Behind the Art: Rick Allan’s World of Stained Glass
If you've had a chance to stand inside Sydney Town Hall, St Mary's Cathedral or St Andrew's Cathedral and look up at the glass, you've probably seen Rick's hands at work. He’s restored some of NSW’s most important stained glass works, and he’s been trusted to do so for over 40 years now.
We first worked with Rick back in 2022 when we were developing the visual language for Centro 86, heavily leaning in to the wonderful psychedelia found throughout the architectural glass work of Catalan designer, Antoni Gaudí.
Gaudí’s body of work is a central inspiration for a lot of what we do at MUCHO. His vision was otherworldly. His buildings feel like a fantastic polymer of nature, psyche and spirituality, marbling together in a crystal ball that happens to be in another dimension, but still on Earth at the same time.
The work feels exactly how you would describe magic mushrooms to a five year old.
We’ll usually start an idea in the office with a few napkin sketches between us, dragging them in to mock up the scratchings as vectors to get a good feel of potential colour ways and outcomes.
We then get to hand Rick the blank slate to work his magic with. The spontaneity of his work is the most exciting part for us, the unexpected details, the tonal flecks and movement that gets frozen within the glass. You can’t plan for that, and once the light punches through the glass, it feels alive.
A lot of memories are made beneath the glow of Rick’s work in our bars, and it still feels just as exciting seeing them now than it did for the very first time.
