Tree patterns

Combination Trees 350 x 350 mm.

As you can probably tell, I made the panel above by leading together glass pieces from two different styles of work, both based on trees. I happened to have the two painted pieces of glass shown below in a pile on my work bench and had a feeling they would go together well. The finished panel also uses other pieces of glass from the same two series as I fitted the two patterns together in the best and most treelike way.

Tree patterns, left from the Theme and Variations series 2020, right sample from front door window 2023.

The original background tree pattern, the tops of four windows for a private house, 2018.

The coloured tree pattern is one I invented to show a woodland scene (I don’t think I stole it from anywhere) for a commission that I never got a great photo of, the one above was taken in my studio window before installing it. I then made a series of panels that were deliberately a cross between a design and a colour sample (below). Three years later I made the black and white trees pieces as samples for a front door commission where I tried out different blacks and greys as well as different methods for making the foliage patterns.

Theme and variations 2020

Some of the samples for a black and white front door commission 2023.

With my leftover pieces I made a second and opposite combination panel (below) where the coloured pieces float across the black and white sample like patches of light in a woodland scene. I’m able to chop these pieces up into complex shapes and then lead them together because it is the right type of glass - i.e. 2 to 4 mm thick whereas most of my work from the past thirty or so years has been made of glass at least 6mm thick and often toughened or laminated, as are many of my samples. These are not commissioned pieces and it’s a wonderful novelty for me not to have to get a beautifully drawn design agreed by a client before starting the making stage. The downside of this spontaneous way of working is that I don’t see mistakes (in the design) until the glass is cut, leaded and soldered so I have to pull the panel apart and change things, aiming for the sort of perfection that happens very occasionally.

The Opposite Combination 375 x 360 mm.

Bathroom Windows

This winter we’ve painted our hall spaces pinky grey, a colour that we chose to compliment the greens and oranges we had in our interiors. The hall is lit by a concealed strip light and although it looked fine as it was I thought I could add something more to the space by making a glass panel to cover it. You can see it installed with the light on and off below.

Left: All three windows with the lights on. Right: Ceiling and door window with the lights off.

The new panel had to go with the windows I’d made in 2005 for the house, two of which you can see at the same time as the new one (above left). For our own windows I’ve used intricate, geometric patterns - I see these windows as an opportunity to use favourite designs that didn’t quite fit in to the schemes I was working on at the time. The bathroom window has a pink/green/gold repeating circle which looks great from a distance (below left) and the door panels have pale blue flower/stars floating across olive green horizontal bands on an etched background. You can see how good these colours look with the lovely brown quarry tiles and red brick of the bathroom walls below.

Inside the bathroom - Left: window. Right: door.

So for the new design I plotted out a flower/star design on a hexagonal grid, thinking of the central flower as a burst of light from the centre. Each point meets another point, but the geometry is not organised into a regular pattern. I wanted the colour to change in the middle as this panel is at a meeting point with a door to the left and the right, and I also wanted it to go with the plate that greets visitors to the spare room on the left which we bought from Rob Turner (below left). As usual the colours, which are transparent fired enamels made of a mix of different pigments, aren’t exactly as I’d planned, the yellow is not quite olive enough and the pink is too dark. However the window sits very well in its place, it’s nice to look up and see a few unexpectedly twinkly stars inside the house.

Outside the bathroom - Left: light on. Right: light off.

New ceiling panel, 210 x 620 mm.

Highlights from The Stained Glass Museum

I feel lucky to have visited the stained glass museum, upstairs in Ely Cathedral, last week when such things were open. My last visit was about thirty years ago, I read that it has been revamped since then but much remains the same. The collection of fabulous stained glass panels is mounted on light boxes in the narrow triforium gallery. The contrast between the experience of viewing these here, stripped of architectural context and the stained glass in the windows of the stunning cathedral space is inevitable, but still painful. However, it’s fine if you focus on detail, and as I’ve been looking at painted faces recently that’s what I concentrated on. Here are six of the best (below).

Top left to right: Mary at the tomb, George Hedgeland 1856. St Catherine from Wood Walton, Cambridgeshire c1310-30. Virgin and Christ Child, Margaret Traherne 1956.

Bottom left to right: Head by John Richard Clayton of Clayton & Bell 1861. Crowned female head, Norfolk c.1440-60. From the legend of St. James, Rouen c.1500-50.

The other aspect of the museum I enjoyed this time around was getting close up to panels by some of the favourite makers whose work I have got to know on my stained glass travels.

Mary Lowndes: Left, The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple (detail) 1910. Right, St Peter, Christ, Mary Magdalene, St Peter’s Church, Great Cheverell, Wiltshire 1909.

It was the window in Great Cheverell, Wiltshire (above right) that made me really appreciate the artist Mary Lowndes, this east window has an incredible presence in the church. Obviously this is the very quality you don’t get from the display in the museum, but the soft painting and interplay between the figures in her Saviour in the Temple panel (above left) are wonderful to see.

