Epoxy vs. Glass: The New Stained Glass of the Future

People often compare Martin Eichinger’s new resin panels to stained glass, and he understands why. They catch light in striking ways, and the colors seem to float inside the material. But the resemblance ends the moment you understand how the work is made.

“Glass does one thing,” Eichinger says. “Epoxy does something completely different.”

Traditional stained glass has a fixed nature. Once shaped and cooled, it stays exactly as it is. Epoxy resin begins that way—clear and fluid—but then shifts for hours. Inside that window, mica powders move, settle, and slowly build their own internal patterns.

“It is changing the whole time,” he explains. “You walk away and come back later, and it has taken on a new direction.”

Glass never does that. Epoxy behaves almost like a slow chemical weather system.

Eichinger pours the resin onto clear acrylic panels, working on the front and back. Instead of a single plane of color, the piece becomes a stack of thin reactions, each one visible through the next. Light doesn’t just pass through; it travels through different layers of activity.

“You get a different view depending on where you stand,” he says. “That part is important to me.”

Stained glass uses transparency. Epoxy uses depth.

Epoxy and Stained Glass: Fireball hangs over the front door to Art at The Geode.

Resin also lets Eichinger use ingredients that glassmaking could never handle: mica flakes, dyes, crushed crystals, even fine strands of fiberglass. Each reacts differently as the epoxy firms up. Some cluster. Some streak. Some remain suspended, almost weightless.

“It is tough material,” he says. “You can put things into it that would never survive in glass.”

Rather than heat, the work relies on timing and observation. The piece develops as the chemistry settles.

What makes these panels feel like stained glass of the future is not imitation, but evolution. They still rely on light, but the interaction is more active. A single piece can look sharp and luminous in one moment and soft and smoky in the next. Light pulls different structures forward depending on the angle, the hour, even the weather outside.

The artwork is not only transparent. It’s responsive.

Eichinger isn’t trying to make a modern version of a cathedral window. He’s pursuing something adjacent: a medium that keeps the spirit of stained glass while allowing for movement and experimentation that glass can’t match.

“It belongs in that conversation,” he says, “but it’s its own thing.”

Epoxy doesn’t replace stained glass. It opens another door beside it—a new way to work with light, color, and layered transparency.

And as Eichinger keeps testing materials and pushing the chemistry further, the medium keeps hinting at possibilities that glass simply never offered. A future where light-based art isn’t frozen, but quietly in motion.

The Chemistry of Art: Mica Powders and Crystallization

When Martin Eichinger talks about epoxy resin, he sounds as much like a curious experimenter as he does an artist. His studio is lined with jars of mica powders, dyes, glass spheres, and a growing collection of test panels—evidence of just how deep he’s gone into understanding how these materials behave.

“I’ve probably done a hundred of these things,” he says. “Just testing what happens. What does mica do? What does glitter do? What do fiberglass strands do? You learn by watching.”

Those experiments revealed something important: epoxy doesn’t sit still. It reacts. It moves. It shifts on its own timeline.

“The thing about epoxy is that it doesn’t just dry,” he says. “It changes. It keeps moving for hours.”

That’s where mica comes in. What looks like simple pigment actually behaves like a mineral should—it aligns, layers, and begins forming crystalline structures as the resin cures. A pour that begins glossy and flat slowly transforms into a layered, almost cosmic surface.

“Mica wants to line up with itself,” Eichinger explains. “It creates these little formations. You don’t control it. You just set it up and let it go.”

The curing process usually takes six to eight hours. In that window, temperature, humidity, and density all influence how the mica arranges. Eichinger likes the uncertainty. It keeps him engaged.

“It’s not like paint,” he says. “You don’t mix a color and know what you’ll get. You come back the next morning, and it’s different.”

Eichinger adding glass beads, dyes, and other ingredients to an unnamed epoxy resin piece.

He pushes the material even further by adding glass beads, dyes, and other ingredients. Each reacts differently inside the resin. Glass beads, for example, naturally settle into tight geometric clusters—tiny hexagonal patterns that echo how molecules organize in nature.

“If you spread the glass beads out just right, they sort of snap into this little honeycomb pattern,” he says. “It just happens. You don’t force it.”

This interplay between chance and structure mirrors what fascinates Eichinger about the universe itself. He spends a lot of time looking at imagery from NASA, especially from the James Webb Telescope, and sees a familiar logic in how matter organizes at every scale.

“When I watch the mica settle, it feels connected to the same processes out there,” he says. “Things want to organize. They want to create structure.”

His resin panels are built on that idea. Layer by layer, he pours the materials and steps back. The chemistry takes over. The resin records the entire reaction, freezing it at the moment it stops moving.

“You give the material time,” he says, “and it shows you what it wants to do.”

The finished works are full of small surprises—pools where mica gathered, streaks where particles drifted, clusters that formed all on their own. They don’t look painted; they look grown.

And that’s what Eichinger loves about this new phase of his work. It’s not just art—it’s a collaboration with natural forces on a smaller scale.

“I’m just letting the chemistry reveal itself,” he says. “And honestly, it’s pretty amazing to watch.”

Capturing the Other Side of Outer Space

When Martin Eichinger began experimenting with epoxy resin, he wasn’t just changing mediums—he was changing how he saw. After four decades of sculpting narrative bronze figures, Eichinger turned his focus outward, toward light, movement, and the mysteries of space.

“I’m in love with outer space,” he says. “What the James Webb Telescope has been able to provide in terms of seeing way back into the history of our universe—it’s extraordinary.”

That sense of awe became the foundation of his new work. Each epoxy piece begins as a study in what can’t be seen directly: light traveling for billions of years, galaxies forming and dissolving, the slow choreography of the cosmos revealed through color and chemistry.

M42 The Orion Nebula isn’t flat at all. I used to see images like this as 2D, but they’re fully three-dimensional—what looks like a glowing donut is actually a slice through a sphere. Once you see it that way, the whole thing shifts.

Epoxy resin, with its depth and transparency, became the perfect medium for that pursuit. Unlike bronze, which hardens through heat, resin comes to life over time—its surface evolving as it cures. “Glass melts,” Eichinger explains, “but epoxy crystallizes. It changes chemically. You can watch it happen.”

As the resin sets, mica powders inside it align and harden into intricate crystalline structures, creating a kind of cosmic micro-landscape. “They take six or eight hours to create their pattern,” he says. “When you put them in, you don’t know what it’s going to look like eight hours later.”

The process mirrors the natural laws that fascinate him most—order emerging from chaos. “Mica wants to layer itself,” Eichinger says. “It creates lines and patterns, just like gases and dust align in space.”

Each piece is built from both sides of a transparent acrylic frame, so light can move through it freely. Depending on where you stand, the view shifts—sometimes luminous and dense, sometimes ghostly and distant. “We can’t stand on the other side of space to see what it looks like,” Eichinger says. “But we can imagine it has two sides. That’s what I’m trying to capture.”

In the studio, color, glass, and mica are poured in layers that react on their own terms. The results are unpredictable, which is part of the appeal. “It’s like being a painter without having to mix paints,” he says. “The chemistry does the blending for me.”

The finished works feel alive. Patterns seem to drift and pulse as the light changes, revealing hidden structures beneath the surface. No two pieces behave the same—each one records a moment of transformation frozen in motion.

Eichinger no longer sculpts stories of people but of processes. His art now speaks to the same balance that defines the universe: control meeting chaos, precision meeting chance.

“We’re looking back in time,” he says of both the telescopes that inspire him and the resin that traps his shifting light. “The universe is evolving, and so is the work.”