collage

Mixed Media Drawings by Sasha Ward

In the Pauline Boty exhibition at Gazelli Art House is a stained glass panel new to me, the fourth of hers that I’ve seen. These student works from the late 1950s and early 1960s hold a great fascination for me, they are full of her unrealised potential and also of my own memories of being a stained glass student in London. That was seventeen years or so after Boty’s time, the world had moved on but stained glass didn’t seem to.

Pauline Boty, Untitled (Architectural details, Edwardian Woman) c.1960/61. Collage and stained glass panel.

The best thing was seeing the collage (above left) that shows how she worked out the design of the stained glass panel.

The best thing at my next stop, the mansion now exhibition space that is Two Temple Place, was a postcard on sale in the shop showing the design for part of one of their celebrated windows (below left). These Clayton and Bell beauties from 1895, landscapes with people and buildings at sunrise and sunset, put everything else I have ever seen in this exhibition space into the shade. These are a different type of drawing, done not to work things out but to show someone what the finished window will look like.

Clayton and Bell, water colour on paper.

I used to be able to get away with presenting that sort of drawing for a commission. I mean an ink, watercolour or pencil sketch that didn’t try to look like glass, other than by showing some lead lines. My final design for a rooflight in the new extension at the Russell Cotes Art Gallery and Museum (below left) mixes views I’d drawn along the coast in Bournemouth with scenes from the rooms in the museum. These views and scenes had gone through many versions by the time they became part of the stained glass panels, with areas working better in one or the other medium, for example the scratchy trees along the cliff tops in watercolour and a particularly good pier in painted glass.

Left: Design for rooflight at the Russell Cotes Art Gallery & Museum, Bournemouth. Sasha Ward 1990. Right: Stained glass rooflight, 3 metres in diameter.

Since that time, 1990, I haven’t often used lead in my large commissions for buildings. Alongside a changing glass technology, where the design is screenprinted onto large sheets of float glass in transparent and opaque enamels, came a different drawing and design process. It seemed untruthful (under the influence of ‘truth to materials’) to have my hand sketches made into stencils and screenprinted. Instead I started drawing shapes for stencils sometimes incorporating photographic imagery, and as the years went on, drawing on the computer. All of this translated very easily into the screenprinting process and also meant that the design could look like the finished artwork would - something that the commissioning bodies particularly liked. An example of this is the hanging panel I made in 2006 for Dewsbury Health Centre (below). The arches in the design remind me of Pauline Boty’s untitled panel, but also of how far I had moved away from making those spontaneous looking, scruffy mixed media drawings.

Left: Collage design for hanging panel at Dewsbury Health Centre, West Yorkshire, Sasha Ward 2006. Right: Hanging panel, 3.2 x 3.2 metres.

Drawings to Glass by Sasha Ward

Below is window panel three from a set of four with the watercolour design on the left and the completed glass on the right. I’ve put these images side by side because I feel as if I’ve made progress over the years in showing clients a design that gives a good indication of what the finished glass will look like. I’ve just completed the panels, but it will be a while before I get photographs of them installed so I thought I would look at the progress of ideas from paper to glass.

One of four panels for a private house, 1200 x 460 mm. Left watercolour, right glass.

One of four panels for a private house, 1200 x 460 mm. Left watercolour, right glass.

A collage, partly shown below left, was one of my early designs and it turned out to be the key to sorting out this composition. The quality I copied from the paper to the glass was the contrast between a matt neutral ground and pools of pale, decorated, transparent colour. In glass terms, this became sandblasted dirty pink ground (a great new enamel colour mix) against a very transparent hand painted blue pool.

Central section of panels 3 & 4. Left collage, right glass.

Central section of panels 3 & 4. Left collage, right glass.

In another watercolour/collage, below left, I worked out some details and found a new pattern to suggest a wooded background. I didn’t really like the overall look of this design, and was surprised when I put it against the glass in progress, below right, to see how much I had stuck to my original shapes. These two glass panels on the lighbox before their first firing show how much the colour of the enamel changes when fired.

Panels 1 & 2. Left watercolour/collage, right glass panels on the lightbox before firing.

Panels 1 & 2. Left watercolour/collage, right glass panels on the lightbox before firing.

When I look at a photo (below left) of the first, unfired layer of enamel I used to create the background, I can hardly remember how I did it. I can see the drawn lines are the same in the finished version (below right) and I have my notes, which tell me that the brown turned grey and the green went pink - as planned obviously!

Background detail. Left on the lightbox before firing, right same section completed.

Background detail. Left on the lightbox before firing, right same section completed.

A third comparison (after paper to glass and unfired to double fired) is from artificial to natural light. The panels will be installed in an existing four light window with a light box behind each one. The colours work much better in artificial light - as planned obviously! You can see this in the photos below. However, when the glass has daylight behind it my original concept, matt ground against pale pool, is really emphasised and gives me something I want to take into my next piece of work.

Top half of the glass completed. Left on the lightbox, right against the window.

Top half of the glass completed. Left on the lightbox, right against the window.