Decommissioned

I made this work for The University of Winchester in 2000, when it was known as King Alfred’s College. The architects Feilden Clegg had designed a three storey staircase fin for the library’s new extension that was clad in glass panels, a total of 156 panels covering an area of 52 square metres. I hadn’t been back to see the work in the intervening twenty three years, but knew it was one of my best commissions as I remember the moment when the first panel was screwed to the framework at the bottom of the staircase, it looked great and I knew the whole thing would work. The head of estates at the college wrote at the time,

“Thank you very much for your recent visit to the College in completing your amazing work of art. We all love it, and I’m delighted to report that amongst a community of 5000 students and staff I’ve yet to hear one negative comment!”

Staircase fin at The Martial Rose Library, University of Winchester

Above and below: photographs from my recent visit. Some of the lights aren’t working and there is some dust inside, but otherwise the glass looks absolutely great - properly intergrated into the architecture and with beautiful colours, textures and details in the enamel. It was fabricated, like a lot of my work from that period, at Proto Studios, but all the framework, fittings and lighting were designed by the architects.

The recent visit however was rather depressing. The library is having an overhaul and the central staircase is being retired, with the glass going into storage. Against my better judgement I wrote to complain - the decision had already been made on technical rather than aesthetic grounds with no chance of it being overturned. This sort of thing has happened to quite a few of my commissions, I don’t mind some of them going but this one was really good! When I told people the sad story on twitter and instagram I received very supportive comments ranging from shock and outrage to resignation and a more philosophical approach which I think is the right way to go - this is from a fellow stained glass artist,

“I am sorry for you Sasha. It's lovely and thus such a waste, but it's a problem we all have to face. The art is in the dedication of the making.”

Collage design for the commission.

What I do have is the final artwork for the piece, in the form of a collage (above). In fact I have a well organised paper file that includes details, sketches and photographs of all of my commissioned works, and a separate portfolio for my best drawings and designs which is a very cheering thought.

Arts Together

I planned a project for Arts Together, a charity that brings together professional artists and older people for weekly art workshops across Wiltshire. The focus was on glass painting and the aim was for each person to have their own stained glass panel at the end without them having to do any glass cutting, leading or soldering for which you need more than the average older person’s strength.

Twelve completed stained glass panels by members of the Pewsey group run by Arts Together.

As you can see from the completed panels (above), they turned out to be varied and original, reflecting the preferences and interests of each member. In week one participants removed the paint, scraffito style, with sticks, brushes and cotton buds and no real idea how the glass would look after firing, even more so in week two when they added enamels that become transparent when fired. This made the work experimental as did the fact that this was a new project and I had no examples to show, therefore nothing for people to copy - I love it when people draw from something in their head rather than from something on their phone.

The stages over the five week period are shown in the photos below.

Week one: scraffito on pieces of glass covered with black iron oxide paint. Carol, Norman, Liz.

Weeks two & three: add enamel paint, start painting borders. Centre shows glass before firing in my kiln. Cis, Janet.

Weeks three & four: (above and below) paint borders, choose coloured glass to add in. Vanessa, Helena, Helena.

Between weeks four & five I leaded and soldered each panel. Derek, Ruth, Ruth.

Week five: (no pictures as we were too busy) cementing.

Oxfordshire South ex Berkshire

Left, Oxfordshire now. Right, Oxfordshire then.

There is a corner of Oxfordshire bordered on its north and east edges by the River Thames that used to be Berkshire (as shown in the maps above) and that leads to confusion when using old guidebooks to local churches. Here are three in that area, all with great stained glass windows.

All Saints, North Moreton. The St Nicholas Window in Stapleton’s Chantry Chapel.

All Saints church in North Moreton has a complete window, the St Nicholas Window, of early fourteenth century glass in a beautiful and highly crafted chantry chapel built in 1299 at the behest of the Lord of the manor Miles de Stapleton. The top tracery of the window is interesting, being a very early example of a fishscale design, its glass is heraldic with yellow stars. The window is complete because it was effectively restored under the guidance of Charles Winston in the 1850s. Many of the heads had been vandalised and the pieces of glass that were inserted are obvious to spot but not intrusive, their muted colours were given a milky surface so they don’t jump out. You can see this approach on the empty shields in the top tracery and the scenes from the lives of Saints Nicholas and Paul (above centre). There are many marvellous parts of original glass painting, such as the miraculous draught of fishes at the bottom of the second column which illustrates scenes from the life of St Peter (above right).

Medieval glass is still in place in windows in the north and south aisles too, with a St Christopher (below left) a delicately painted crucifixion (below centre) and a grisaille cross (below right) in the kitchen area that’s right behind the south door.

North Moreton, medieval stained glass in the aisles and the kitchen.

St Andrew’s, East Hagbourne, 14th Century glass in the north aisle, and fragment windows.

The fourteenth century glass in St Andrew’s Church, East Hagbourne consists of two scenes, a nativity and a virgin and child (above left), and other fragments reset in to the tracery in combination with some really bright colours. The brightest and best on the north east corner is hidden away behind a curtain in the vestry (above right).

This church has a light but rich atmosphere, with yellowish windows in the other two east windows. I was particularly taken with the pierced screen at the bottom of the Perpendicular east window (below centre) and with the Lady Chapel where everything is well considered and harmonious. The stained glass is by Burlison and Grylls from 1939.

East Hagbourne, east window and detail, east window in the Lady Chapel.

St James, Radley. North aisle window, west window.