I saw a Leonard Walker window in Lydd Church on the Romney marshes (below right) and loved his technique, where specially made glass full of streaks and textures does the work that painting would normally do. The example in the museum (below left) is a replica of part of a window he made for the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, Singapore. The minimal painting, on head, hands and feet, blends in beautifully with the hand made glass pieces.

Leonard Walker: Left, Commerce 1923. Right, Christ in Glory, All saints Church, Lydd 1959.

Geoffrey Clarke: Left, Priest 1949. Centre, exhibition panel. Right, Church of the Ascension, Plymouth 1958.

The museum has acquired four works by Geoffrey Clarke, all of them fascinating, pioneering and difficult to see properly in the space. Priest (above left) is made of glass pieces set in layers of painted plaster. The exhibition panel (above centre) I saw last year in the Pangolin Gallery at Masterpiece is made of cast aluminium, as are his windows in the Church of the Ascension in Plymouth (above right) which I never managed to get inside. Whenever I see a glass panel by Geoffrey Clarke it makes me want to start experimenting with materials.

There aren’t many stained glass panels around by the pop artist Pauline Boty. The first one I ever saw in an exhibition at the Pallant House in Chichester (below right) I thought was the best thing I’d ever seen at the time. Her stained glass self portrait in the NPG is wonderful, as is the Siren panel (below left) that I was thrilled to see at the museum. I read that Boty was keen to get out of the stained glass department at The Royal College of Art in order for her work to be taken more seriously. I also saw a photo of her at Wimbledon School of Art where she first learned stained glass, with her fellow students including my teacher at The Central School of Art, Tony Attenborough - I’m so pleased to have discovered this link.

Pauline Boty: Left, Siren c1958-62. Right, Untitled (dreaming woman) 1961.

Disembodied head

Purple man from ‘These People Are Intellectuals…’ Left, in progress. Right, in the exhibition at Norwich Cathedral

Purple man’s disembodied head was an unplanned addition to our exhibition at The Hostry, Norwich Cathedral. When making the stained glass panel ‘These People are Intellectuals, They Live in Houses Full of Books and Have Nothing Worth Stealing’ (described in a previous blog post) purple man ended up with two alternative heads. I did a second one (on the left in the photos above) out of the same piece of flashed streaky purple glass because I thought I’d sandblasted too much of the purple layer off on the first head. However head number one turned out to be the best one, so head number two ended up on its own stand in the display case alongside an explanation of how the window was made.

St Margaret, Stratton Strawless Left, the south aisle. Right, north window containing medieval glass.

When you start looking at old stained glass in churches you get used to seeing disembodied heads. These are pieces of medieval stained glass that have survived breakages or the releading of windows and find themselves either part of another picture or out on their own. We made a trip to the village of Stratton Strawless, just north of Norwich, to see a perfect example of fifteenth century Norwich glass painting in the angel head which has been set into a clear glass window (above and below). Miraculously the church was not locked and it is full of stupendous monuments and second hand books as well as the angel head which seems so beautifully done now that I’ve started painting heads myself.

Stratton Strawless, the C15th angel head.

Stratton Strawless, glass in the windows of the south aisle.

Set into the windows of the south aisle are a collection of other glass fragments, including the heads of a bishop, a king with a fascinating web of lead lines where he has broken and a strange head which is all beard and no hair (above right). All of the other churches we drove to were locked, so thank goodness for a visit to Castle Acre Priory. Here were windows and arches, carved patterns and lines and among them just a few carved heads (below).

Stone heads from Castle Acre Priory.

Arches

Left, Version 4, glass panel 270mm square. Right, Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery - currently closed.

I was working on a series of painted glass panels called Theme and Variations while planning our exhibition at Norwich Cathedral. It was only when I looked back at this photo of the castle (above right) that I saw the connection to the rows of arches in my series, even down to the inverted concrete arch of the horrendous glass lift exit in front of it. So I added the castellations to the top of the last in the series (above left) in the hope that a local visitor to the exhibition may notice the link.

Left, Norwich - from Castle Meadow to the Royal Arcade. Right, Stained glass inside the arcade.

Most of the buildings in Norwich I’d earmarked to visit to see the best examples of old stained glass were closed. With covid restrictions in place, the city felt like a half empty stage set so I wandered around and found interesting architectural details everywhere. The rounded arch, filled with fresh floral stained glass, made another appearance in the Royal Arcade (above).

Left, King’s Lynn - the locked doors of St Nicholas’ Chapel. Right, beside the locked doors of King’s Lynn Minster

By the time we got to King’s Lynn and found that absolutely every building that wasn’t a shop, cafe or pub was shut, we had begun to get fed up, despite the beautiful locked doors and interesting architectural features - more arches on top of arches.

An outdoor visit saved the day. Nearby are the ruins of Castle Acre Priory, a Cluniac monastery from around 1089 to its dissolution in 1537, with the most magnificent set of arches you could hope to see (below). The enormous west front has a solid base of round arches around the original west door, and a large pointed mid 15th century window inserted above. Wonderful to see the combination of the two types of arches combined in the elaborate architectural detail and to find inspiration on how to take my painted series forward.

The West Front of Castle Acre Priory, Norfolk.