White Windows

Signatures panel in progress                                                    Two screens by Louis Barillet

When I was making the signatures panel border, made of recycled white glass, a visitor mentioned the work of Louis Barillet from the 1930s. When I saw his screens I could see the link. Now I am finding windows made of different types of textured white and clear glass everywhere.

National Portrait Gallery entrance                  Tate Britain : original window & detail from the new panel by Richard Wright (2013)

There is a row of four white windows in the entrance of the National Portrait Gallery, and many examples of the genre in the newly refurbished Millbank Entrance of Tate Britain. When the building opened in 1898 there were two of these clear decorative windows, one was subsequently removed and a new leaded window by Richard Wright has been commissioned in its place. This window has the simplicity that I have noticed in so many stained glass windows designed by artists - from Henri Matisse to Gerhard Richter. I am reminded of the comments I got at college when I made my stained glass pictures; "the material is so beautiful you should let it speak for itself". I always wanted to do some of the speaking myself - the windows I really love bring a bit more personality into the buildings they inhabit.

Windows on the stairs to the members' room: windows inside the room with many textures and a wide bevel on the larger panes.

Return to Kelmscott

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The Thames at Kelmscott, click on the photos to enlarge them

I knew that Kelmscott would be even more beautiful in winter, and in the afternoon sunlight yesterday I took enough photographs to do a blog entry twice this length. 

The staff loo : from outside above, from inside below.

I've never thought it would be appropriate to install any of my work in the fabric of Kelmscott Manor, but I wanted to leave some pieces behind as "visitors" to the house. The signatures panel fitted in the staff loo with its fixings hardly visible.  We removed the curtain to reveal a view of the River Thames - if you peer through the transparent parts - and coloured light flooded on to the opposite wall.

The panels that 18 Kelmscott volunteers & 1 staff member helped make on a day of workshops in October happened to fit in the kitchen windows. They slide between the leaded casements and the steel window supports in a way that is so effortless I couldn't have planned it. Here, the colours are so bright that their reflection glows even on the dark tiles and work surface.

In the staff kitchen

Painted glass

Baddesley Clinton, a moated manor house in Warwickshire, contains examples of stained glass that demonstrate my two favourite aspects of the medium - enamel painting and pattern making. The collection of heraldic shields in the house and the church nearby date from the sixteenth to the twentieth century.

The Jervais Glass, displayed in an upstairs window at Baddesley Clinton and before conservation by Chapel Studio. (One of the displays calls it "conservation", the other "restoration" so I've used both terms here).

This late 18th century painted glass panel is by Thomas Jervais who also painted the Joshua Reynolds windows at New College, Oxford. These windows were usually the examples chosen in the books I read as a student to illustrate why enamel painting ruined the medium of stained glass until the Arts and Crafts movement rescued it. I love this style of glass painting, light but opaque, but I can see that in combination with lead it is unsatisfactory. The Baddesley Clinton panel has been very skilfully restored, but it is fun to see how it looked before the recent restoration with the breaks leaded.

As regards the heraldic glass, I am interested not in the iconography but in the painting and etching techniques used, and in the same lead effect. Leads inserted where glass pieces have broken follow effortless lines that remind you of what the glass would like to do if we didn't torture it into regular shapes. 

The oldest shield in the house and one from St. Michael's Church nearby.

Where socialism meets stained glass

People's History Museum display, including illustrations by Walter Crane and his self portrait.

In the People's History Museum, Manchester, the story of working people in Britain is told through displays of cartoons, photographs, documents, banners and even stained glass. The section that includes William Morris and Walter Crane is shown above, on top of a photograph of Clarion van 3. The Clarion Vans spread the socialist word, touring from 1896 -1929. Van 3, made in time for a large Clarion gathering in Shrewsbury in 1914, was named after William Morris, to a drawing by Walter Crane that includes a stained glass sign and decorative panels between the windows. Photographs of the equally attractive Vans Nos. 1 and 2 below.

WM at Silbury Hill

A year ago today we went on a drawing trip to Silbury Hill. My drawings were intended to start a series about places local to me. I haven't done anything with these drawings yet, but am looking at them afresh in the light of William Morris' letter to his sister Emma in April 1849 (WM aged 15). The muddy path he took from Avebury is the one I was on for drawings I & II below.

'On Monday I went to Silbury Hill which I think I have told you before is an artificial hill made by the Britons ….. we went through a mud lane down one or two fields and last but not least through what they call here a water meadow up to our knees in water, now perhaps you do not know what a water meadow is as there are none of them in your part of the world, so for your edification I will tell you what a delectable affair a water meadow is to go through; in the first place you must fancy a field cut through with an infinity of small streams say about four feet wide each the people to whom the meadow belongs can turn these streams on and off when they like and at this time of the year they are on just before they put the fields up for mowing the grass being very long you cannot see the water till you are in the water and floundering in it except you are above the field luckily the water had not been long when we went through it else we should have been up to our middles in mud, however perhaps now you can imagine a water meadow : after we had scrambled through this meadow we ascended Silbury Hill it is not very high but yet I should think it must have taken an immense long time to have got it together .

Looking across Silbury Hill towards Avebury (showing the water meadow and the muddy path) by Ray Ward

Ray worked his drawings into a series of illustrations for Adam Thorpe's book On Silbury Hill, published in July by Little Toller Books.