Highlights from The Stained Glass Museum

I feel lucky to have visited the stained glass museum, upstairs in Ely Cathedral, last week when such things were open. My last visit was about thirty years ago, I read that it has been revamped since then but much remains the same. The collection of fabulous stained glass panels is mounted on light boxes in the narrow triforium gallery. The contrast between the experience of viewing these here, stripped of architectural context and the stained glass in the windows of the stunning cathedral space is inevitable, but still painful. However, it’s fine if you focus on detail, and as I’ve been looking at painted faces recently that’s what I concentrated on. Here are six of the best (below).

Top left to right: Mary at the tomb, George Hedgeland 1856. St Catherine from Wood Walton, Cambridgeshire c1310-30. Virgin and Christ Child, Margaret Traherne 1956.

Bottom left to right: Head by John Richard Clayton of Clayton & Bell 1861. Crowned female head, Norfolk c.1440-60. From the legend of St. James, Rouen c.1500-50.

The other aspect of the museum I enjoyed this time around was getting close up to panels by some of the favourite makers whose work I have got to know on my stained glass travels.

Mary Lowndes: Left, The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple (detail) 1910. Right, St Peter, Christ, Mary Magdalene, St Peter’s Church, Great Cheverell, Wiltshire 1909.

It was the window in Great Cheverell, Wiltshire (above right) that made me really appreciate the artist Mary Lowndes, this east window has an incredible presence in the church. Obviously this is the very quality you don’t get from the display in the museum, but the soft painting and interplay between the figures in her Saviour in the Temple panel (above left) are wonderful to see.

I saw a Leonard Walker window in Lydd Church on the Romney marshes (below right) and loved his technique, where specially made glass full of streaks and textures does the work that painting would normally do. The example in the museum (below left) is a replica of part of a window he made for the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, Singapore. The minimal painting, on head, hands and feet, blends in beautifully with the hand made glass pieces.

Leonard Walker: Left, Commerce 1923. Right, Christ in Glory, All saints Church, Lydd 1959.

Geoffrey Clarke: Left, Priest 1949. Centre, exhibition panel. Right, Church of the Ascension, Plymouth 1958.

The museum has acquired four works by Geoffrey Clarke, all of them fascinating, pioneering and difficult to see properly in the space. Priest (above left) is made of glass pieces set in layers of painted plaster. The exhibition panel (above centre) I saw last year in the Pangolin Gallery at Masterpiece is made of cast aluminium, as are his windows in the Church of the Ascension in Plymouth (above right) which I never managed to get inside. Whenever I see a glass panel by Geoffrey Clarke it makes me want to start experimenting with materials.

There aren’t many stained glass panels around by the pop artist Pauline Boty. The first one I ever saw in an exhibition at the Pallant House in Chichester (below right) I thought was the best thing I’d ever seen at the time. Her stained glass self portrait in the NPG is wonderful, as is the Siren panel (below left) that I was thrilled to see at the museum. I read that Boty was keen to get out of the stained glass department at The Royal College of Art in order for her work to be taken more seriously. I also saw a photo of her at Wimbledon School of Art where she first learned stained glass, with her fellow students including my teacher at The Central School of Art, Tony Attenborough - I’m so pleased to have discovered this link.

Pauline Boty: Left, Siren c1958-62. Right, Untitled (dreaming woman) 1961.

The Cloud of Unknowing

This is the poster for our exhibition at Norwich Cathedral, as you can see from the dates it has just finished. Despite the lower visitor numbers to the cathedral and the extra restrictions imposed during the second lockdown we felt lucky to be showing anywhere this year. The exhibition centred around a series of panels made during lockdown when I turned some of Ray’s drawings into stained glass. Although we have worked alongside each other for over thirty years, we have never collaborated or exhibited together before.

Wall of glass: Four cabinets of glass panels with samples and drawings on the lower shelves & two larger panels on easels.

The basic idea was to have a wall of Ray’s black and white paintings meeting a wall of my coloured glass panels. These panels were the ones I made during lockdown and will be familiar to readers of my blog. At the far end were the self portraits, at the near end were the collaborative pieces, and in the middle was the series of enamelled decorative panels called "‘Theme and Variations’. On the bottom shelves were enamelled samples from previous projects which showed up well just lying on white paper and on the shelves above were print outs of my blog entries which describe the making of my glass panels.

Cabinets 1&2: Self portraits, fragments, glass paints and the start of the Theme and Variations series.

Cabinets 2,3&4. Theme and Variations and the collaborative panels.

I thought visitors to the cathedral would be interested to learn about the technical side of stained glass, as the guides and volunteers you get in such places are always more interested in a window’s history and iconography. In the cabinets I showed samples of all the types of glass paint I use (yes - it’s still called stained glass even if it’s heavily painted), the tools of the trade and a new panel in progress. I made this just before the exhibition opened and I’ve been looking forward to seeing it again as I think it may be an important bridge between the work I’ve been copying from Ray and my own artistic path (below).

Panel in Progress: Left, glass pieces cut, painted and fired. Right, in the exhibition showing the leading up process.

Wall of black and white pictures: 46 paintings in indian ink & egg tempera on gesso hanging together in a cloud. 

“The pictures are written from scratch, I have no idea what they are going to be when I start. I have displayed them in groups on the wall forming clouds which you can see as a whole. But if you look harder you can always see something else in the cloud whether it is a camel, a weasel or a whale.” Ray Ward

Ray decided to hang his paintings, a recent series of egg tempera and indian ink on gesso, in a cloud formation hanging from a hidden bar where the wall meets the ceiling. A lovely shadow was created by the shape, which swayed slightly in front of the ancient stones and flints. One reason for hanging the paintings like this was to provide a space for the titles to be written up, large enough to read from a distance. Covid restrictions led to this solution which proved to be a lot better than the handouts you might normally provide as it put the words alongside the pictures, forming verses in your head:

Why are girls so obsessed with cats I really don’t think there’s much we can do. The problem is everything will be alright They’re wrong I’m more scared of success then failure. We will talk but have nothing to say The wind plays recalling madness, heartless cold reproof. Is anyone here enjoying this? An echo is not a reply.