We went to is St James’, Radley mainly to see the four tree trunks that act as columns in the south aisle. It’s a small church and as extraordinary as it sounds with dark wood all around and a domestic feel emphasised, when we were there, by the sound of a ticking clock. The stained glass glows from every window, with arms and crowns on backgrounds of silver stained quarries. There are some older sections of glass, for example the angel between two royal coats-of-arms (above left) and the sixteenth century portrait of Henry VII up in the bell tower (above centre and right). But most of the glass is either very restored or else supplemented very skillfully by Thomas Willement in the 1840s.

The hand of the skillful rearranger of glass was evident in all three churches and a different approach was taken in each one. I normally go guidebookless so as not to get too annoyed by inaccurate descriptions of the stained glass process but there are a couple of things I’d like to point out.

1. When the original paint has come off the glass it hasn’t ‘faded’ although it may have come off due to a number of reasons. It may be, as in the North Moreton window, a newer piece of glass used as a replacement for a broken piece by the restorer.

2. Stained glass windows are nothing like jigsaws.

Radley, heraldic glass in the aisle windows.

Silver stain

Silver stain is a paint made from silver nitrate that turns some glass yellow when fired. It has been used for glass painting since the fourteenth century and it gave stained glass its name. I’ve written about my love of silver stained windows previously on my blog here. In my own work I usually use enamel when I want a transparent yellow, but below are two examples which show the great advantage of silver stain which is that you can put it on the back of the glass (you can’t do this with enamel as it sticks to whatever you lay the glass on in the kiln) and get a layered look.

Hillside from 1983 and Kelmscott Manor from 2014.

I haven’t bought any silver stain for years, but I have eight pots of it - all differently labelled - that I have acquired from various places over the years. I made a small panel out of my colour samples (below left) which included a strip of silverstain painted on the back and front of the glass - see how the metallic elements on the tin side of float glass change the pale yellow to amber. I also made some larger sheets to cut up (below right), failing to match the colours and textures that I achieved in the first piece I painted which is the tallest one on the left of the photo.

Leaded panel using colour samples with silver stain across the middle and sheets of silver stain in the window.

So I thought it was about time to test and label my eight silver stains. The variations in colour are shown below where I have put all the pieces together on the lightbox. I’ve used 6mm and 2mm float glass, testing how each stain changed on a sandblasted surface, on the tin side, when the painted surface is put up or down in the kiln, and whether the colour is better when fired at a lower temperature. As shown below, I can get pretty much any shade of yellow, ochre and brown that I want, and in combination with enamels on the other side of the glass I will be able to make any colours in the red, orange and green ranges too.

Other Peoples' Subject Matter

Ray Ward, Fred Baier and me on stage after our talk on 13/04/2023.

Ray and I were asked by our friend and Artworkers’ Guild Master Fred Baier to give a talk together at the Art Workers’ Guild in Queen Square, London. He wanted us to talk about our so called collaborative stained glass panels, a daunting prospect as I didn’t initially think I had much to say about them.

When we planned the talk it took us right back to the beginning of our partnership, after we met in art school in 1981. Ray remembered being impressed with the things I made that had a use, such as my patchworks and the stained glass that is shown in my sketchbook drawings (below centre). I remembered clearly the moment when I saw a poster for Ray’s performance on the wall at Trent Poly (below right) and recognised in it decorative qualities in the brushstrokes that were hard to find in a fine art department in 1981.

Left, our student union cards; centre, my sketchbook; right, Ray’s poster.

I also talked about the way that Ray’s paintings remind me of the things I like about the best stained glass, for example the little painting below left that shows an artist lounging in his studio (with echoes of Matisse’s Red Studio) where the carpet and clothes are really devices to fill with pattern. Ray’s recent work is mostly in black and white with good titles that are funny and poignant; examples that he showed in the talk include ‘Technically I didn’t throw the baby out with the bath water as it wasn’t in the bath at the time’ and ‘Today is all filled up with yesterday and tomorrow’ (below centre and right).

Three works by Ray Ward

Left, window at Frimley Park Hospital; centre, during the manufacture of panels for Central Liverpool’s Premier Inn; right, my lightbox with the last panel I made before lockdown in progress.

It was quite easy then to find links from Ray’s work that enabled me to talk about ten of my commissions from the intervening years, starting with an early screenprinted panel for Frimley Park Hospital (above left). I emphasised themes that come up when you work to commission such as using other peoples’ subject matter and having to present a design from which you cannot deviate.

I’ve described the making of our so called collaborative panels in previous blog posts here and here. I’m still making stained glass from Ray’s black and white drawings and, as I see myself as the technician on this project, I talked mostly about the techniques involved in making them. What I hadn’t realised was the link between the subject matter of the pieces I’d chosen to interpret in glass, from ‘I said Tell me the Truth and You Gave me a Lie’ (prompting one of our friends to send us the message “Are you guys OK?”), to two scenes of tension between couples in ‘That’s not really a question is it, more of a statement’ and ‘Just Another Story’ all shown below.

Ray is used to being plagued with comments from friends (for example ‘I didn’t know you were depressed/ill/rightwing’) who mistakenly think his work is autobiographical, this is something I don’t usually have to put up so I think I’ll choose a funnier piece next with a picture of a less downcast figure.

Under the disco lights that followed our talk, portraits of two greats of stained glass Christopher Whall (left) and Robert Anning Bell (right). Ray wasn’t the only person dancing (centre).