Drayton and Yarnton, Oxfordshire

Our cellar

When we decorated our cellar Ray set some of his relief plaster panels, made about twenty years ago, into the walls. It may not be obvious why from the photo above, but I like to think of the link these have to altar pieces, particularly those carved in Nottingham alabaster from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. We went to St. Peter’s church in Drayton, Oxfordshire to see a set of particularly fine examples of the genre which had survived because they were buried for safety and rediscovered when a vault was dug out in 1814.

Fifteenth century altar piece in St Peter’s church, Drayton, Oxfordshire

There are six scenes crowded with dynamic figures, heads, animals and angels. The panels, some with missing sections, are about 40 cms. tall with traces of paint visible and are mounted in the wall behind an altar. I was so captivated that I couldn’t really be bothered with the (nineteenth and twentieth century) stained glass in the church, but we did find a guide book that told us about a similar Nottingham alabaster altar piece in St. Bartholomew’s at Yarnton, only 15 miles away - a church I knew by name but couldn’t remember why.

The two end panels of the Drayton altar piece

Fifteenth century altar piece in St Bartholomew’s church, Yarnton, Oxfordshire

This altar piece (above) with two of the six panels missing, proved much less exciting than the Drayton one mainly because of the way that the panels are mounted, surrounded by heavy stone, and lit with a dim yellow light. However, every window in the church is filled with fragments of the most fantastic medieval english and continental stained glass, most of it given by alderman William Fletcher, Mayor of Oxford, in 1813. We stayed for a long time, admiring the details and the style of the figures so in keeping with the altar piece; I was delighted not to have my medieval reverie interrupted by any more modern glass here.

Yarnton church: East window (above the Nottingham alabaster altar piece) mainly English C15th and detail.

Two more depictions of the virgin and child (with other painted fragments) in the north windows of Yarnton church.

Details from the north west window of Yarnton church.

Left, The only C15th pieces that are in their original position in the top tracery, north window. Right, Head and birds in the sanctuary window, Yarnton.

To me, the most exciting windows are the reset angels in deep alcoves, lit by sunshine in the south west corner of the church (below). The windows are small enough for the mainly fifteenth century pieces to make a complete picture in each one, with some pattern, some objects ( a wheel or a surveillance camera, a football or a flower?) some border pieces, some incongruous bird and animal segments, fritillaries and bluebells. The faces that loom out of the bottom of the right hand window (bottom picture) have a particular other worldly quality - there is nothing in the centuries of stained glass painting that I would rather see.

Angel windows in the south wall of Yarnton church.

The two angel windows in Yarnton church.

Details of painted glass in the bottom of the left hand angel window

Detail from the bottom of right hand angel window

Studio Pictures

Invitation to our studio from 2010 (left) and 2021 (right).

Night time photo of the studio, with Ray’s work upstairs and mine downstairs.

Open studio weekend has been and gone - the first since 2010 and therefore the first thorough tidy up in eleven years as we showed our studio and its contents to friends, family and neighbours. Luckily they came, bought things and we all enjoyed ourselves in a restrained semi pandemic sort of way. Warm autumn weather meant the garden was looking good (below).

Back of studio from the garden.

Studio windows from the inside, top Ray’s, bottom mine.

Paintings and piles of drawings in Ray’s studio..

Morning sunshine through stained glass in my studio.

As well as a tidy up, the weekend prompted me to make a display of my work in the windows and work out what I wanted to say about it. Of course I’d rather say nothing at all, but that doesn’t get you anywhere. I’ve also put up a couple of displays on the wall which I think will stay there for a while, one is a map of the UK marked with the location and photos of ten commissions from 2008 - 2019, the other is a group of old photos of me at work on commissions from 1990 - 2014 (below left and right). For anyone who hasn’t visited our studio, I hope you enjoy looking at the photos of it, and please feel free to make an appointment to visit while there is work out to see.

Wall displays of commissions and photographs.

New Front Door Window

I’ve just installed a design for an actual window, the first in quite a while. It felt good to be working out a design for the constraints of a shape, long and thin, and the clients’ preferences, simple, blue and with a touch of the organic. Once I got back into the stride of architectural glass design as opposed to making exhibition pieces, all went well. You can see the final design as it progressed in the drawings on my studio wall below.

Full size designs, 1320 x 150 mm, drawn in this order (from left to right) 5, 4, 1, 2, 3

Samples, enamel and sandblasting on glass.

The glass samples (above) I made at the end of this stage show the basic idea, a pattern of triangles with two stems of plants growing in the gaps between them. The detail comes from the intersection of the stems and the triangle points, you get thin lines of clear glass in the outlines of the leaves while the white triangles are sandblasted and therefore opaque.

