In the Window

Left, roadside front window before. Right, kitchen window.

As you can see in the two pictures above, the windows in my friend’s new house have restricted views. At the back, the kitchen looks on to a concrete wall with tiles and objects positioned wherever they fit. At the front, there is a busy stretch of main road and a pavement close up to the low window. Although she has made it look great with her objects and stick on patterns, she wanted some pieces of my glass in front of the window to block the traffic in a more colourful way.

This was after seeing the rows of random samples I always have in my studio window, slotted into wooden grooves fitted across the window frames. At the moment (below right) I have my most recent samples, some colour test strips and a few samples that stay every time I have a reshuffle so I suppose they must be my favourites. I’ve used grooved wood for shelves in the window since I was a student at the Royal College of Art (years ago, picture below left), with a great view of the Albert Hall and a changing display of the pieces I was painting on top of a backlit piece of glass.

Left, my window at The Royal College of Art in 1985. Right, my studio window this week (2019).

Left, roadside window after. Right, colours through the glass.

Choosing glass offcuts or old samples, cutting them up and arranging them in a row is like making a fragment-style stained glass window. That is, anything looks OK but there is an art to the ordering and cropping. These pieces are big at 400 mm tall, and from many different periods so I did a bit of work to unite them with two rows of circles sandblasted out and filled with green enamel. It means that you can still play around with the order and orientation of the pieces. The best part, as always, was seeing the colours projected through the glass on to the carpet in the afternoon sun (above right).

Detail of three panels, originally samples for The Centre Livingston, private house & Manchester Children’s Hospital.

2000 windows

On local church crawling trips (which I really prefer to do without a guidebook) you mainly see stained glass windows made either in the nineteenth century or the year 2000. On my last trip across the Wiltshire border and into Berkshire, there were two classic examples of these millenium windows.

Inside St Mary, Kintbury, millenium window by Di Gold to the left of the altar

The first is in St Mary Kintbury, a church that is clean and bright and was open on both my visits. The millenium window (above), by an artist I don’t know, is tucked to the left of the altar and partly obscured by something directly behind it in the churchyard. In terms of stained glass, I would call its style naive, with thin paintwork and deliberately wobbly lead lines. You can see what I mean when you compare the figure in it of The Good Woman to the figure of St Peter in a truly accomplished window in the same church by Heaton, Butler & Bayne (below).

(Amusing) comparison of St Peter (H,B&B 1862) & The Good Woman (2000)

In the church are three windows by H,B&B, this one to the right of the entrance door is my favourite. The colour is luminous even through the extensive paintwork, with lovely detail in the sky, water and clothes - there are even drops and stains from the water on St Peter’s robes (click on image below to enlarge).

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St Mary, Kintbury with window showing Jesus walking on the water by Heaton, Butler and Bayne (1862)

Inside St Mary’s Hamstead Marshall. Window by Mark Angus (2000) in the nave to the left of the altar.

The second church is in a beautiful spot outside the village of Hamstead Marshall and open on two out of three recent visits. It’s a simple, lovely brick building with a shock of a millenium window at the east end of the nave. This one, again partly obscured by stuff growing outside, is by the instantly identifiable artist Mark Angus. All of the glass is bright, the colour combination is similar to the bottom of my favourite H,B&B window (see below) but unrelieved by any neutral or pale colours. There is some painting and also some screen printing in his literal depiction of the pair of columns that are in the field next to the church.

Left, screen printed detail on column by Mark Angus (what looks white in the photo is really bright yellow). Right, the robes of Jesus by H,B&B.

In the Mark Angus window a bright red X literally marks the spot where Hamstead Marshall sits on a map of the local area. I would call the style of this millenium window typical of the late twentieth century, with disconnected angular lead lines, graphic details and emphatic geometry. Although shocking and incongruous in the church’s interior, I don’t want to be too hard on the composition which is at least bold and may, of course, come back into fashion.

