Inspired by the Hudson River School

View across the Hudson from Blithewood, Bard College, Annondale-on-Hudson, 2023 and 2000.

Staying with my brother on a recent holiday in New York State I spent a lovely morning drawing the view across the river from the lawns of Bard College (above left). We had visited the house of the father of the Hudson River School, Thomas Cole, and I was using the style I’d picked up from looking at his paintings, with paintbrush blobs for distant trees and picturesque details in the foreground. When I got home I looked through sketchbooks from previous visits (shown below) and was astonished to find a drawing I did 23 years ago from pretty much the same spot (above right).

My USA sketchbooks, clockwise from top right: 1996, 2000, 2012, 2023.

Looking through the sketchbook from my first visit there in 1996 I found more versions of the view, usually framed by the summer houses of historic houses that line the riverbank but behind the railway that seems to run through the water. The old drawings practically line up with the new (below left) as if my hand remembers the drawings I always do when I’m there.

Left: More views across the river, 1996 and 2023. Right: House in Annandale-on-Hudson 2000.

Left: Thomas Cole, River in the Catskills, 1843. Right: Frederick Church, Catskill Mountains from the Home of the Artist, 1871.

In 1996 we had visited Olana, the house of Thomas Cole’s pupil, Frederick Church, that he had built in a spot with fantastic views. Some of my work from the following years was consciously influenced by Church’s use of landscape motifs - mountains, waterfalls, sunsets - and the solitary foreground tree that cuts across the horizontal layers of the landscape as shown in my sketchbooks below.

View across the River Hudson to the Catskills, 1996 & 2000.

If I’m not drawing the river, or the view across the street from the porch, I draw the view through the window, recording the different houses we have stayed in on each visit. Again I was surprised by the repetition in what I’ve chosen to draw, with pine trees making another, looser grid right up against the windows of each house.

Windows, Rhinebeck 1996, Haggerty Hill Road 2012 & Bard College 2023.

Behind the Scenes

Left, East Hagbourne, Oxfordshire. Right, Urchfont, Wiltshire.

To see the medieval glass patchworked into a window at St Andrew’s Church, East Hagbourne (above left) I had to poke my head through a screen of heavy curtains that hide the vicar’s desk. To get up close to Rosalind Grimshaw’s window in Urchfont church I had to move piles of chairs and toys (above right). I’ve now started looking out for the children’s corners which, like kitchens in churches, give an indication of how the church is being used.

Left, inviting at North Moreton, Oxfordshire. Right, austere at Potterne, Wiltshire.

Steeple Ashton, Wiltshire.

In the huge church of St Peter and St Paul, Steeple Ashton, everything is clean and neat with fragments of medieval glass in almost all of the windows. The door to the vestry, not a separate room but just a space sectioned off, was open and everything inside was in order (above left). The children’s corner (above right) actually looked like you might want to spend time there, it seemed to have been arranged by someone who actually cares what the place looks like.

My best behind the scenes photo, above left, is from the corner of another huge church, this one at Madley in Herefordshire. The scene is simply furnished, the atmosphere is timeless. In the east window of the church is a wealth of medieval stained glass (below), but even more unusually there are twenty first century paintings by Edward Kelly installed in the nave and the crypt (above right). The triptych in the crypt is a particularly wonderful sight because paintings, particularly modern ones, are rarely found in English churches.

This from The Rev Simon Lockett, who I like to imagine sitting on that pink cushion. ‘It is a great joy to have the triptych “The Lillies of the Field” here in Madley Crypt. I have lived with these paintings for a long time now and they have helped to bring this beautiful space alive giving the crypt depth as well as a flourish of colour and bold form. They have helped with a contemplative practice as well as a daily reminder not only of the beauty of creation but of the natural cycle of abundance, death and new life’.

Medieval glass in the east window of The Church of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Madley.

Squares

Left: from my 1996 sketchbook, drawing before making the kitchen window. Right: photo of window 500mm square.

I made a window for the kitchen door in our old house which I sold to a friend who was visiting. It was a simple thing, an arrangement of squares of glass scraps, mostly enamelled, and mostly featuring the stripes I use for my samples. This window was much better than the snap I have of it (above right), but luckily I also have my sketchbooks from a time when I drew everything, before I made it (above left) and even after I made it (below). The before drawing in coloured pencil shows that I changed about five pieces before leading it up, with the thinnest possible lead used for the verticals. The arrangement spiralled around the central circle on a square of orange flashed glass (that I remember breaking when I was sandblasting off the thick orange layer) becoming paler towards the edges of the window.

Pencil drawing (not rubbing) of the window.

Left: glass squares on the lightbox. Right: centre of the new panel.

I’ve never found a pattern for putting sample pieces together that I like as much as that simple mosaic of squares, and as I had a lot of small ones (40mm sq.) in my sample box I thought I’d make a new panel in the same spirit. In 1996 I was led by the central orange square but this time, 27 years later, I had lots of green pieces that suggested a landscape format, and lots of diagonal stripes that I was careful to arrange in an imaginary oval that pulls the composition together. I found a piece with a building painted on it and then one with a belisha beacon, these added interest to the panel so I dared to add a cow in the middle. These pieces all contain the right subject matter for a local landscape and show me a way of using small scale imagery that mixes well with my habitual pattern making.

