Mark Angus in Slough

Slough, looking towards St Mary’s Church from Trinity United Reformed Church and the same view through the stained glass inside.

Slough is the home to some of the finest twentieth and early twenty first century stained glass; Alfred Wolmark’s celebrated 1915 abstract window in St Mary’s Church; one of my largest handmade commissions now in storage as the building it was in, a community type centre called ‘The Centre’, has been knocked down; and Trinity United Reformed Church with all of its windows by the British artist Mark Angus.

Trinity United Reformed Church. Three walls, all eleven windows by Mark Angus, 1995 and 2002.

I was interested to see Mark’s work in a modern, fairly neutral building where the windows get no help from the atmosphere inside in getting a religious message across, which is one of his stated aims. The church member who showed us in said how much the congregation liked the windows and that they had invited Mark back to complete the set when more money was raised around 2002.

The windows are like pictures in an exhibition, not visually linked to each other in what seems an unusual decision for the space. The symbols and signs that indicate the meaning of the windows (still, an explanatory card seems to be needed for each one) take precedence over an interior design approach and the result is quite exciting.

East facing corner; blue window representing The Ascension in to Heaven with St Mary’s spire visible through it.

The full height Ascension window (above left) works brilliantly, with big bits of streaky blue blown glass and liberal use of the device that links all these windows - little strips of lead floating across the main lead lines in a technique that was intended to ‘liberate the lead line’. The only painting that I could see was a faint wash with sgraffito details for hands and faces, the only etching those stars in the window below right. This means the stained glass is more transparent than it often is, how good to see the buildings outside, and to see the strong colours reflected on to the window reveals and sills even on the north side of the church.

I’ve included a photo of each of the small windows below - do they go together and do they need to?

South east wall; St Andrew in the middle.

North west wall; windows commemorating Reverend Jamie Ross, Minister’s wife Ina Ross and Moira Stephen, ‘Spirit of Dance’. I think these are the three windows made in 2002.

North west wall, "‘Cycle of Life’ window on the right.

Details from the last two windows on the north west wall.

Mixed Media Drawings

In the Pauline Boty exhibition at Gazelli Art House is a stained glass panel new to me, the fourth of hers that I’ve seen. These student works from the late 1950s and early 1960s hold a great fascination for me, they are full of her unrealised potential and also of my own memories of being a stained glass student in London. That was seventeen years or so after Boty’s time, the world had moved on but stained glass didn’t seem to.

Pauline Boty, Untitled (Architectural details, Edwardian Woman) c.1960/61. Collage and stained glass panel.

The best thing was seeing the collage (above left) that shows how she worked out the design of the stained glass panel.

The best thing at my next stop, the mansion now exhibition space that is Two Temple Place, was a postcard on sale in the shop showing the design for part of one of their celebrated windows (below left). These Clayton and Bell beauties from 1895, landscapes with people and buildings at sunrise and sunset, put everything else I have ever seen in this exhibition space into the shade. These are a different type of drawing, done not to work things out but to show someone what the finished window will look like.

Clayton and Bell, water colour on paper.

I used to be able to get away with presenting that sort of drawing for a commission. I mean an ink, watercolour or pencil sketch that didn’t try to look like glass, other than by showing some lead lines. My final design for a rooflight in the new extension at the Russell Cotes Art Gallery and Museum (below left) mixes views I’d drawn along the coast in Bournemouth with scenes from the rooms in the museum. These views and scenes had gone through many versions by the time they became part of the stained glass panels, with areas working better in one or the other medium, for example the scratchy trees along the cliff tops in watercolour and a particularly good pier in painted glass.

Left: Design for rooflight at the Russell Cotes Art Gallery & Museum, Bournemouth. Sasha Ward 1990. Right: Stained glass rooflight, 3 metres in diameter.

Since that time, 1990, I haven’t often used lead in my large commissions for buildings. Alongside a changing glass technology, where the design is screenprinted onto large sheets of float glass in transparent and opaque enamels, came a different drawing and design process. It seemed untruthful (under the influence of ‘truth to materials’) to have my hand sketches made into stencils and screenprinted. Instead I started drawing shapes for stencils sometimes incorporating photographic imagery, and as the years went on, drawing on the computer. All of this translated very easily into the screenprinting process and also meant that the design could look like the finished artwork would - something that the commissioning bodies particularly liked. An example of this is the hanging panel I made in 2006 for Dewsbury Health Centre (below). The arches in the design remind me of Pauline Boty’s untitled panel, but also of how far I had moved away from making those spontaneous looking, scruffy mixed media drawings.

