We took a walk around the village of Shrewton as suggested by the Churches Conservation Trust because there are three churches under their care within a 5km stroll, plus two other churches on the same route and two chapel buildings. It’s hard to imagine seven active congregations in this small area. The villages feel isolated because of their position on Salisbury Plain which is no longer a rich, farming area but one dominated now by the presence of the army. Following a footpath along the River Till and with other parts of the route skirting flooded fields, it was interesting to see two sets ..read more

The Bowls Club window, week one. The Marlborough group of Arts Together, a charity that brings together professional artists and older people for weekly art workshops, meets in the Bowls Club. The windows there provided a good setting for the latest version of my glass painting project. At the end of week one we had a row of glass pieces on the window sill ready to fire, their black iron oxide paint having been textured and scratched off by the group members. Four weeks later, after sessions of enamel painting on the centre and border pieces, I returned with the panels that I’d leaded up in m ..read more

The chancel, St Laurence Upton cum Chalvey. The church leaflet says that St Laurence Church in Upton cum Chalvey (a parish of Slough) ‘may justly claim to be the oldest building in Slough’. The oldest part is the chancel, rebuilt in the twelfth century on top of Saxon stonework and redecorated during the nineteenth century restoration of the church. Under your feet but hidden by the carpet under the bell tower (in the foreground above) is the grave of the musician and astronomer William Herschel (1738 - 1822), who lived in Slough for the last part of his life when he was King’s Astronomer to ..read more

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 wind ..read more

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 later, 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 ..read more

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, bu ..read more

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 sandbla ..read more

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 ..read more

Combination Trees 350 x 350 mm. As you can probably tell, I made the panel above by leading together glass pieces from two different styles of work, both based on trees. I happened to have the two painted pieces of glass shown below in a pile on my work bench and had a feeling they would go together well. The finished panel also uses other pieces of glass from the same two series as I fitted the two patterns together in the best and most treelike way. Tree patterns, left from the Theme and Variations series 2020, right sample from front door window 2023. The original background tree pattern ..read more

Left: West window by A.J. Davies at St Mary Magdalene Church, Crowmarsh Gifford. Right: Interior of St Lawrence, Warborough, Oxfordshire. Since seeing his little east window at St Margaret’s in Herefordshire (described on my blog here) I’m getting more interested in the work of A.J. Davies of the Bromsgrove Guild. The first window I saw on this Oxfordshire trip was in the church at Crowmarsh Gifford (above left) high up above the west entrance door and slightly lost in its surroundings (my zoomless camera couldn’t capture the details). However St. Lawrence church at Warborough, only four mile ..read more