Stained glass bursary: Session 1

I have been awarded an AN bursary and it is to support me in developing new skills in stained glass making. One of the things I have to do is to develop a report on the experience and to explain how these new skills will help me to move on as an artist. This blog it would seem to me is an ideal place within which to reflect on the processes involved in undertaking the bursary. Those of you who follow these posts and who are students, will perhaps feel at times anxious when learning a new skill, as skills take time to develop and it takes a while to see how you might use them to develop your art work. So hopefully seeing how another person reflects on the process might be useful. On the other hand some of the people who follow this blog are experienced hands and might want to see how a new skill can revitalise a well established body of working procedures and processes. 

Because this blog is centred on how drawing helps with problem solving, I shall also show how it is central to the thinking processes related to the development of this new set of skills. In particular how cartoons are used as a central element of both the design process and the practical construction of a stained glass panel. 

The bursary is paying for 15 three hour taught sessions at Hannah Stained Glass and I will be reflecting on each session as it occurs.

Session one

Drawing up a cartoon

Before undertaking the sessions I had to decide what sort of work I wanted to translate into glass. I had originally wanted to add glass to my skill set because I felt it had spiritual qualities due to the illumination that emerges from the penetration of light through the materials of its making. It also involves working with an intensity of colour that can be emotionally very powerful. Therefore during the summer before the sessions started I began a series of paintings designed to attune myself to a colour range that I could see working in glass. I was also wanting to develop a series of images that furthered my ideas concerning animism, and in this case I decided to focus on developing a series of images related to my boyhood experience of having a Sooty glove puppet. All children seem to be able to channel feelings and thoughts through inanimate objects, be these dolls, toy soldiers or other play things and now I am a grandad I see this very clearly when I watch my grandchildren play, and so decided to revisit a time when  Sooty acted as my surrogate and showed me how to do things I couldn't. A shaman would understand the process very clearly and I have always been drawn towards the art of people who lived thousands of years ago. An ability to use psychic energy to inhabit a landscape feature or channel an animal spirit must have been very useful to any shaman who was embedded amongst the tribes of indigenous peoples that inhabited these islands in the time before the Roman's came, and perhaps at some future date there will be a return to similar ways of engaging with the world.

I began as usual with drawing, filling many sketchbook pages with simple images. 

Sketchbook images

Once I had an idea of where the images were going, (I was particularly drawn to my 1950s experience of watching films with Sooty at the old Gaumont cinema in Dudley, where my mother worked as an usherette), I began to work the images up in more detail and to revisit old sketchbooks where I had previously touched upon the idea. 

Key to these ideas was the fact that Sooty had golden yellow artificial fur. This became the colour key for the development of the paintings that were to become the forerunners for the stained glass image ideas. 

A1 and A0 sized acrylic paintings

I had recently developed plantar fasciitis, so had a lot of pain in my heel and it therefore seemed to me that I could use the Sooty figure in a similar fashion to how I had previously used votive ideas, as a sort of material intermediary in a psychic process that could help externalise and remove the pain. This also helped me to further my investigations in relation to visualising interoceptive experiences, (in this case pain), so I was confident that these images would be about real experiences and that they would enable me to continue the development of my personal mythos and image narratives which constitute the bedrock out of which my artwork emerges. 

I had to eventually stop painting and choose an image to work from, especially as for the first session I had been asked to draw up a cartoon of what I wanted to do.

This image was decided upon as the instigator or model for the stained glass 

A1 size acrylic painting of Sooty acting to relieve my plantar fasciitis, with accompanying cartoon

Initial cartoon with idea for border

I had no idea what the cartoon should be like, so I guessed I would have to put an idea together about where the leading would go and I also guessed that the painting could operate as a colour reference. 

