Many Sided Shapes

Exterior and interior of the first floor, Ariana Museum, Geneva.

Ariana Museum, Geneva, was built by Gustave Revilliod in the late nineteenth century to house his art collection and named after his mother. Now it is a museum of ceramics and glass with an exhibition "Harmony in Glass" by the British artist Anna Dickinson with whom I studied at The Royal College of Art in the 1980s. The building's neo-classical/baroque curves, quite different on the inside and the outside, and the glimpses of some complicated high level stained glass through the first floor windows started me thinking about shapes even before seeing Anna's fantastic retrospective. 

Left: A quarter of Anna Dickinson's exhibition "Harmony in Glass" on until 1st November.   Right: Cast Yellow Vessel with a Hendecagon Steel Liner 2010   

I am keen on counting, and have had discussions with Anna before about how many sides we like our shapes to have. In Anna's work, there is often a shape that makes a tessellating pattern over the surface of the glass vessel which may have a circular metal liner. In the yellow piece shown above, the reverse is true as the eleven sided shape is on the inside. The odd numbered shapes are the ones that interested me, sometimes they are more difficult to photograph, looking odd in both senses of the word.

So here is the number count in this exhibition:  

3 sides - 1 : 7 sides - 1 : 8 sides : 2 : 9 sides - 1 : 10 sides - 3 : 11 sides - 2 : 15 sides -1.  All the others are either circular or have facets that are too numerous to count in the round, reminding me how much more complicated the geometry is for an artist who works with three dimensions.

Clear Frit Vessel (9 sides) 2014                  Green Triangles (10 sides) 2014                                Green Twist (3 sides) 2011

The museum also has a great display of medieval stained glass, including the rose window, below left, number count as follows: outer window - 8 : main circle - 12 : centre - 4.

I wanted to contrast that versatile dodecagon with my own round glass commission for Dewsbury Health Centre, below right. As this is a hanging piece, there were no geometrical constraints based on glazing bars. The inner shape has 6 sides, the outer shape is flying out of the circle and has a piece taken out of it but it would have 7 sides.

Wall of medieval glass in Ariana Museum                             Hanging panel, Dewsbury Health Centre, 2006

The Return of Some Favourite Themes

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The Great Hall, Manchester Town Hall - between weddings - with 4 of 12 murals painted by Ford Madox Brown between 1879 & 1893. Click on all images to enlarge.

Since I discovered that I have in my bedroom a chair "possibly designed by FMB", see previous blog entry, I have been very keen on Ford Madox Brown. On my recent trip to Manchester I managed - between weddings - to get in to the Great Hall of Manchester Town Hall to see the murals that he painted there towards the end of his life. However, as I approached the hall via one of the magnificent staircases, I was so absorbed by others aspects of the building's interior decoration that I couldn't concentrate on the paintings.

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Great Hall Foyer, photo by Michael D. Beckwith.  Block of 6 stained glass panels. 

The first thing was the roof, simply glazed to my great delight with "brown and yellow windows", see another previous blog entry, of my favourite type, with no lead just brown paint and silver stain. The inscription on the glass reads "THE MAYORS MANCHESTER FROM THE YEAR OF INCORPORATION TO THE OPENING OF THE BUILDING " with names and dates from 1838 to 2003, well after the opening of the building. The lettering changes over the years but the cotton plant does not.

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Staircase windows

Then there are the windows. They admit a beautiful quality of light to the interior of the building, including the Great Hall itself, where there is a complete set of delicately coloured stained glass windows. Here I found a favourite motif, see yet another previous blog entry, the wonderfully decorative horse chestnut leaf.

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Details from the 3 window types in The Great Hall (in my order of preference).

Wandering around the corridors and into the public rooms on the first floor I came across mosaic floors, painted walls, textiles, carvings and patterned ceilings. The work was carried out by at least three different firms but all, including the lettering, said to have been designed by the architect of The Town Hall, Alfred Waterhouse.

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In the south vestibule, horse chestnut motif around the door frame and original patterned ceiling.

Ron Jones House (part two)

Since exhibiting my window and wallpaper designs together earlier in the year, I have wanted to work on a project where I could decorate all the surfaces of a room. The IT room/lounge at Ron Jones House in Bristol turned out to be that project.

