Rooflines

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?

Roof under construction: flower roof

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.

Panels in the studio this summer.

Airbrushing

The glass version of Kelmscott Design Number Two has taken a long time to finish, but here it is in my studio in Marlborough. Top left: first enamel layer before firing. Top right: completed and laid out on a tracing of the wallpaper version. Below: backlit and ready to be fired. This design is also a repeat, it's an irregular quadrilateral that rotates.

My renewed interest in airbrushing - and possibly also in the brown and yellow combination mentioned previously - comes from last year's project for Airbus in Bristol. This was the restoration of a magnificent window made in 1936 by Jan Juta for the headquarters of The Bristol Airplane Company. Working with Creative Glass in Bristol, we remade seven broken panels, including the  huge one with the propellor and the one with the compass, both shown below. The blocks of colour and the thin strips of clear and etched glass in combination with small areas of airbrushed detail have crept into my new work subconsciously.

Artistic licence

I enjoyed seeing my old work again, so here is some more. Above is a page from my 1987 sketchbook when I was designing a window for a house in Oxfordshire. This design was rejected  because of its industrial feel, the pylons in particular - outrageous because pylons are such a huge part of the Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire landscape. 

I remember when I was sketching telegraph wires next to an old barn when I was about fifteen, my Dad suggested to me that I didn't need to put the wires in the drawing. He explained this was called "artistic licence". It was a great relief to discover that I could leave things out if I wanted to, but pylons and telegraph poles are usually the things that I decide to leave in.

Pylons drawn and photographed near Yate                                                 Drawing from the attic at Kelmscott Manor

WM on the Tour de France route

I found two churches with William Morris windows on the Stage One Tour de France route. I watched the riders come through Otley this morning, then went to visit the churches. The first one, St. Wilfrid in Pool in Wharfedale, was decorated with bicycles and had a "Le church, le tour, le welcome !" sign but was locked.

The second, St. Margaret's in Ilkley, is a Norman Shaw church. There are lots of good windows inside, including one of four angels (below) designed by WM and made in 1894. It looks great and in composition is so much simpler than the rest of the windows (mostly made by Powell & Sons) in the church.