The Weekend Course

West Dean weekend student work: 1. simple leading 2. simple but lots of pieces 3. soldering a less simple design.

The adult beginner’s weekend stained glass course is a bit of a rushed affair. There are so many stages to learn, including the most important one of how to design a simple stained glass window, something I like each student to do for themselves. I felt a sense of triumph on last weekend’s course at West Dean College (which will be the last weekend course I teach) as a student actually made a window that was really simple and easy to make, yet original (1 above left). As you can see, the creeping inaccuracy of the cutting meant that the glass pieces didn’t fit the paper pattern once leaded, but easy to cut means easy to trim down if you have to.

West Dean student work in progress: 4. work bench 5. round panel pieces cut  6. panel cemented but not cleaned.

Mostly the students don’t follow my advice to keep it simple and come armed with examples of the sort of organic or representational thing they want to make. It’s only as you make the stained glass panel that you understand the pitfalls, why some shapes are easy to cut but hard to lead, like the orange star burst which is being soldered at 3 top right. This means that it’s not the number of pieces that makes a design doable or not in a weekend, for example 2 top centre & 4 above right (which has over 40 pieces of glass) were both simple to make because of the leading pattern. The round panel (5 above centre) was only just doable for a beginner, but there is always the possibility of skipping the last stage and taking the cement in a bag to do at home, or taking the panel home dirty, like 6 above right.

West Dean student work with sandblasting: 7. paper plan wave 8. around the edges 9. butterfly antennae.

We don’t have the use of a kiln on this short course, but we do have a sandblaster which gives you a different way of adding detail. In 7. (above left) a wave has been added to give the much desired organic feel, linking the pieces with three lines. Painting, or drawing and sandblasting, across the lead lines is something else I find it hard to persuade students to do, you can see another example of linking pieces with sandblasting in the wobbly circles at 12 below right. Sandblasting a section around the edges of adjacent pieces was also effective in 8 above centre, giving the finished panel a chunky appearance that went well with the blocks of glass.

West Dean finished panels: abstract designs with curves and sandbalsting. 10, 11 & 12.

It’s great when a design that is supposed to represent something actually works. The butterfly (above right) is an obvious example, but the three landscape panels below are very satisfying. The river estuary that is both curvy and geometric (13), the palm tree that floats above its trunk (14) and the lighthouse (15) that is immediately recognisable but so subtle all provide a perfect end to my teaching of the weekend course.

West Dean landscape panels: 13. river estuary 14. palm tree 15. lighthouse.

glass patchwork

I’m making a series of windows of which large sections are made out of glass pieces from my scrapbox, patchwork style. I’ve done this lots of times before, but that doesn’t stop the scrap box growing in size, with pieces dating back to the 1980s when I first started painting and firing glass. In my endeavours I’m inspired both by fabric patchwork, which I used to spend a lot of time doing, and by the fragment windows that you see in churches.

Studio lightbox with glass pieces spread over paper window cartoons.

Sorting the pieces, mainly by colour.

Sorting my glass pieces comes easily as I know them so well. I’m ordering them by colour because the pieces are nearly all by me and the subject matter and style is pretty consistent over the forty year period that they cover. Many of them are samples from commissions that I did or didn’t get or from pieces that went wrong. I can often remember what I was listening to on the radio at the time I was making the sample - like a proper patchwork quilt all of my life is in these pieces.

The pink section cut and numbered, the yellow section cut and numbered.

I reached number 121, then made a list to see if I really knew where all the pieces came from. Lots of them are useful colour strips which I can’t date, for example numbers 21, 23, 24, 27, 29, 60 and 61 below. Above you can see sample pieces for the last public commission I installed in Liverpool Hospital almost two years ago (numbers 31 & 33 on the right) next to a piece from a dismantled 1987 panel (no. 34) and some Bournemouth pine cones from a residency I did there in 1995 (36 and 38).

The four corners all together (but not as they will be in the windows).

I’ve planned the next stage of the windows around all of these fragments. There will be black and white painted/sandblasted sections that pick up on the marks, patterns and shapes contained in them. I’ve drawn everything up full size (see window A below) as I can’t afford to have second thoughts once I start on the glass - but with apologies to my clients for the extra time that all of this takes.

Drawing for window A, showing lead lines and paintwork to come. 680 x 690 mm.

Trying to fit all the pieces of the four windows on my lightbox.

