Victorian Medieval / September 15, 2016 by Sasha Ward

Rosalind Grimshaw window in Urchfont church, 2000.

I visited St. Michael and All Angels church in Urchfont because my excellent guidebook from Wiltshire Historic Churches Trust mentioned a millennium window there by Rosalind Grimshaw. It's a small window but really expressive with good colour and glass. The whole church is lovely and its stained glass rich and varied. The patterned windows on the south side look great from both inside and out - with columns of big satisfying circles - until you think what wonderful medieval glass might have been there originally.

Victorian patterned windows on the south side

This set us thinking about how to answer the question (of the frequently asked variety), why is medieval stained glass the best? It's too dangerous to mention the quality of the glass itself, because that leads people to believe the myth that you can't get good glass anymore, although when you look at the angel detail from the large south window you can see how harsh and brittle looking the coloured glass is in these particular Victorian windows.

Moving down into the chancel, the angels at the tops of the windows become more interesting, and older. The pair on either side of the altar (below), six winged seraphim holding crowns, are beautiful - with a captivating expression that is so obviously medieval.

The information in the church describes, as usual, the stained glass as either "medieval", "victorian" or "modern", with the sub group of "imitation medieval" for the beautifully coloured patterned windows underneath the seraphim (below right). This convention of copying the medieval window style is the reason why they could never be as good as the originals. Those seraphim were made by people who believed in the work they were doing. The sincerity comes across in the expression of the figures, while the style and workmanship of the windows perfectly compliments the medieval building for which they were made.

Face of the seraph: window on north side of chancel - chancel built around 1340

Click on any of the photos to enlarge them

Improving The Local Landscape / August 20, 2016 by Sasha Ward

It's Saturday so the noise from the building sites in this small English country town has stopped. The crane at the end of the drive is parked with a lovely row of blocks dangling in mid air. What is being built may not improve the local landscape, but while the cranes are here I find this landscape more interesting, more drawable. I found the same type of crane in my photos of Swindon this week - can you find a view without a crane in it these days?

View from the top storey of a Swindon car park

The question sent me to my sketch books, I wondered where I'd drawn cranes from previously.

Answers: from a Malmö balcony in 2013 (above), from floor 7, RCA London (one example from 1984 below), and from a school rooftop in Slough - my favourite type of drawing spot.

Wreay Church, Cumbria / August 4, 2016 by Sasha Ward

I was amazed at some photos of stained glass in Jenny Uglow's book "The Pinecone" which tells the story of Sarah Losh, "forgotten Romantic heroine - antiquarian, architect and visionary". The church she built and decorated in the 1840s is St. Mary's, Wreay, five miles south of Carlisle, a trip worth taking if you want to see something original. It's a small Romanesque building covered inside and out with carvings in stone, wood and alabaster and filled with stained glass all using as subject matter forms from the natural world.

The stained glass that struck me on the pages of the book were examples from a series of windows where the usual type of patchwork/mosaic painted and coloured fragments are combined with circular flower head motifs. I love the way the two styles are shoved together and the way that the bold, irregular flower heads fit into the arched windows high up in the walls on every side of the building. They look so incredibly "modern".

Red, white and blue - three of the small arched windows taken from different parts of the church.

The larger windows in the church, although very beautiful too, are of the standard patchwork type. They were an early commission for William Wailes of Newcastle, whereas the clerestory windows were made by a local firm, Geoffrey Rowell of Carlisle. Even more unusual are the windows that alternate with the clerestory flower heads, impossible to work out how they were made until you look at them from the outside. The solid is carved alabaster, the colour is a collage of glass fragments - like black card with tissue paper.

South west corner, group of three windows from the inside and the outside.

South side, group of three windows from the inside and the outside.

Looking west, 3 patchwork style windows and above alternating glass & alabaster windows following the gable line. View from inside and outside, note the carving of pine cones and animals around the larger window.

On the east wall of the nave, above, you can see some of the incredible carvings that Sarah designed and commissioned. The pulpit (bottom right in photo) of a stump and palm tree from bog oak, is particularly great as is the row of angels and trees above the arch. Some of the alabaster, for example the lotus flower candlesticks on the alter, was carved by Sarah herself, the other carvings were done by local crafts people.

The apse is really beautiful, with orange painted walls and globes of amber glass set into niches. My favourite section, shown below, combines a curved painted wall with pierced alabaster windows depicting fossils found in Cumbrian coal mines. It's a wonderful combination of complex wall drawing with a simple pattern of light and shadow in elegant elongated arches around the top of the semi circle and under a lovely wooden ceiling.

Ceiling Shapes / July 25, 2016 by Sasha Ward

Galatina, Puglia, Southern Italy: above, my drawing station on the roof top, below the view I was drawing one hot evening in mid July. The roofs surrounding me across the narrow streets in this historic part of town were full of fascination - lumps, bumps and enclosures to surmount or section off the shapes made by the vaulted ceilings inside the buildings.

sketchbook page, view from drawing station

sketchbook page, standing up to draw the enclosed lump on the roof of the building opposite

Left, sitting room ceiling: Centre and right, ground floor ceilings.

Inside the house all the rooms had vaulted ceilings, the seams from the corner points not quite joining but forming a circle for a hanging lamp. The one in the sitting room had traces of painting, the unrestored ground floor ceilings were criss-crossed with unexplained wires and bare bulbs, emphasising their stellar shape.

On our journey we stayed at Castello di Semivicoli an incredible castle with the guest bedrooms squeezed in to the spaces on the second floor left by the vaulted ceiling bumps. In the huge first floor rooms the vaulted ceilings are decorated in a different way each time, with subtle paint colours and shaped mouldings. I particularly love the wonky geometry as the central medallion shapes are drawn on to the irregular contours of the ceilings that rise to a flatish plane, suitable for chandelier hanging.

Circle, octagon and cloud on the ceilings of Castello di Semivicoli.

Enclosures / July 4, 2016 by Sasha Ward

Holy City  St. George's, Hanover Square, London:  Old Town my panel from 1985:  Kelmscott Design No. 1  from 2014 — *Holy City* St. George's, Hanover Square, London: *Old Town* my panel from 1985: *Kelmscott Design No. 1* from 2014

Enclosures have turned out to be a major subject matter for me. I am drawn to walled cities, or really representations of walled cities, like the stained glass one I photographed recently (see last blog entry). I found a small glass panel called "Old Town" that I made in 1985 and a glass painting based on Kelmscott Manor in its walls garden from two years ago - these three images, lined up above, have obvious links.

On my last visit to The National Gallery I was captivated by a large Velasquez painting, an enclosure but just of a piece of ground, no buildings. I realised that it was the actual enclosure that interests me, not only the way that it organises a picture but also what meanings it could have.

"Philip IV Hunting Wild Boar" 1632-7 Diego Velasquez

In my current work, I have been designing a long thin window which happens to have a series of linked enclosures. I like them to have open points so you can get in and out. I also like them to have straight sides - an oval or a circle makes you feel trapped like the wild boars above. The enclosures in this design are bordered by flower beds rather than walls. They started by containing a string of plums, this went as the design progressed but came back again in the final glass panel.

Garden Plums, sketches showing development of the design — *Garden Plums,* sketches showing development of the design

Finished window in my studio, 300 x 1300 mm.

Garden Plums detail: gold and pale green enamel, the textures and colours look great. — *Garden Plums* detail: gold and pale green enamel, the textures and colours look great.

The window is on its way to Poland, the third one for the house of my friend & glass artist Frances Federer. Read her entertaining, informative blog about her journeys between England & Poland here