Scrap Glass / February 23, 2023 by Sasha Ward

Left, palette with unfired enamel paint. Right, glass scraps painted with two enamel colours and fired.

For a recent commission I had to make a lot of colour samples using transparent glass enamel mixed with a drop of lavender oil and another of gum arabic in the traditional way. With the leftover paint I coated rectangles of glass with two colours against each other and once fired, saved them in a box. The next stage, cutting them up then leading them together to make something satisfactory, proved harder than I thought.

Scraps cut up and arranged to make scrap panels 1, 2 and 3.

My first idea was to make exuberant curved shapes with background pieces cut on the slant (scrap panel 1 above and below). The offcuts from the slanted pieces made an effortless triangle panel (scrap panel 2 above & below). I shouldn’t have been surprised that panel no 2 was so much better than panel no 1, as I wasn’t trying too hard - always a recipe for disaster. There was too much yellow in no 1, so panel no 3 (above right) was an attempt to deal with the yellow by making it the spine of the piece and using the colours in a more ordered way.

Scrap panels completed, top panels 1 & 2. Bottom panels 3 & 4.

The original format of panel no 3 looked very clumsy, so I cut it down to make a smaller panel no 3 (above right). Finally, to emphasise the original idea of the two enamel colours coming together on one piece, like a simple flag or landscape design, I made panel panel no 4 (above left) where the bands of complimentary colours frame other painted and sandblasted scraps from one of my many boxes of broken glass and sample pieces.

Studio window / July 13, 2020 by Sasha Ward

Do you ever get sick of the sight of your own work? In my case, samples and fragments of it are sitting on shelves in my window, blocking a view of our beautiful garden. The up side is that even in the gloom of a winter afternoon (above) there were interesting coloured reflections cast on the work I was doing on the lightbox. As this piece of work was a geometric composition, I ended up with a window full of striped colour samples and a more coordinated look in the studio (below). However, I was tired of that look and resolved, as we were going into lockdown, that I would end up with a completely different window at the end of it.

I found an autumnal photo with no coloured glass on the shelves from another year when I must have needed a change (above) and one from the following spring where I had painted the shape of one of the pink leafed plants on to a sample I was doing for a house in Italy (below).

Further back in time (above) I had the shelves in the same positions and a similar mix of geometric test strips and slightly organic patterns which were sample pieces for the commissions on the go. I recognise fragments from a wall panel for St James Hospital in Leeds, a plane propellor from Pegasus House in Bristol and colour variations for windows in Liverpool and Derbyshire. I only remember one occasion when I wanted to fill all four windows with samples (below). This was the last time we held an open studio event and the samples were labelled showing which commission they were made for. (Ten years ago I thought this was a terrible picture of me, now I can only see how much younger I look.)

Which brings me to the same window today and work that does look pretty different from anything I’ve put in front of it before (below). There are two main themes; self portraits which are on the bottom shelf and which I think I’ve done enough of for now, and stained glass panels from Ray Ward’s drawings which are on the top shelf and which I’ve described in previous blog posts. These have been a welcome return to making leaded panels and this is something I hope to continue doing both to commission and for exhibition.