Kelmscott Design No. 2

This design shows the rooves of Kelmscott Manor from the south, where the huge vine grows. I have included the background stripes that I see in the Oxfordshire landscape, especially now when the low sun shines through rows of trees. I wanted the design block to rotate 180˚, so it could be used for a tape : above is the design for packing tape now in production: below is my installation in the brewhouse window of the wallpaper version of the design with a central section taken out for the corresponding glass panel. I was delighted that the lines joined up and that the white ground on the paper and glass did not make the room too dark.

Brewhouse window from the outside at dusk, lights on, looks intriguing.

William Morris' bed curtains

The bed: My drawing of a caterpillar embroidered on the bedcover: One of the curtains.

I have been skirting around WM's imposing bed with the beautiful curtains and cover, placed provocatively between my favourite DGR drawing and Jane's embroidered version of it (see my earlier blog post). I have also admired the embroidered details on the cover by May and Jane of the river and of local flora and fauna in an observational style.

The design of the curtains is linked to WM's trellis wallpaper, but their style has always reminded me of the 17th century crewel work curtains by Abigail Pett in the V&A Museum. In a time when most of our art book illustrations were in black & white, I used to go to the V&A for children's Saturday sessions. I have never forgotten the name of Abigail Pett - a rare non anonymous woman. I have also continued to find inspiration in textiles, carpets, printed sources and all manner of decorative arts, as William Morris did. My first glass commission for a public building (Lansdowne Hospital in Cardiff, still in the black & white era), shows the same influences I think - the birds were drawn from my stamp collection.

Above: Abigail Pett's curtains in the V&A. Below left: A favourite book. Below right: My first public commission.

Airbrushing

The glass version of Kelmscott Design Number Two has taken a long time to finish, but here it is in my studio in Marlborough. Top left: first enamel layer before firing. Top right: completed and laid out on a tracing of the wallpaper version. Below: backlit and ready to be fired. This design is also a repeat, it's an irregular quadrilateral that rotates.

My renewed interest in airbrushing - and possibly also in the brown and yellow combination mentioned previously - comes from last year's project for Airbus in Bristol. This was the restoration of a magnificent window made in 1936 by Jan Juta for the headquarters of The Bristol Airplane Company. Working with Creative Glass in Bristol, we remade seven broken panels, including the huge one with the propellor and the one with the compass, both shown below. The blocks of colour and the thin strips of clear and etched glass in combination with small areas of airbrushed detail have crept into my new work subconsciously.

The chestnut tree

The southern boundary of Kelmscott Manor is bounded by water, the Radcot Cut, not the River Thames as some visitors presume - see map above to clear up any confusion. The Cut provides a lot of excitement; in April a champagne bottle was dredged from the mud and dated to the 1860s-70s, and in August a huge horse chestnut tree fell with a crash in to the water.

Now the living half of the tree is flowering in the water and circled by the rooks who live in it, the dead part will be taken away soon. The view through the chestnut trees to the field, the river and the woods beyond is a favourite spot and has been reminding me of a stained glass panel by Kerr-Xavier Roussel, below right. This is from a series of 13 panels designed by French artists and made by Louis Comfort Tiffany; Vuillard's design also featured chestnut trees but his stained glass panel is now lost.

Left: one of my drawings from the cut. Right: Garden by Roussel, 1894.

Peepholes

Temporarily installed in the small window in the Brewhouse is a wallpaper and glass version of my Kelmscott design 1 (above). You can see how this links to my playhouse project below: a  house in the courtyard before decoration, and a view of the interior with block printed paper and acetate windows (below). The houses are supposed to look rough on the outside and full of pattern and colour when you are inside.

Although the point of my residency is not to have fun, the playhouses are the fun part. I have spent some time rearranging the window panels to get some sense of order, we need more striped designs as these work best with the wallpaper strips. Kizzy Jones (below left) sensibly brought her sketchbook full of designs to work from and her friend Eden Oakley-Shaw (below right) did the gorgeous window on the far right below. Incidentally not all these works are by children.