Chaos out of Order

I found an old piece of work based on a drawing of a hut by a lake in the hills that gave me an idea for a new piece of work. The idea was to turn the picture into a sequence by repeating the shapes of road, hut, lake and hills and changing them slightly in each version. The sequence I followed to get to the final piece is described below - starting with stage one where I cut nine pieces of glass, some coloured, some flashed and some painted, into squares and sandblasted them with the basic design (below left). Stage two involved adding colour (below right), which never turns out quite how I imagine.

Stage one: Nine 90mm squares of glass, sandblasted. Stage two: First layer of painting.

It was at this point that I realised I’d made things too simple and too twee. So I dropped the squares down to add another colour between them (below left). This led me to join up the white paths and the black blobs (which were originally the lakes) to create a more disorderly pattern. The huts had served their purpose as pattern makers so they had to go (below right).

Stage three: Strips of coloured glass added. Stage four: Sandblasting & painting to link pieces together.

After more painting and sandblasting to disguise the remnants of the huts, I thought the colours looked OK together and leaded up the piece (below left). Then I left it a while, knowing it wasn’t quite right. I liked the columns but not the rows, so I spaced a photograph of the panel out in photoshop and got rid of the cramped up look (below right). Then I ripped up the leading before I could change my mind and came up with a new plan.

Stage six: Leaded panel after more sandblasting & painting. Stage seven: Moving the columns apart.

The new plan followed a pattern that I worked out on paper first. I added borders to give more space to the design, especially the blobby blacks which had been designed to cover the lead joints. I added horizontal colour strips between the columns which link visually to the geometry of the horizontal lead lines, with the white paths meandering across all the glass pieces. Another layer of sandblasting and painting meant that I changed some of the colour combinations I wasn’t happy with, before I leaded up the panel for the final time (below left). The sun projected version of the panel emphasised the blobby contrasted with the stripey that I was after (below right).

Stage ten: Panel with borders added.

You can see the aspects of the panel that I like best below - sunlight through different types of glass and glass painting, and subtle colour combinations that flow across the lead lines.

Left: Sunlight through the panel. Right: Detail shown on light box.

In the Window

Left, roadside front window before. Right, kitchen window.

As you can see in the two pictures above, the windows in my friend’s new house have restricted views. At the back, the kitchen looks on to a concrete wall with tiles and objects positioned wherever they fit. At the front, there is a busy stretch of main road and a pavement close up to the low window. Although she has made it look great with her objects and stick on patterns, she wanted some pieces of my glass in front of the window to block the traffic in a more colourful way.

This was after seeing the rows of random samples I always have in my studio window, slotted into wooden grooves fitted across the window frames. At the moment (below right) I have my most recent samples, some colour test strips and a few samples that stay every time I have a reshuffle so I suppose they must be my favourites. I’ve used grooved wood for shelves in the window since I was a student at the Royal College of Art (years ago, picture below left), with a great view of the Albert Hall and a changing display of the pieces I was painting on top of a backlit piece of glass.

Left, my window at The Royal College of Art in 1985. Right, my studio window this week (2019).

Left, roadside window after. Right, colours through the glass.

Choosing glass offcuts or old samples, cutting them up and arranging them in a row is like making a fragment-style stained glass window. That is, anything looks OK but there is an art to the ordering and cropping. These pieces are big at 400 mm tall, and from many different periods so I did a bit of work to unite them with two rows of circles sandblasted out and filled with green enamel. It means that you can still play around with the order and orientation of the pieces. The best part, as always, was seeing the colours projected through the glass on to the carpet in the afternoon sun (above right).

Detail of three panels, originally samples for The Centre Livingston, private house & Manchester Children’s Hospital.