More Mark Angus

Small window in St Andrew, Steyning, West Sussex. Mark Angus 2000

Since I appreciated (and described in a blog post last March) a whole church full of Mark Angus windows I have been looking for more. The one in St Andrew’s church, Steyning, didn’t disappoint, high up in the north east corner and casting an inky light on the stuff accumulated below (above right). The coloured glass is beautiful, the detail not painted but using what I think of as his signature - the abundant use of those liberated lead lines, veering off the dividing lines between glass pieces like the strokes of a thick pen.

The church website says that, wanting to commission a millenium window, a decision was made to seek a good example of contemporary art. A number of artists was approached but most of the proposals were judged to be unimaginative, so Mark Angus was commissioned because of his “Daily Bread” window in Durham Cathedral. The Steyning window, seventeen years later, does resemble that one, but the subject matter is (supposedly) inspired by Ezekiel 47:12: “On the banks, on both sides of the river, there will grow all kinds of trees for food.”

In Mark Angus’ 1984 book Modern Stained Glass in British Churches, he wrote “The Artist must always bear in mind that his work is experienced daily by ordinary people. His work’s must be accessible, explain mystery, and yet maintain mystery, give insight and meaning alongside awe.”

West window in Christ Church, Bradford-on-Avon, Wiltshire. Mark Angus 1993

Before he moved to Germany, Mark Angus lived near Bath and there are several of his windows in that region, including two in Bradford-on-Avon. I think I love his west window in Christ Church, although I could hardly see it. There is no colour but there are different types of white glass and more of those wonderful lead lines making a picture that describes a rainbow with cloud, rain and sunshine in the most original way. You get no direct view of this window inside the church (did you ever? I wonder) as there is an inaccessible gallery above the west door, beyond which an accumulation of gloomy stuff again (above right).

East window in St Mary Tory, Bradford-on-Avon, Wiltshire. Mark Angus 1999

Also in Bradford-on-Avon and with a Mark Angus east window, the chapel of St Mary Tory is a rare treat. This is a tiny building, rebuilt in the late nineteenth century on the site of a former chapel and hermitage dating from the fifteenth or early sixteenth century. When I took the photo above right I was standing with my back against the west wall and facing through the windows a fantastic view of the town.

The window was commissioned by retired vicar Canon Bill Matthews on behalf of the donor Enid German who wrote “An inner image prompted me to finance a coloured window to replace the existing plain glass one. After deep concentration in prayer, the design for the central panel came. Those of the two side panels I left to the artist, Mark Angus, then unknown to me. I passed my ideas to Bill who acted as go-between.” It is fascinating to get such an insight into the commissioning process, especially, as in the same bit of text on display in the church Mark remembers it differently. He describes in detail how he arrived intuitively at the design for each lancet, aiming for a mood of “active quietness”. After describing each panel he wrote “So now we have the whole image. Of a garden, of nature, of light, of the mystic, of refreshing tears and raindrops, of sky, of heaven. It is an escape from the hard realities of life, a retreat and a resting place.”

The view from the chapel of St Mary Tory.

Of course the central lancet is quite obviously a flower, in Mark’s words “a mystical rose, which is both contained and is free”. I had to get up close to check on the yellow splodge of stamen in the middle (below left), it’s so unusual to see him using glass enamel and it looks more superficial than those wandering signature lead lines. There are views of houses and trees through the coloured glass, who on earth would prefer nothing but plain glass windows?

St Mary Tory, detail and view from a south facing window.

The Bird Window

A record I got for Christmas almost fifty years ago. The whole window in St Mary's Church, Selborne, Hampshire. Designed by A Gascoygne, made by Horace T Hinks, 1920.

There is a unique bird window in St Mary’s Church, Selborne, the Hampshire village where the eigtheenth century naturalist Gilbert White lived for most of his life (above right). It shows St Francis preaching to the birds and depicts every bird, I counted 67 different species, mentioned in White’s Natural History of Selborne. Painted in accurate detail, I know these birds well from the cover of a record I’ve had since I was a teenager. Because the record cover designer has cunningly omitted the uninspiring figure of St Francis in the middle of the window and the standard canopies and predella panels surrounding the scene, it was a surprise to see that the actual window is only remarkable if you look closely - how apt for a window about bird watching.

The other unique bird window that I’d wanted to see for a while is the only known work in stained glass by the artist William Nicholson (below left). This window, in the Somerset village of Mells, is also dedicated to St Francis, and is a memorial to John Francis Fortescue Horner of Mells Manor, commissioned by his widow Frances who knew Nicholson as well as many other leading artists of the time. It’s a window with a dynamic composition, where circles radiate from Mary’s halo and fish become birds as they rise to the top of the tracery. The window was painted by Nicholson assisted by Barbara Batt (or the other way round?) a 21 year old student from the Central School of Art who clearly knew what she was doing in terms of glass painting.