Left, one of several pairs of columns in the adjacent field. Right, another literal Mark Angus detail.

Cobbles

The picture above shows the lawn outside my studio after an episode of sun burn. I’ve done it before when leaving mirrors outside to dry after cleaning them. This time it was a load of dalle de verre - slabs of thick glass that concentrated the sun’s midsummer rays on to the grass before I had time to pick them up and polish them. Lots of people think it’s an art form.

The pattern has been there for three weeks and I have been looking at it in combination with the crazy paving cobbles of the adjacent terrace, which I know well as I made a glass panel in 2007 that faithfully copied the contours of the stones. I loved making this, switching my brain off while I copied rather than invented a pattern, but as you may know I am always suspicious that the work won’t be any good if I’m enjoying myself too much.

I was disappointed in the panel when I got it out to look at again, apart from the success of the colour combination which resulted in a thin yellow outline to each stone (see detail below - can’t remember how I did that!) and the delicate scalpel cutting in neat facets rather than curves.

Yate Library 2009: detail from glass panel and sample in my studio window.

I have continued with this garden/cobbled theme in lots of commissioned work ever since. Above is a detail and a sample of one of four panels for Yate Library that I made in 2009. Here the random shapes are derived from the stones on the wall of an ancient barn with an anemone cutting across the sandblasted lines.

Things got more complicated a couple of years later when I had a commission for a health facility in Dorchester (see details below). Here the plants are marigolds drawn in a schematic way under the cobbles and in a graphic style on top of them. The patterns in this design came from chicken wire (obviously) and a marbled endpaper for the green lines.

Maiden Castle Road, Dorchester: details from two glass panels.

Although I really like both of those commissions, they weren’t in my head this month as I drew out a new commission for a building in Thornbury, South Gloucestershire (see design below). Here I disguised some flowers and leaves amongst the cobbles in the manner of an oriental carpet. I’ve concluded that a design of cobbles alone is just too boring. It doesn’t provide the links with nature that is a traditional part of ornamentation for architecture, so here branches cut across the cobbles with flower heads that are pale blue and shaped like clouds.

Design for glass panels for Alexandra Court, Thornbury July 2019.

Blood and Tears

Inside Blessed Robert Griswold Church: 2 existing windows, artist unknown. Photomontage showing my design

Blessed Robert Grissold Catholic Church is a brick and wood building in Balsall Common, built in 1994. The church has two painted glass windows already and are now commissioning me (fingers crossed) to make a third. Although you can’t see all three windows at the same time, I wanted to make a link to these two (above left) in my design which is on the theme of the eucharist and is in a straight forward sort of style. I sent off my initial sketch designs with the usual trepidation and received a great reply from the priest that included the sentences quoted below.

“Some of the abstract patterns reminded me of the decoration on the walls of the 17th century chapels at Baddesley Clinton and Harvington. Considering Blessed Roberts association with the recusants I wonder if Sasha could incorporate into her design a deliberate echo of this religious art”

I spend a lot of time looking at religious art (in churches) and a lot of effort trying to keep the influences out of my own work. This is particularly the case when I am working on a hospital commission as I have often been told that my work appealed to the commissioners because it isn’t traditional and therefore it doesn’t have associations with churches and by extension with death. So for a change, I was delighted to be able to pick up on some shapes, drops of blood and tears, and use them in a way that doesn’t disguise their meaning.

4 development sketches: Initial design with shapes: Final design with blood and tears following the feedback.

Inside the small chapel at Harvington Hall, Worcestershire

Drops of blood and tears of the passion painted on the walls of the small chapel in the sixteenth century.