Once in the workshop and presenting what I had done as preliminary work, I was made to realise that I hadn't really understood the real nature of a stained glass cartoon. The leading is incidental, yes it is needed to tie everything together, but the cartoon is used to determine the exact shapes of the pieces of glass that need cutting out. Leading is of course going to be the way the pieces are eventually going to be held together, however just as glueing is going to be the way a collage is eventually held together, and will be vital to the success of your collage, you would not begin with or foreground the glueing. Media specificity is vital here. An idea can still operate in a different medium, but it will work differently. Its form needs to be reshaped to fit the nature of the specific materials that will now be used and what is communicated will now include narratives specific to this new medium. Media specificity also includes an awareness of the constructional processes that are needed to make sure the materials are used in such a way that they will not fall apart because of a lack of understanding of their nature. Perhaps later you might want to break the rules, but that is something that has to be done with a good understanding of the rules you are breaking. I.e. I have had to hold myself back from playing, but I'm still planning to do that later. 

I was asked to begin a new cartoon drawing. My original drawing was A1 size and I was also asked to slightly reduce this, as my piece was going to be freestanding, and without the extra support of a solid window frame and cross bars, an image that big would be subject to a lot of stresses and strains and could be liable to break. I was then asked to make another cartoon that sat within the edges of a new sheet of paper and not to simply use the edge of the paper as the edge of the drawing as I had done before. The frame is vital to the structural integrity of a stained glass piece and by making my image go to the edge of my paper, I had not given myself any room to detail the specific framing information needed. 

As this is going to be a freestanding panel, it was decided to use zinc came as the supportive edging material. This decision gave us certain information. Zinc U Section Came is 12 x 5mm and it comes in 2 Metre lengths, but these 2 Metre lengths will be cut in half for posting unless requested otherwise, and an additional cost will apply on full lengths. (I'll separate out costings and suppliers but getting to become aware of these things is as much a part of learning a craft as the actual doing of it)

The supplier gives a specification as above, but in order to make the drawing more information is needed so it was decided to divide the 12mm width up into three sections as in the drawing below. 

I was now able to begin my cartoon and draw out the frame in such a way that it was going to be very clear where the edges of my glass would go. 

The Zinc U Section Came is set out as light pencil and the edge where the glass will go is identified by a black Sharpie line. In fact all the shapes for the glass will become defined by using a black Sharpie to set out their boundaries. The thickness of the Sharpie in effect replacing the 1mm thickness of the zinc. The frame drawing is carefully checked for accuracy before then moving on to draw the actual design. 

Redrawing the cartoon

The first cartoon is then analysed for weaknesses and to see if there are any decisions that would result in hard to cut or too thin areas of glass. It was decided that there were several problems. The first were to do with a lack of structural integrity that was due to long lines of continuous leading that went down through the design of the leg area and the fact that I was suggesting the use of quite large pieces of glass. This could be overcome with a combination of staggering lines and cutting across these lines with smaller pieces of glass.

Main initial problems identified from the first cartoon.

I had tended to think of the leading as making up the edges of each image, but for instance where the toes are drawn there is a tight curve, this can be overcome by painting in the shape of the toes, inside a wider shape formed by the leading. This was an issue that needed resolving throughout the cartoon, therefore a 'double drawing' was decided upon. A black Sharpie would be used to determine edges of the glass and pencil shading to determine where painting would be needed to clarify the design. 

Another issue was the relation between the border and the image. The border is useful as it helps give structural integrity and contains the image. One of the problems with stained glass designs is that they can visually push out from a centre and that means that the eyes are tempted to follow the implied trajectory of the lines of leading, which tend to lead away from the centre. A border helps stop this and the observer's gaze is held within the frame. However the border can become separate and operate simply as a containing device, so something needs to be done to resolve this. 

In the case of the image I was working on, because one element (the arm) comes in from the side, it was decided to use this as a way of integrating the border into the design and to follow the implication of the form out into the border. 

The second cartoon

The new cartoon has several changes, the most important being that the Sharpie lines now represent the actual edges of the pieces of glass. If this passes muster, (which it may not), then the next job will be to make a tracing of it and to cut out all the sections, so that I have templates from which I can cut glass pieces.

Detail of cartoon

The edges of the area that will be painted onto the glass is ghosted in pencil 

I have tried to eliminate any really tight curves or sharp points, but whether these have been sorted out properly, will depend on whether glass can be cut sufficiently precisely. I have also tried to make more edges straight as these are much easier to cut. 