A full catalogue of Ray Ward’s work in the exhibition can be found on his website, link here

The Grotto

August 2016

It’s hard to believe that the end of our garden looked like this so recently, a straggly bank up to a sloping fence that new neighbours had just put up. Since then, and especially during lockdown, we’ve spent a huge amount of time gardening. Transforming the bank and unearthing the rubbish buried underneath was at one time Ray’s major project. He made paths, steps, benches, an unexplained grotto and planted mostly ferns.

August 2016

July 2017

The photos I found show the bank during the two summers it was constructed. There is a high up bench (above) where you can sit and watch traffic on the A346, and a low down shady bench (below) for morning coffee break. The grotto, seen side on in the centre of the photo above and to the left in the photo below, was made of concrete and covered, like most of the walls, with the flints which are so abundant in our soil. Ray made a window in each side and a corrugated plastic section of roof to let the light in to whatever he was going to put inside it.

July 2017

The whole construction looks particularly fine in the snow (below) with all the sloping lines and steps visible. The existing trees were what had determined the contours of the walls and flower beds. One peculiarity of the grotto was the way it was hidden by a stray conifer in the flower bed in front of it, it took another year for us to realise that it had to go.

February 2018 - view from the studio

November 2020

My part of the grotto was lining the inside with shells. The fact that nothing is straight or symmetrical was a challenge to my sense of order, but the shells we collected over a couple of summers dictated the ‘design’. The scallop and oyster shells came from Kent, while the cockles came from Curracloe Beach in County Wexford where we collected over 500 in one evening’s walk. We found the current keeper of the grotto on a recent trip to King’s Lyn, where everything except the shops was shut. So it’s become a seaside souvenir grotto for times like these when we’re spending so much time at home.

Top: The current keeper of the grotto. Bottom: Curracloe Beach and girls eating ice creams.

Disembodied head

Purple man from ‘These People Are Intellectuals…’ Left, in progress. Right, in the exhibition at Norwich Cathedral

Purple man’s disembodied head was an unplanned addition to our exhibition at The Hostry, Norwich Cathedral. When making the stained glass panel ‘These People are Intellectuals, They Live in Houses Full of Books and Have Nothing Worth Stealing’ (described in a previous blog post) purple man ended up with two alternative heads. I did a second one (on the left in the photos above) out of the same piece of flashed streaky purple glass because I thought I’d sandblasted too much of the purple layer off on the first head. However head number one turned out to be the best one, so head number two ended up on its own stand in the display case alongside an explanation of how the window was made.

St Margaret, Stratton Strawless Left, the south aisle. Right, north window containing medieval glass.

When you start looking at old stained glass in churches you get used to seeing disembodied heads. These are pieces of medieval stained glass that have survived breakages or the releading of windows and find themselves either part of another picture or out on their own. We made a trip to the village of Stratton Strawless, just north of Norwich, to see a perfect example of fifteenth century Norwich glass painting in the angel head which has been set into a clear glass window (above and below). Miraculously the church was not locked and it is full of stupendous monuments and second hand books as well as the angel head which seems so beautifully done now that I’ve started painting heads myself.

Stratton Strawless, the C15th angel head.

Stratton Strawless, glass in the windows of the south aisle.

Set into the windows of the south aisle are a collection of other glass fragments, including the heads of a bishop, a king with a fascinating web of lead lines where he has broken and a strange head which is all beard and no hair (above right). All of the other churches we drove to were locked, so thank goodness for a visit to Castle Acre Priory. Here were windows and arches, carved patterns and lines and among them just a few carved heads (below).

Stone heads from Castle Acre Priory.

Arches

Left, Version 4, glass panel 270mm square. Right, Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery - currently closed.

I was working on a series of painted glass panels called Theme and Variations while planning our exhibition at Norwich Cathedral. It was only when I looked back at this photo of the castle (above right) that I saw the connection to the rows of arches in my series, even down to the inverted concrete arch of the horrendous glass lift exit in front of it. So I added the castellations to the top of the last in the series (above left) in the hope that a local visitor to the exhibition may notice the link.

Left, Norwich - from Castle Meadow to the Royal Arcade. Right, Stained glass inside the arcade.

Most of the buildings in Norwich I’d earmarked to visit to see the best examples of old stained glass were closed. With covid restrictions in place, the city felt like a half empty stage set so I wandered around and found interesting architectural details everywhere. The rounded arch, filled with fresh floral stained glass, made another appearance in the Royal Arcade (above).

Left, King’s Lynn - the locked doors of St Nicholas’ Chapel. Right, beside the locked doors of King’s Lynn Minster

By the time we got to King’s Lynn and found that absolutely every building that wasn’t a shop, cafe or pub was shut, we had begun to get fed up, despite the beautiful locked doors and interesting architectural features - more arches on top of arches.

An outdoor visit saved the day. Nearby are the ruins of Castle Acre Priory, a Cluniac monastery from around 1089 to its dissolution in 1537, with the most magnificent set of arches you could hope to see (below). The enormous west front has a solid base of round arches around the original west door, and a large pointed mid 15th century window inserted above. Wonderful to see the combination of the two types of arches combined in the elaborate architectural detail and to find inspiration on how to take my painted series forward.

The West Front of Castle Acre Priory, Norfolk.