Both Baddesley Clinton and Harvington Hall are moated manor houses in the West Midlands with hidden priest holes and rooms formerly used as private chapels. The walls of Harvington Hall are covered with paintings from the 16th and 17th centuries preserved in good condition after being whitewashed for over a hundred years. The small chapel is covered in a schematic pattern of the shapes that were unknowingly in my first designs - some folds of cloth at the top, then alternating lines with drops of blood and tears of the passion. As my design is in a straight forward style, I copied them and kept them in colour lines which radiate out from a white circular host and chalice. In the glass, the white (sandblasted and clear) areas will really stand out against the colours of the fired enamel, seen in the samples I made below.

Full size glass samples showing part of the chalice and drops of blood and tears.

The Appreciation of Stained Glass

On a beautiful day in Dorset, here I am in front of a cricket pitch on my way into Milton Abbey to appreciate some stained glass. Once inside, the abbey opens into a magnificent tall transept. On the north side is a monument to the Damers underneath a heraldic window bordered by roses and on the south side a huge tree of Jesse window designed by AWN Pugin and made by Hardmans, in typically vivid colours.

Left, south transept window above monument to Joseph & Caroline Damer. Right, Tree of Jesse window by Pugin, 1847.

However, I was not in Milton Abbas for the abbey but rather to see a Lawrence Lee window in St James Church in the famous landscaped village street. I’ve never knowingly seen a Lee window, but he wrote a book “The Appreciation of Stained Glass” which was one in the series on the appreciation of the arts published by the Oxford University Press. That was in 1977, the year that I went to the Central School of Art to do my Foundation Course and to learn how to make stained glass properly - in preparation I read Lee’s book thoroughly. Re reading it now I can see where I picked up many of my stained glass dos and don’ts based on the study of church windows - in particular lots of don’ts and harsh opinions on celebrated twentieth century windows.

Left, in front of the 1970 Lee window (I usually need a chair for taking photos). Right, the top of the window

I particularly like his chapter on (glass) painting which is one of the few to show an example of his own work, a distinctive head of St. Columba. Just from those few images I would have recognised these figures anywhere, and I’ve concluded that it’s his figures I particularly like, when usually it’s the figures in a window that I hate. These, St Catherine and the Virgin Mary shown below, remind me of inky black and white book illustration of the same period. Here is a passage from the painting chapter that is good to bear in mind when on these church visiting trips :

“The argument will always go on between those who make and those who talk about what is made - and it is very useful to both parties that it should be so. I believe, however, that in the context of this Appreciation of the Arts Series we ought to instruct ourselves to look, filtering out as far as possible any purely mental questions about dates, styles, authenticities and so on (all that is fun afterwards), so that appreciation becomes an impulsion of our physical self toward’s the artists work. We must literally pick up from the very point at which the glass painter’s brush left the glass, seeing what he saw as he laid it aside for firing.”

Lawrence Lee details - left, St Catherine and right, The Virgin and child.

Tom Denny window, St Mary, Tarrant Hinton 2000

Our route home went through Tarrant Hinton, so we made a stop to see a Tom Denny window. I have seen so much of his work recently that it’s beginning to grow on me - the leading patterns so particular that you can spot one in a church even when driving past. The presence of this small window, on a Dorset landscape theme, is huge with an overall golden glow. Here are some wise words from Denny:

“Colour is the most immediate thing about glass; most of your problems are solved if the colour is right for the place. Although I don’t aim to make glass look as if it were made hundreds of years ago, a happy by-product of the way I work - etching, plating and staining - not only enriches the surface, but creates a visual fragility equivalent to old glass.” From an interview with Tom Denny in Contemporary Stained Glass Artists by Kate Baden Fuller, A & C Black 2006.

I forgot to take the outside of the Tarrant Hinton window, so I’ve shown one in Leicester (below) from inside and out. You can see the irregular look of the lead pattern, and also the way that he draws his figures (animals in the Dorset window) as if they are knitted in to the backgrounds. That part of his work hasn’t grown on me yet, perhaps it’s the hardest thing to do well.

One of two Tom Denny 2016 windows in Leicester Cathedral from the inside and the outside.