I then roughed up a colour idea in Photoshop, after scanning in the hand drawn cartoon. This was made to be able to assess the warm/cool colour balance and to check how the yellow of Sooty would sit with a pink/violet complementary set of leg forms.

Colour rough

The colour rough isn't something I am going to copy, it is simply to give me an idea of where I'm going. The area around the heel is treated differently, because this is where I will try and work more directly with the glass, and will develop fused glass textures to try and replicate the pain feeling that I tried to depict in the painting. 

Sooty will be more defined and Medieval looking. 

Study for stained glass Sooty

Because the next session would involve glass cutting, I was told I needed to have my own glass cutter by then and was shown examples of the type to buy, which had reservoirs for the necessary lubrication oil inbuilt into their handles. 

Materials needed for session 1

Paper, sketchbooks, ink, paint etc for developing design ideas

Paper for cartoons

2B and HB pencils to draft out designs 

Rubber to remove pencil adjustments

A black fine line Sharpie to draw up finished cartoon

Computer and Photoshop software to develop colour roughs for cartoon

See also: 

Stained glass session two

Stained glass session three

Stained glass session four

Stained glass session five

Some earlier thoughts on stained glass

Williams and Byrne (A company that works with the traditional skills I'm learning)

Martin Boyce at the Modern Institute

Martin Boyce

When I was up in Glasgow last weekend I managed to catch the Martin Boyce exhibition at the Modern Institute. Boyce had installed decorative wall mouldings throughout the gallery, a sort of recreation of the typical moulding you would find in a rich bourgeois apartment. His work was framed by these devices, each image  partly a colourfield painting and partly a support for a series of linear frameworks designed to look like antique lamp fittings. Each panel was covered with industrial paint built up in washes and these surfaces were covered with industrially cut out circle patterns. On each painting, Boyce positioned linear elements which were made of metal armatures and hanging chains. These were sprayed black and worked as 3D drawing elements that played off against the painting surface. Throughout the gallery space there were free standing linear forms, very like standard lamps, providing a human like presence. 

Martin Boyce

I thought the exhibition was very interesting as it took the idea of paintings in a domestic space and twisted it so that the various elements were and were not acting out their traditional roles. The paintings were of course hanging on walls, but the moulding was put in by the artist as part of the exhibition, so that the decorative feature is now on exhibition, as well as being a frame for the paintings. In a domestic space we usually see paintings hung next to various light fittings, but in this case the paintings become the support for these fake fittings. In the room stand more objects that look like standard lamps that have lost their light shades and bulbs, which are of course not really light fittings, as they are metal sculptures, bronze casts and so unusable as supports for lights. This room is asking us questions as to the role of rooms and how we think of them in relation to paintings. Do we isolate paintings and other art from the rooms we see them in, or should we see the work as part of the 'furniture'. Perhaps in many rooms paintings and other pieces of art are indeed seen as 'part of the furniture'. Boyce's work reminds us of the way that art can be 'domesticated' and that it has often been seen as just a classier interior decoration. 

Martin Boyce

Boyce's standard lamps lean against the walls and in doing so they work as a classic case of the rhetoric of metonymy. Standing for human beings, they both people the space and make us aware of how we design objects that in effect work as replacements for other people in the spaces that we live in. The overly designed interior is often cold and soulless, people are too messy, and Boyce's work touches on these difficulties. I wondered if he had in the past been to some rich person's house and looked at his own work on some expensively patterned wall and thought to himself, "what am I doing providing work for spaces like these? 

As far as drawing students are concerned the thing of interest here is 3D drawing in relation to flat images. Boyce opens out a dialogue with domestic spaces and in doing so asks us to think about what is and what is not a drawing. The 3D fittings are very easy to read as linear (drawn) objects, but could you also read the moulding as a type of drawing? These are hand-made objects, made in such a way that they look like manufactured things. Again Boyce asks us to think about the status of these objects, are they designed or thought of as art works? 

Overall a very interesting exhibition and one that reminded me of the importance of not accepting where work is exhibited and eventually displayed as being neutral things, and using an exhibition opportunity to question the very nature of what it is to hang work in a room.