Three Squares / July 27, 2020 by Sasha Ward

The small square glass panels I’ve made over the past fortnight were designed as wall panels - you can see them hanging high up on my studio wall (below left). I wanted to try out an invisible fixing which is glued to the back centre of the panel, that part of the glass has to be opaque to hide it.

Left: studio wall with original date stamp design and two glass wall panels at the top. Right: Square One, 265mm sq.

Square One (above right) is a leaded elaboration on the date stamp painted piece I made on XXII.VI.MMXX that looked a bit pointless as a stand alone piece of glass. I added patches of colour to compliment the yellow and remind me of midsummer in the local countryside, with an all important black piece in the middle and a scrap textured with triangles to match the XXs on the yellow ground.

Square Two (below) was designed as an opposite to that geometric piece with organic, slightly out of control shapes in lush sprayed enamel colours that I rarely use all together. I sandblasted the surround and the edges of the glass so they look as if they merge into the wall. The light, bright colours and the different textures achieved by applying the glass paints in a variety of ways show up really well against a white (rather than transparent) background in both of these pieces.

Square Two: detail and full piece on the wall, 260 mm sq.

Left: ‘One Way Out’ ink drawing on plywood by Ray Ward. Right: ‘One Way Out’ glass enamels, 260 mm sq.

The third piece was a continuation of my project to turn Ray’s drawings into glass panels (see my previous posts for more examples). The drawings have been going so easily into stained glass versions, but I wanted to try one using my usual enamelling and sandblasting techniques. I intended to give the figure (above left) a solid centre to hide the fixing, but that was one of the things that didn’t really work out. I saw how unpredictable the enamel colours, used in layers, can be as my gold turned green and the hand painted streaks looked so watery that I resorted to sandblasting stripes across the whole background. The result - 6 firings later - is the panel (above right) displayed in the window not on the wall.

Left: panel before firing no. 5. Right: reverse side of finished glass panel.

Studio window / July 13, 2020 by Sasha Ward

Do you ever get sick of the sight of your own work? In my case, samples and fragments of it are sitting on shelves in my window, blocking a view of our beautiful garden. The up side is that even in the gloom of a winter afternoon (above) there were interesting coloured reflections cast on the work I was doing on the lightbox. As this piece of work was a geometric composition, I ended up with a window full of striped colour samples and a more coordinated look in the studio (below). However, I was tired of that look and resolved, as we were going into lockdown, that I would end up with a completely different window at the end of it.

I found an autumnal photo with no coloured glass on the shelves from another year when I must have needed a change (above) and one from the following spring where I had painted the shape of one of the pink leafed plants on to a sample I was doing for a house in Italy (below).

Further back in time (above) I had the shelves in the same positions and a similar mix of geometric test strips and slightly organic patterns which were sample pieces for the commissions on the go. I recognise fragments from a wall panel for St James Hospital in Leeds, a plane propellor from Pegasus House in Bristol and colour variations for windows in Liverpool and Derbyshire. I only remember one occasion when I wanted to fill all four windows with samples (below). This was the last time we held an open studio event and the samples were labelled showing which commission they were made for. (Ten years ago I thought this was a terrible picture of me, now I can only see how much younger I look.)

Which brings me to the same window today and work that does look pretty different from anything I’ve put in front of it before (below). There are two main themes; self portraits which are on the bottom shelf and which I think I’ve done enough of for now, and stained glass panels from Ray Ward’s drawings which are on the top shelf and which I’ve described in previous blog posts. These have been a welcome return to making leaded panels and this is something I hope to continue doing both to commission and for exhibition.

Rooflines / December 13, 2018 by Sasha Ward

Staircase windows, each panel 880 x 300 mm

Just installed is this three part internal window for artist blacksmith and friend Melissa Cole in her newly built house. At front left in the snap above you can see a corner of her balustrade, it’s made of lines of metal that look like a scratchy drawing, and hopefully a bit like the scratchy lines in the landscape part of my design. The themes in this window revisit subject matter from my Kelmscott designs where roof shapes were placed in a pattern made from the local landscape.

When I visited the house during construction, the set of plans (below) was up on the wall - how could I resist basing my design on a roof plan that looked like a flower?

I liked my first sketches, collages of the roof under construction and the flower roof shape. However, I found it hard to work them into the format of the window openings. So I made a 3D model of the roof, with the aim of stretching it to a landscape format without losing the real shape.

House in the landscape: paper model of the roof

sketches showing development of the design

As I developed the design, the geometric shape of the roof flowed into curves that spread into the surrounding areas. The straight lines tie the panels together across the roof cross, in the glass these are picked out with a sandblasted white line. I was pleased with the restraint I exercised in my use of colour. Once Melissa had chosen the strong orange and I had mixed up a metallic pink/purple for the roof (marvellous new colour that changes with light on or through it), there was only room for neutrals and a lot of white - the neutrals appear very green in the photo of the panels in my studio window below. As they should, the panels look best in the place they were made for. Thanks to an ideal, positive talking commissioner who insisted that it’s the artist who has to be happy with the work as much as the client.