St Francis window in St Andrew's Church, Mells, Somerset, and detail of Mary with baby Jesus. Designed by William Nicholson, painted by Nicholson and Barbara Batt at The Glass House in London, 1930.

St Francis from The Selborne window, St Francis from the Mells window.

It is interesting to compare aspects of these two windows, like the figure of St Francis with the same hairstyle and hand position, but painted so differently (above). The treatment of the lettering particularly shows these differences of style. The paintwork in the 1920 Selborne window is so neat that it looks stencilled, while the writing on red glass, so unusual in its placement at the bottom left corner of the 1930 Mells window, is confidently hand written, scratched through two layers of iron oxide paint (below).

Birds and lettering at St Francis' feet, Selborne. Dedication panel from the Mells window.

The birds themselves are the stars of both windows. In a section (below left) of the Selborne window you have three overlapping blackbirds surrounded by, clockwise from centre left, song thrush, yellowhammer, cuckoo, blue tit, house sparrows, nuthatch, wallcreeper, woodcock and kingfishers on a lush green background painted in the same detailed style. Whereas the birds in the Mells window are not identifiable. A section (below right) from the centre of the window shows a variety of bird shape and detail in the most subtle colour scheme with bands of light in the background that are spokes of the radiating circles that hold the design together.

Blackbirds from the Selborne window. Unidentified birds in the middle of the Mells window.

My first public commission on the cover of AN 1987. Full size drawing of one of the painted birds in the design.

When I saw a call out to make a bird window for Lansdowne Hospital in Cardiff soon after I graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1986 I had no doubt that the commission had my name written on it (above). I hadn’t come across many other contemporary stained glass artists who were comfortable drawing birds. More bird windows followed, including one for my old school (below) - the size of the glass pieces I painted the birds on increased with the size of my new kiln. Bird windows were so popular that I had to include birds in designs where I would have preferred not to, until I stopped doing them altogether. In addition to the aforementioned record cover, my way of depicting birds was influenced by the collection I had of birds on postage stamps and from drawing stuffed, not moving ones. My clients are still asking for bird windows and I think I’m ready to have another go, this time taking with me some influences from Nicholson, whose birds don’t perch but move and fly.

My second public commission (1988) in the chapel at Lady Margaret School, London S.W.6. and bird detail from it.

twentieth century Stained Glass

Hornsey Parish Church (of St Mary with St George) from the outside.

I saw that the doors of Hornsey Parish Church were wide open as we drove past it, giving a full view down the nave to a window of the type that I particularly like. My visit, later in the day, didn’t disappoint. The church was designed by architect Randall Morris in 1959, there is no mention of a designer or maker of the windows in the comprehensive information boards inside the church, but they look to me to be architect designed. Made in the simplest way with large pieces of pastel coloured machine made unpainted glass, these would generally be classified as leaded lights rather than stained glass.

Hornsey Parish Church, the chancel at the north end and the west wall of the nave.

The interior is wonderful, light airy and calm with colour on the ceiling panels emphasising the parabolic curve of the roof that is echoed in the design of the windows on all four sides. The proportions of these windows change from the back (facing north) to the south (above the doors) to the sides, but the design of overlapping scales sensitively coloured and placed on the windows’ supporting bars is consistent throughout.

Hornsey Parish Church, the window above the south facing entrance doors - a really satisfying design.

St Paul’s Parish Church, South Harrow, east and south facing windows on a dull day.

Rising incongruously from the streets of another London suburb, is St Paul’s Church, South Harrow. It’s a Cachmaille-Day church from 1937, and again I could see from the outside that it contained exciting looking stained glass. It was open but there was a service about to start, so I only got a glimpse of the windows from the entrance (above right), these are arranged in two sets of five very tall thin lancets facing south and east..

Cachemaille-Day worked with many different artists using many different styles in the dozens of churches he designed or reconfigured between the 1930s and 60s. The St Paul’s windows are listed as the work of Christopher Webb from 1938, their colours may look familiar but their style is not like the C. Webb windows I’m used to seeing. There is a motif of stars and curved bands that repeats up each window, creating a jazzy 1930s regular pattern that is spectacular when the sun is out, as in the photo below right (not my own). I wonder what level of collaboration between architect, artist and commissioner led to this stained glass solution, so perfect for the building.

St Paul’s, south facing window from the outside, the windows on a sunnier day.