When David and I first established Williams & Byrne, we made a solemn promise to one another … [click to continue…]
From the category archives:
Stained glass case studies
Just in from a loyal newsletter follower, Dorothy Collard, who writes:
There’s so much I want to ask you, but I’ll start with the Literary Agent’s front door. – Just how did you do it?
How?
There are several answers here.
And one answer – as some of you will remember – is that I got stubborn and refused to put up with bad smells in the studio … [click to continue…]
Our ever-collecting client, just because he liked it, had bought a 19th century window from an auction house in Paris, France.
The trouble was, it was the wrong shape and too short by 10 inches for the particular place he had in mind within his ornate lakeside villa. [click to continue…]
Here’s a shot of the fitting … [click to continue…]
It works, that’s what people say. They are astonished by the effect of the glass on the space around it.
Photographs come later – tonight some sleep.
You spend weeks and months on the design – moving from tiny black-and-white sketches to 1:10 half-toned approximations; and then onwards to a full-sized water-colour painting, plus a full-sized black-and-white tonal drawing (to give a clear instruction to us painters about where the light must pass through really clearly) …
And then you finally come to cut the glass, and paint it, and silver-stain it, and also plate it (in order to create the perfect colour as you see it in your mind), then you paint and silver-stain the plating.
At last the piece is encased in lead, with neatly mitred joints to show each graphic angle. Cemented and polished. Fitted in its various frames with steel armatures.
So, tonight, it lies “finished” and strapped against our A-frames, in readiness for tomorrow’s installation, but – exactly because it is an architectural piece – until tomorrow, when we fit it, who knows what this window really is?
That is our responsibility as designers and painters of stained glass. Responsibility to the donor and his memories and his loss. Responsibility to the building itself. And responsibility to the people who will enter the building, each with their own particular memories and their own particular loss.
These unimaginable things matter – nothing else.
First-time visitors, click here to start at the beginning of this bizarre tale of stained glass design …
It was P.R. Exec. #1 who broke the silence: “Where did you say that this new stained glass window was going?”
Are you new here? Well, for the story so far, you must click here!
…
Our Public Relations team looked shocked. Anyone would have thought that we’d dismissed them and moved to a different Agency.
"It's the end of the world!"
Or (much the same thing) that a particularly terrifying prophecy in the Book of Revelation had come to pass.
What on earth had we done?
I checked that my hands were in full view on the boardroom table, still holding the architect’s crumpled drawing.
What on earth had we said to cause such fright?
