In this commission, finished but not yet installed, I have linked the glass door panels with the fanlight above by using a vertical design, based on trees. These are not trees with bare branches like the ones I’ve written about on a previous blog Drawing Branches. They are lollipop style decorative trees with clumps of leaves placed where the layout and balance of the design dictates.
Rather than nature, I’ve drawn on historical stained glass as a guide. Not just the trees in medieval glass at, for example, Canterbury Cathedral (below left), but more particularly the trees you see in the backgrounds of Clayton and Bell windows (below right) with a jumble of different painted leaf forms making up the clumps.
My trees have clumps made of four different patterns (below). The two on the left are not particularly like leaves, while the other two patterns each come in three different versions created with sandblasting, stencilling, scrafitto and painting. The client didn’t want any colour in the front door, instead there is tone, translucency and overlaps created by using both layers of glass in the double glazed units.