Weather Over the Firth

A chapel of rest is used for perhaps forty minutes at a time, by people who are not in a condition to read a narrative window. Anything with figures in it would have been an imposition. What the building had was a north light — flat, even, and unchanging — and the brief, such as it was, came from the funeral director: give them something to look at that doesn’t ask anything of them.

Five lights, graded left to right from a squall to a clearing. No paint. The whole thing is cut glass and lead, which means every effect in it had to be found in the sheets themselves, and we bought nine sheets we did not use because they were a fraction too even.

Working without paint

Paint is a crutch. With it you can rescue a badly chosen piece of glass by knocking it back with a matt. Without it, the cutting has to be right, and the choice of sheet has to be right, and if you get either wrong the only remedy is to cut it again. It slows the work down by about a third and it is worth it. There is a liveliness to unpainted glass that a fired matt kills.

Plating in panel 12

The one departure: in panel 12 there are eleven pieces with a second sheet leaded behind them — a pale amber, barely there. It is the only warmth in nine square metres of blue, and it is what makes the window turn rather than simply lighten. From inside you cannot see that it is two layers. You can see that something happens there.