Brenna, the mind behind Willow Deep, the stained-glass, gold-leaf and restoration art studio based in Rosendale, is an innovator with a knack towards the traditional arts and a focus on retaining old-fashioned methods of making her distinctive works.

Brenna’s studio, Willow Deep, is technically located in Cottekill, right on the outskirts of Rosendale, but she’s an advocate for promoting Rosendale’s growing Main Street community, vintage stores and eateries. As a history buff, Brenna also provides her visitors and students with a detailed background of the land her studio is located on as well as the history of the surrounding area in Rosendale. Today she works full-time in her studio doing custom stained-glass and gold-leaf signage commissions for clients and hosts regular workshops for interested parties of all experience levels.

After graduating from Bard, Brenna (she is known professionally by her first name) spent several years working in the music industry. She found it draining and felt a desire to ditch her desk job and find something more hands-on to do. She took a risk, abandoning her career to move to Oregon for a year to learn the restorative arts. It was a natural fit since she was always interested in old houses and historical sites growing up.

Then, a happy coincidence. The program Brenna took also had a relationship to the art of stained-glass and gold-leaf signage. By the end of the program when she received her certification, Brenna realized that although she loved the restorative arts, she found a passion for detail inspired by her brief time working with stained glass and gold leaf. Once she returned to New York, she began working at a stained-glass studio in Brooklyn that’s been around since the ’70s and a gilding studio in Harlem.

These positions helped her gain expertise in this field, but she noticed one crucial error in their model — they couldn’t hone in on the business aspect of their companies enough to make them sustainable. This is when Brenna shifted gears yet again, moving back up to the Hudson Valley and starting a business that allowed her to apply the skills she learned refining her trade combined with her “business common sense” to create a functioning, profitable art studio and workshop space.

That was back in 2018. Now Brenna works full-time at her studio and offers workshops to supplement her income. These workshops include several different courses, with the most popular one being the suncatcher workshop. It’s offered once or twice a month and is open to people of all skill levels. It’s also the most affordable option; even those who have never stepped foot in a studio will come out of the class having learned the basic skills of this ancient trade and have a beautiful work of art to take home with them. In addition to this, Brenna conducts private classes where she can do individual teachings of the suncatcher and copper foil methods.

The most intensive class she offers, requiring no small commitment from students, teaches how to build a leaded glass window. Brenna says this class teaches people “how to make plans for their design, cut glass, use lead, solder and make the window. It takes five days, and this can be consecutive or over a period of time.”

Her style, Brenna said, is ever-changing, since each project she is commissioned to do is unique — she never gets bored with her art. Her main source of inspiration comes from everything around her, including the beautiful scenery right outside of her window in Rosendale: “Nature is the best art and gives the best colors.” Beyond this, space and the celestial sky also inspire Brenna’s art, along with her roots in music. Some distinct styles that she implements when creating her stained-glass pieces are art nouveau, modern art, Victorian, farmhouse, etc., but she mainly draws inspiration from folk art. Her gold leaf work is mainly inspired by 19th- or 20th-century styles, although she likes to apply contemporary takes to it when she can.

What makes Brenna’s process distinct compared to other stained-glass studios is that she does not use a computer to make her designs — she draws them all by hand. There is a distinct difference between a piece that was created by a computer design and a design that was hand drawn, because, she said, “whatever style of pattern you’re doing will have your artisan touch.”

Because of this method, Brenna’s clients trust her process and give her more freedom to express herself through her art because they know how technical and detail-oriented she is.

Although stained-glass and gold-leaf work are two separate traditional art forms — according to Brenna, hers is the only studio that she knows of that combines these two forms — she also notes that there are some interesting connections these forms share. She provided Shawangunk Journal with some techniques of the trade: “The way that glass is made for stained glass is with different alloys of metal in the glass, and red glass, which is the most expensive, has gold in it. Also, different types of glass with iridescence, which are very popular, are made by baking a sheet of thin metal on top of the glass which is basically gold leaf.”

Brenna’s studio is in the backroads of Rosendale, a town she identifies with as being “a town in the heart of the Hudson Valley that is still the underdog.” In addition to her role as the owner and creative mind behind Willow Deep, she's also a part of a cooperative of Hudson Valley-based womxn designers and artisans called Hinterland. If you’d like to check out Hinterland’s webpage and learn more about the artists that reside in this area of New York, you can click here. To learn more about Willow Deep, check out Brenna's products for sale and sign up for one of her many recurring workshops, click here. Willow Deep also posts regularly on their Instagram and Facebook pages, which are both @willowdeepstudio.