Analysis of Someone Else's Christmas Cards

This should be year 9 of my Analysis of the Christmas Cards series where I think of as many different ways as I can to categorise the cards we receive then choose and photograph my favourite ones before chucking them all away and saying goodbye to Christmas before it rolls round again. But the number of cards we get is on the decline, and either I’m getting bored of them or the cards themselves are becoming more boring - less homemade, disfigured by ugly written slogans (for example season’s greetings) with even a couple of duplicates or repeats from previous years. I’d already decided I wasn’t going to bother with the analysis when I visited my Aunt Gillian’s house and saw a christmas card display that was better than any I’d seen for ages and therefore worth counting up then quickly sorting into some basic categories.

Around the sitting room, birds on the mantlepiece.

The cards, already sorted into loose categories, stand on every surface in the sitting room. There are so many, about 100, that they spill out into other rooms. I missed a whole group on the windowsill (the curtains were drawn) that excitingly included a triangular card, there is also an octagonal one in the religious corner (shown below left). These have been included in the final shape statistics which are as follows and roughly as usual: 55% square, 22% portrait, 22% landscape, 2% other.

The religious corner, small ones on the bookshelf.

Two more chests in the sitting room.

Into the hall and the kitchen where we find some of Gillian’s favourites (I think her number one is the hare staring at the moon).

I had to choose a favourite quickly, and went for the Selwyn Image mistletoe, oak and robin design displayed on the mantlepiece and shown below. Gillian said she liked all the bird cards, which make up 25% of the whole collection, with other favourites on the card display bar in the kitchen. These include two wonderful buildings shown below and the ever popular mysterious Christmas hare.

My favourites: two buildings and two robins by Selwyn Image and Gertrude Hermes (the last two are Ashmolean Museum cards).

Tree patterns

Combination Trees 350 x 350 mm.

As you can probably tell, I made the panel above by leading together glass pieces from two different styles of work, both based on trees. I happened to have the two painted pieces of glass shown below in a pile on my work bench and had a feeling they would go together well. The finished panel also uses other pieces of glass from the same two series as I fitted the two patterns together in the best and most treelike way.

Tree patterns, left from the Theme and Variations series 2020, right sample from front door window 2023.

The original background tree pattern, the tops of four windows for a private house, 2018.

The coloured tree pattern is one I invented to show a woodland scene (I don’t think I stole it from anywhere) for a commission that I never got a great photo of, the one above was taken in my studio window before installing it. I then made a series of panels that were deliberately a cross between a design and a colour sample (below). Three years later I made the black and white trees pieces as samples for a front door commission where I tried out different blacks and greys as well as different methods for making the foliage patterns.

Theme and variations 2020

Some of the samples for a black and white front door commission 2023.

With my leftover pieces I made a second and opposite combination panel (below) where the coloured pieces float across the black and white sample like patches of light in a woodland scene. I’m able to chop these pieces up into complex shapes and then lead them together because it is the right type of glass - i.e. 2 to 4 mm thick whereas most of my work from the past thirty or so years has been made of glass at least 6mm thick and often toughened or laminated, as are many of my samples. These are not commissioned pieces and it’s a wonderful novelty for me not to have to get a beautifully drawn design agreed by a client before starting the making stage. The downside of this spontaneous way of working is that I don’t see mistakes (in the design) until the glass is cut, leaded and soldered so I have to pull the panel apart and change things, aiming for the sort of perfection that happens very occasionally.

The Opposite Combination 375 x 360 mm.

Styles in glass painting and lettering

Left: West window by A.J. Davies at St Mary Magdalene Church, Crowmarsh Gifford. Right: Interior of St Lawrence, Warborough, Oxfordshire.

Since seeing his little east window at St Margaret’s in Herefordshire (described on my blog here) I’m getting more interested in the work of A.J. Davies of the Bromsgrove Guild. The first window I saw on this Oxfordshire trip was in the church at Crowmarsh Gifford (above left) high up above the west entrance door and slightly lost in its surroundings (my zoomless camera couldn’t capture the details). However St. Lawrence church at Warborough, only four miles away, has three A.J. Davies windows from different periods, therefore interesting to compare them with each other and to see their quiet impact on the whole church (above right).

Warborough: East window by A.J. Davies (1919) and details from the bottom lights.

The east window is dedicated to those who died in the First World War with large and small figures, badges and scenes united by patterned borders and quarries. The scenes at the bottom show how these quarries, covered in unconnected painted ornamentation, break out into different shapes with strong lettering incorporated into the design and his signature so usefully placed at bottom right.

Warborough: North nave window by A.J. Davies & detail (1924).

At the north east corner of the church is this slightly later work (above) of an organ playing monk next to St Hilary. In the background are the same sort of symbolic details that I’d admired in his St. Margaret window, angels and radiating light as well as a flock of cute bluebirds. The snakes and slipper detail below shows the technique of covering all the pieces of glass with paint, then removing it with textured strokes, scraping and stippling to let the light come through in a subtle way.