The window is in a front door and is double glazed. We realised that you could get a more interesting effect by using both panes of glass with parts of the design on each pane, something I’ve done before, so that the two layers shift against each other as you move around, as in the two layered samples I made next (below).

Samples on two layers of glass.

Front door with design in vinyl - left: first layer inside, centre: second layer outside, right: both layers from the inside.

However, our plans had to change with the news that we couldn’t change the double glazed unit in the front door without getting a whole new front door (because of warranty not technical issues). We decided it was fine to go with the design printed on vinyl, that is adhesive window film, instead. As you can see above, the new window looks completely different from the outside and the inside, with a different part of the design printed on the interior and the exterior film. Although the colour printed on the vinyl is not as transparent as the blue and green enamels would have been the window does the job of providing privacy in the hallway while letting you know who is at the front door.

Details of completed window, 2 layers of vinyl.

Stained Glass Inscriptions

Whenever I see beautiful lettering decorating the walls of a church I think what a good idea it is to use meaningful texts to embellish a church interior. The inscriptions on stained glass windows however, are rarely as interesting to me, usually being an account of who commissioned the window and when they died placed in a predella type panel at the bottom.

Left: St Winifred’s Church, Manaton, Devon. Detail of window by Frank Brangwyn 1927 Right: St Andrew’s Church, Cullompton, Devon. Detail of window by GER Smith c 1950

Some examples from twentieth century windows seen on recent church visits (above and below) show a variety of lettering style with borders and backgrounds, and a tendency to run the sentences across the two or three lights in each window so it is hard to make sense of the narrative. I prefer the inscription, light on a dark ground, by Robert Anning Bell (below left) where you read a complete sentence in one pane and find out when the person commemorated was born.

Left: St Paul de Leon Church, Paul, Cornwall. Detail of window by Robert Anning Bell 1917 Right: St.Matthew’s Church, Midgham, Berkshire. Detail of window by Francis Skeat 1955

St Margaret’s Church, Knook, Wiltshire. East windows by Alexander Gibbs 1874.

This wall of windows (above) in a tiny church restored by William Butterfield in 1874 with windows made by Alexander Gibbs, shows how far apart the parts of the sentence can be, with Lady Heytesbury’s name split either side of the altar. The lettering, in rows separated by bars of red glass, is truly a part of the design, colourful and legible from a distance.

At Heytesbury in the same parish is the large church of St Peter and St Paul, also restored by William Butterfield with windows made to his designs by Gibbs. Here, the panel of text is truly spectacular (below) in departure board style, with triple rows of coloured glass between the lines of white and yellow writing.

St Peter and Paul Church, Heytesbury, Wiltshire. Detail of north window by Alexander Gibbs, 1867

The arrangement of these stripes of writing, taking up vertical space in one narrow window light, reminded me of the one in St Nicholas, East Grafton (below). Here there are coloured bands at the bottom of the panel and patterns at the top, the script is surprisingly easy to read and the message is meaningful as well as decorative.

St Nicholas Church, East Grafton, Wiltshire. Detail of East window by Heaton, Butler and Baine 1888.

Melting glass

Dalles de verre, stored outside for 50 years and in my garden

I’ve had a pile of thick glass slabs for a while waiting for the right project, something that hasn’t come along yet. They are dalles de verre, used since the mid twentieth century to make windows where chunks of the glass are set in concrete or resin. My slabs are not great, they have weathered badly having been stored outside for decades and most of the colours are so dark, browns and greens mostly, that they look black in daylight. I had a go at firing them down in my big kiln, hoping to end up with thinner, larger pieces full off interesting impurities.

After firing I still didn’t know what to do with them, until I realised that one grey piece was a lovely thing - in shape, surface texture and inner markings. I leaded it up along with some complementary pieces of glass to make a panel (below).

Melted Grey 310 x 280mm, on the lightbox and in the window

Fragments of dalle, on the lightbox and in the kiln before firing

Fragments after firing. Left, top left & bottom right fragments in the kiln. Right, other two pieces fused together.

In the second firing the smaller scraps came out best, and the ones I put on a bed of loose plaster had a texture on the back that looked quite good. You can see the glass before and after firing above, including the two triangular pieces that fused together as they were just close enough on the kiln shelf to reach each other as they melted. These were the next pieces I chose to lead up (below).

Accidentally on Purpose 300 x 410 mm on the lightbox.

The shapes, some leaded and some painted, that surround these melted chunks of glass are placed so that they could join up with a shape on the opposite edge of the panel, giving the idea of a repeating pattern, as above.