Linoleum Striato - Water Colour                                                                                    Left hand side of the room

This slightly daring linoleum, "Water Colour" , found its perfect home as the centre piece for the new room. The colour is light but also rich, invigorating and in tune with our colour range. I used its streaks as the background for my wallpaper designs, and didn't mind that once it arrived in the middle of my room layout (below) the original floor design - suitably altered - was banished to the left hand half of the ceiling.

Net for my final model of the room

Before and After, left hand side

The IT room/lounge was two rooms that have become one, so part of my task was to link the two halves while giving each its own feel. The left hand side is the IT side, and although the new wall colour is neutral the glow from the ceiling blues the colour in that half. In the right hand side, the wallpaper wraps around the seating area with the richest gold colour continuing along the wall behind the new sofa and across to the open door. 

Before and After, right hand side

The development of the design from my original repeating three colour motif to the version used on the windows and walls here was mostly achieved by stripping parts of the pattern away and allowing other parts to float around. I also wanted to make my original inspiration (from the plant in the sunlight) more visible, so I added fine lines as radiating suns, stars on the ceiling and vertical plants on the walls and window vinyls.

Details from the right hand side - window and wall designs.

Ron Jones House (part one)

I have just completed my project for Ron Jones House, a property run by Elim Housing to provide supported accommodation for adults in Stokes Croft, Bristol. Working with staff and residents we have transformed the communal lounge/IT room with colour and pattern on the floor, walls, windows and ceiling. Part Two will describe the general scheme, this post is about the pattern I designed for use across all the different materials in the room.

I wanted to design a repeating motif simplified from aspects of the place that I particularly liked - sunlight catching a plant in one of the nice old windows and a circles with stripes pattern on the gates (both shown above).

How the pattern developed - linking windows circles, sunlight & leaves in different formations.

Detail of the final design showing one repeat                     Floor design, to be laid in the centre of the room with a wide border

The existing carpet was particularly grotty, so the plan was to replace it with a patterned floor cut from 3 colours of linoleum laid in the centre of the room with the design growing in density towards the two windows. However, budgetary constraints intervened and in the end the new floor was laid with a simple but lovely linoleum and my pattern moved to the ceiling, walls and windows. You can see the layout of the room and the options we considered in the photo of just some of the models I made of the space below.

It was only when I printed the pattern out full size and placed it on the floor that I remembered what my initial inspiration must have been and dug out my photos from last year's trip to Ostia, the harbour city of Ancient Rome, and to Hadrian's Villa nearby. At both sites current excavations are revealing more buildings, many with black and white mosaic floors based on circles.  Some of the most lovely patterns are the simple ones revealed in patches through concrete or grass.

Roman mosaics from Hadrian's Villa, Tivoli and Ostia Antica

The Four Marys

The Mary Window, St Martin-on-the-Hill, Scarborough 1868

I have seen three Morris & Co. windows recently that use the same Burne-Jones cartoon for the figure of the Virgin Mary, in the centre above, and I've written about two other versions, below, in previous posts. This post is called "The Four Marys" in honour of the strip cartoon from "Bunty" magazine and for the other Marys alongside the Virgin Mary:  Mary of Bethany at Scarborough, Mary of Cleopas at Sopworth and Mary Magdalene in both churches. However, I find that I am not particularly interested in the iconography, or the stories that the guidebooks to the churches tell about the artists, possible models and local patrons involved. What I look at is the way that the figures have been inserted into the window shapes and how they contrast with the backgrounds used in each case: richly coloured and geometric at Scarborough, small figures in quite a basic scheme at Beaudesert, popping out of the lancets but with a more sophisticated organisation of the background at Sopworth.

The Mary Window, Sopworth, Wiltshire 1873                                                                  Saints Mary and Michael, Beaudesert 1865

Below, in ascending order of preference, are three shuffled Virgin Marys. What a difference the colour contrasts and patterns used for furnishings and fabrics make to the very same figure whose clothes and lily can be made to join perfectly. The dark iron oxide paint on the later version has lasted much better than the paint recipe that the firm used in its early years.