A.J. Davies made the third window (below), also visible in the photo of the church interior, twenty two years later towards the end of his life. Gone are the interestingly shaped background pieces, the patterns and the branches for borders. Instead we have a stippled background, realistic looking flowers instead of floral ornamentation and some cute children, all of which record changing fashions in the making or commissioning of stained glass.

Warborough: North nave window by A.J. Davies & detail (1946).

St Mary Magdalene Church, Crowmarsh Gifford, Oxfordshire. North chancel window by Charles de Vic Carey, 1961.

On the same trip I was thrilled by a small lancet window in the church at Crowmarsh Gifford, the only one I have ever seen by Charles de Vic Carey, the teacher at Wimbledon Art School of Pauline Boty and my first stained glass teacher, Tony Attenborough. In it, I recognised the way I was encouraged to paint, with visible brush strokes (so good to see some actual painting rather than the endless quest to find different ways of applying the paint) going across lead lines and uniting the pieces of glass to make a composition, as a painter would. At the bottom is a little, loosely painted portrait of Emily Wilder and children above the fabulous lettering that is collage like and totally of its time.

Details from the bottom half of the Charles de Vic Carey window.

Inspired by the Hudson River School

View across the Hudson from Blithewood, Bard College, Annondale-on-Hudson, 2023 and 2000.

Staying with my brother on a recent holiday in New York State I spent a lovely morning drawing the view across the river from the lawns of Bard College (above left). We had visited the house of the father of the Hudson River School, Thomas Cole, and I was using the style I’d picked up from looking at his paintings, with paintbrush blobs for distant trees and picturesque details in the foreground. When I got home I looked through sketchbooks from previous visits (shown below) and was astonished to find a drawing I did 23 years ago from pretty much the same spot (above right).

My USA sketchbooks, clockwise from top right: 1996, 2000, 2012, 2023.

Looking through the sketchbook from my first visit there in 1996 I found more versions of the view, usually framed by the summer houses of historic houses that line the riverbank but behind the railway that seems to run through the water. The old drawings practically line up with the new (below left) as if my hand remembers the drawings I always do when I’m there.

Left: More views across the river, 1996 and 2023. Right: House in Annandale-on-Hudson 2000.

Left: Thomas Cole, River in the Catskills, 1843. Right: Frederick Church, Catskill Mountains from the Home of the Artist, 1871.

In 1996 we had visited Olana, the house of Thomas Cole’s pupil, Frederick Church, that he had built in a spot with fantastic views. Some of my work from the following years was consciously influenced by Church’s use of landscape motifs - mountains, waterfalls, sunsets - and the solitary foreground tree that cuts across the horizontal layers of the landscape as shown in my sketchbooks below.

View across the River Hudson to the Catskills, 1996 & 2000.

If I’m not drawing the river, or the view across the street from the porch, I draw the view through the window, recording the different houses we have stayed in on each visit. Again I was surprised by the repetition in what I’ve chosen to draw, with pine trees making another, looser grid right up against the windows of each house.

Windows, Rhinebeck 1996, Haggerty Hill Road 2012 & Bard College 2023.

Behind the Scenes

Left, East Hagbourne, Oxfordshire. Right, Urchfont, Wiltshire.

To see the medieval glass patchworked into a window at St Andrew’s Church, East Hagbourne (above left) I had to poke my head through a screen of heavy curtains that hide the vicar’s desk. To get up close to Rosalind Grimshaw’s window in Urchfont church I had to move piles of chairs and toys (above right). I’ve now started looking out for the children’s corners which, like kitchens in churches, give an indication of how the church is being used.

Left, inviting at North Moreton, Oxfordshire. Right, austere at Potterne, Wiltshire.

Steeple Ashton, Wiltshire.

In the huge church of St Peter and St Paul, Steeple Ashton, everything is clean and neat with fragments of medieval glass in almost all of the windows. The door to the vestry, not a separate room but just a space sectioned off, was open and everything inside was in order (above left). The children’s corner (above right) actually looked like you might want to spend time there, it seemed to have been arranged by someone who actually cares what the place looks like.

My best behind the scenes photo, above left, is from the corner of another huge church, this one at Madley in Herefordshire. The scene is simply furnished, the atmosphere is timeless. In the east window of the church is a wealth of medieval stained glass (below), but even more unusually there are twenty first century paintings by Edward Kelly installed in the nave and the crypt (above right). The triptych in the crypt is a particularly wonderful sight because paintings, particularly modern ones, are rarely found in English churches.

This from The Rev Simon Lockett, who I like to imagine sitting on that pink cushion. ‘It is a great joy to have the triptych “The Lillies of the Field” here in Madley Crypt. I have lived with these paintings for a long time now and they have helped to bring this beautiful space alive giving the crypt depth as well as a flourish of colour and bold form. They have helped with a contemplative practice as well as a daily reminder not only of the beauty of creation but of the natural cycle of abundance, death and new life’.

Medieval glass in the east window of The Church of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Madley.