Comparing my old work and approach with my new one, I know that I used to put more concentrated effort into drawing and that the glass I made was quite scrappy and loose. Now my drawing is rough and untidy, while I put a lot more detail and care into the glass painting.

Woman in an Opera Dress at a Prison Camp

Left, Ray Ward’s painting, egg tempera and indian ink on gesso. Right, my stained glass interpretation of Woman in an Opera Dress at a Prison Camp, 420 x 360 mm.

This is the latest in my series of so called collaborations with Ray, made as a request by one of his collectors who missed out on buying the original black and white painting (above left). Sometimes Ray’s characters are adapted from visual sources, like a snapshot, but this one comes from a story told in her memoirs by Evgenia Ginzburg who served an 18 year sentence in labour camps at the eastern edge of the Soviet Union. Here she met women who arrived at the camp in their tattered finery because they had been arrested while at the opera. This was a great choice of painting to interpret as it is covered in lines and textures, with the dress and her flesh that is visible through it seemingly the focus of the piece.

Although I trace directly from a photocopy of Ray’s work, I have to do the lines in a completely different way - too many black lines on coloured glass would look like a load of dirty scribbles. Instead for the dress I chose two shades of streaky pink flashed glass and sandblasted the colour off to make fine white lines. You can see in the photo of the dress detail above how deep I had to go to get to the white, creating a texture that looks pleated and scruffy, as I imagine the original dress was. I covered the background in fine sandblasted lines and smoky paintwork too, with the only bit of sgraffito scribble on the ground behind the figure. All this talk of detail makes me think I should concentrate less on the technique and more on the subject matter.

Choosing the glass, painted pieces on the lightbox.

Evgenia Ginzburg survived her ordeal in the gulag, as did my mother’s cousins. She met them for the first time when we went to visit the family in Gus-Khrulstany in the year 2000, a photograph (below) marks the happy occasion The two cousins are in the back row in the centre of the photo, I can see that I could have used either of their faces for the portrait of the woman. Next to them sits my mother Elizabeth (wearing glasses) with me in the right foreground.

In the 1990s Anastasia, the granddaughter of my mother’s cousin Natasha and therefore my second cousin once removed, brought the branch of the family that had stayed in Russia into contact with the branch of the family that had gone to England at the Revolution. She is in the centre of the photo above and on the left below with her parents and grandmother Natasha. We have a wealth of family stories, diaries and photographs from the pre revolutionary period, then a big gap except for one story from the late 1920s or 30s. My great aunt Lena travelled to Gus in an attempt to bring little orphaned Natasha back to England with her, but the grandfather wouldn’t let her go. As Natasha recounted the familiar story to us she said, ‘think how different my life would have been then.’

Three Small windows

St Margaret, St Margaret’s, Herefordshire.

The last church we visited on our trip to Hereford and back was St Margaret’s, the name of both the village and the church, which is in a field high up with a view of the Golden Valley to the east (above). It’s a beautiful spot, the small church is notable for its carved oak screen which is also a loft (below), a rare survivor from the Tudor period. Beyond the screen is a low chancel with more of the painted biblical texts on the walls and a wonderfully detailed east window by Archibald Davies, otherwise known as A.J. Davies of the Bromsgrove Guild.

St Margaret’s, Herefordshire, looking through the tudor screen.

The chancel, St Margaret’s with east window by A.J. Davies 1926

The window fits perfectly with the other features in the church in terms of its colouring, its size and its scale of detail with an oak leaf border that echoes the screen. It’s so satisfying to see this sort of harmony in a church interior - the wonderful details you find on closer inspection (below) are an added bonus.

Details from the A.J. Davies window that shows a scene from the life of St Margaret.

This window was the third I had seen on this trip where a low decorated chancel was beautifully complemented by a small east stained glass window. The other two were in Gloucestershire churches, both with a series of Norman arches carved with zig zags. At St John, Elkstone (below) zigzags also arch over the virgin and child window by Henry Payne who taught A.J. Davies at Birmingham School of Art.

The chancel, St John, Elkstone, Gloucestershire.

The features of this beautiful chancel are the vaulted arches with dragons’ heads where they meet and the amazing yellow light that fills the space through the south windows. The stained glass window is simple and fits in as well as an ancient one would. I always admire Payne’s flower details, here the floral border seems to nod to the Norman carving with the flowers contained by diamonds and separated by a string of circles.

Elkstone: left, looking through the norman arches: right, east window by Henry Payne 1929.

Kempley: left looking through the Norman arch: right, east window by C.E. Kempe 1876.

I found the most remarkable combination of stained glass and church decoration to be at St Mary, Kempley, a church that is famous for its Romanesque wall paintings. The paintings start in the nave and above the arch as you can see in the photo above left, then past the checked pattern under the arch to a low vaulted chancel. Once inside you are surrounded by a background of strong, earthy colours and the pale silhouettes of patterns and figures as the walls and ceiling are completely covered with frescoes that were painted around 1130 then covered over between the Reformation and the 1870s. The small east window by C.E. Kempe (above right) is in his familiar style but really looks at home here with a similar balance of pale silver stained figures against a dark red background, silhouetted by the light.

The chancel, St Mary, Kempley, Gloucestershire.

I was reminded of how much I value a small window, as opposed to metres of glazing. And how refreshing it is in a church to progress to a small, intimate space which, in all three cases, has a truly divine atmosphere.

St Mary, Kempley - no hint of what’s inside but a fabulously pink wall.