. “The residential and commercial side of things has become bigger business.”

Over the last decade, Winnipeggers’ passion for art glass has shifted from traditional stained glass to fused glass. Prairie Studio Glass offers classes for beginners and more advanced crafters in both techniques.

McMillan provides instruction for Manitoba school teachers on how to safely work with students to create glass art projects. He worked with St. Francois Xavier Community School students in 2016 to make glass bubbles that were incorporated in a glass donor wall in Country Kids Learning Centre in SFX.

Prairie Studio Glass staff have become experts in heritage window restoration. McMillan said homeowners will contact him when they want to have an existing stained glass window restored. The average life span of a stained glass window is between 80 and 100 years.

“A lot of older homes in Manitoba were built at the turn of the century and their stained glass feature windows have reached the end of their lifespan,” he said. “We’re well-versed in how windows will fail.”

This also applies to the memorial and decorative stained glass windows found in many western Canadian churches. McMillan and his employees have worked on projects in churches across Manitoba and into Saskatchewan and northwestern Ontario.

He’s proud of the recent work done for a church in Holland, Man. After the church was partially destroyed by fire, the company was able to reclaim 11 of the original windows, restore and reinstall them in a new church. They were also commissioned to create three new windows. Previous projects also include restoration work on windows in Headingley United Church and Holy Trinity Anglican Church in Headingley.

McMillan said two major projects were restoration of an elaborate heritage window created by celebrated English artist Henry Halliday in University of Winnipeg’s Bryce Hall and a wall piece created of fused glass for St.Amant’s chapel.

McMillan said he believes that stained glass work is an art form, not just a craft. It is becoming more highly valued art form.

McMillan tries to attend an annual international glass conference as he said he gains inspiration from seeing what’s possible and what others are doing.

Many of the custom art pieces that McMillan, Doran and other staff create are displayed on the company’s web site.

“We feel our products can stand on their own as art pieces,” he said.

For more information on Prairie Studio Glass, see https://www.prairiestudioglass.com