Kelmscott design no. 3

3 glass sketches for the repeat design Kelmscott No. 3

Glass and print versions of the design to show how the repeat works

I've put my three wallpapers and corresponding glass panels up next to each other in an exhibition about artists' residencies. Design No 3. links Kelmscott Manor with the River Thames and its gardens with clumps of  waterside plants. I'll be tweaking all of these designs in the next few months - seeing them printed on a large scale and all together gives me a great opportunity to evaluate my work from the residency.

The three Kelmscott wallpaper designs installed together in an exhibition at New Brewery Arts

Exhibition details for "A Time And A Place" at New Brewery Arts, Cirencester 

The River Thames

My third Kelmscott repeat design features the river and has been stuck at the stage above since August, so I returned to the river Thames for some winter drawing. Does it feel melancholy because I have read William Morris' descriptions of the place so many times?

"…though it has a sadness about it which is not gloom but the melancholy born of beauty I suppose it is very stimulating to the imagination".

"…and am writing among the grey gables and rook haunted trees, with a sense of the place being almost too beautiful to work in". from WM's letters to Louisa Macdonald Baldwin in 1871 and 1872.

two of my winter drawings

The "Anarchy & Beauty" Exhibition includes May Morris' embroidery of the river. I chose this work to write about on The National Portrait Gallery blog of modern makers' responses to the exhibition.

Extract here :

This small embroidered rectangle by May Morris is the best representation of the River Thames at Kelmscott that I have seen. I love the dense overlapping stitches she used to show the plants and the flat landscape beside the water. I spent last summer drawing along the banks of the river and in Kelmscott Manor, the Morris’ country home just a stone’s throw away. The huge expressive stitches on the embroidered hangings in the Manor gave me an incredible sense of the presence of William Morris, his wife Jane and their daughters Jenny and May. I wondered whether they would have approved of what I was doing there as Artist in Residence as I found my own way of depicting the house and garden in the melancholy Oxfordshire landscape.

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.