Left: Collage design for hanging panel at Dewsbury Health Centre, West Yorkshire, Sasha Ward 2006. Right: Hanging panel, 3.2 x 3.2 metres.

An Insertion

My 1978 diary records me learning how to cut a hole in a piece of glass - ‘an insertion’. Because I have a tendency to keep everything, I found the 1978 insertion in my glass racks (above) and was surprised to find how close to the edges of the background glass I got as I smashed and nibbled my way to the perimeter of the circle.

Large piece of glass showing the bashing and removal stages during the cutting of an irregular shaped hole in it.

These days, I use a drill or order a piece of glass already drilled with holes. I have been known to sandblast through the glass to start a hole off, but decided to return to the old school method to cut a big hole for a chunky glass insertion with an irregular shape. The method goes like this - first score and open up two circuits; then cover the centre with crisscrossed lines; then start bashing from underneath the glass; then start removing squares of glass with the notches of an old fashioned glass cutter; finally remove the edge pieces with glass pliers.

Left: hole in glass, Right: piece of glass to be inserted in it.

Handling glass and finding out how much it is willing to do for you is satisfying. It was actually harder cutting small holes in thin glass to make the central panels of glass sketches that explored some ideas. Should the colour of the glass extend beyond the circular lead line (above right) or be contained by a thick lead line (below right) ? Should I combine black painting with enamels on the coloured glass strips (below) or should I introduce sandblasting in lines that ignore the leading (above) ? It’s hard to decide these things on paper, but the little glass sketch often provides the answer.

Lead Lines

On the five day stained glass course at West Dean College students sometimes make panels which are particularly good because of the way that the painting and sandblasting combine with the leading. There is no set way of doing this as you can see from the variety of examples I have chosen below.

Panels by students at West Dean College. Top: Gillian, Helen’s workbench, Zahra. Bottom Karl, Sarah, Julie.

Top left (Gillian) used a silhouette of black paint around the edges of the pieces thus disguising the lead lines, which is good practice. Bottom left (Karl) used lines of black paint and sandblasted areas in the foreground to link the separate glass pieces, which is also good practice. Top left (Zahra) framed interesting pieces of chunky glass with off cuts, collage style. Bottom right (Julie) combined the collage style with lines and spatters of paint worked across the lead lines. The panel at bottom centre was a particular triumph in its use of a colour palette where nothing jumps out and where the lead lines describe the objects while also making a pattern. This student (Sarah) did all the painting on one evening when she was able to put the glass pieces next to each other on a light box, it’s really hard to do good glass painting when you haven’t got the space to do this.

West Dean House, window with portrait of Edward James by Patrick Reyntiens 1990s and foliage detail.

The Patrick Reyntiens window in the oak hall at West Dean House is useful for showing students some of these glass painting techniques. They are usually amazed to discover that you can’t really make out from a distance what is lead line and what is black paint. This is loosely applied, with scraffito details, on the green glass that makes up the tree trunks and the foliage (above right).

Panel by Susan, 2023, with inspiration from Louis David.

Sometimes a student’s panel references a particular window, like Susan’s version of a Louis David figure from a window in Colmonell, Ayrshire. In the photos above you can see the stages in between, with a fabulous drawing on black paper where details from the illustration of the window were moved around to make something new. On another of last year’s courses, Benedikt found a Harry Clarke illustration of the mealstrom and combined it (hooray for originality) with his version of the stick man from the album cover of Led Zeppelin IV (below right).

Panel by Benedikt, 2023, with inspiration from Led Zeppelin and Harry Clarke.

On this year’s course Helen finished her large (600 x 500 mm) door panel of Thunderbird 2 flying over the sea. Her originality was in the working process, with the overall design in her head rather than on paper. The separate elements - sea, sky and copper foiled Thunderbird came together over a few courses like magic, trailing lead lines through the broken pieces of sky.

Thunderbird 2, made by Helen completed in 2024.

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).