Page 6, 12th May 1961

12th May 1961

Page 6

Page 6, 12th May 1961 — WHITEFRIARS: Home of a new Technique for a New Age
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Organisations: St. Nicholas School
Locations: London, Canterbury, Surrey

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WHITEFRIARS: Home of a new Technique for a New Age

PLAYING WITH LIGHT . .
By MARI AN CURD
A GLASSMAKER'S furnace lit 281 years ago on
former Carmelite property just off London's Fleet Street has never gone out: It burns on today taking in its stride many commissions for a modernage product—the demand for concrete-set stained glass.
Fifteen years after the Great Fire of London; 12 months before the last martyr, BI. Oliver Plunkett, went to the Tyburn scaffold, William Davis lit his fire amid the ruins of White Friars Friary in ill-famed Alsatia, land which then still held the right of Sanctuary.
Today, many newspapers — including the CATHOLIC HERALD stand on this site, but the fire has moved on: carried in a brazier on a lorry back in 1923 to the giant Whitefriars Glass Studios at Wealdstone in Middlesex.
Unique
Whitefriars today are not only unique in being the only firm in the world to make their own glass including traditional leaded stained glass windows and exquisitely hand cut domestic glass, but, as one of the directors. Mr. W. Harman told me when I visited the factory recently, the firm are pioneers in this country in the art of creating the jewel-like concrete-set stained glass which is so eminently complementary to much of our present-day architecture.
-The firm's king-pin ideas man for this modern style is Mr. Pierre Fourmaintraux. a Frenchman, who saw, even before the last war that churches in his homeland near the German border were adopting this medium.
But it was only a few years back that the idea really began to take on in England. But take on it did —with new Catholic churches and schools popping up all over the country taking the lead to such an extent that at present among commissions for many different parts of the world the majority on the Whitefriars books are for Catholic churches or school chapels wanting concrete set stained glass.
Though this medium may look simpler than the traditional—and still extremely popular — leaded glass, there is no less skill in its preparation: but the cost can be up to 50 per cent less.
You can't tell Mr. Fourmaintraux that you want a window, abstract or otherwise, and expect him to produce one in a day. He has, as he pointed out to me, to sit, sometimes for days, waiting for the right inspiration: and then to translate that inspiration to paper and to colour: colour particularly.
Whitefriars has more than 300 colours available and others can be produced to order but it takes the eye of the artist and the feel almost of a poet to balance and compose these inch thick pieces of glass. A sample. deep ruby red lay on a shelf along with greens from palest lime to deep olive; blues from the deep to the almost neutral; yellow from lemon to barley sugar streaked golden brown. Oh yes, the novice could make a hideous jazz-bag: the artist a thing of composite beauty.
Next step
How do you commission a window? First. in co-operation with your architect you talk it over with the stained glass artist. You may have an idea of what you want to depict; you can bring drawings or hook illustrations, or you can tell a man such as Mr. Fourmaintraux of Whitefriars that you want a special saint or symbol. Or you may want your window to serve by bringing in light: to serve for the straying eye to work out its own interpretation of skilfully curved, intcrwining and broken lines—in other words. the abstract.
But don't go away with the idea that your "abstract" window will be any easier to execute than for example the traditional palmhearing martyr or saint.
Mr. Fourmaintraux will then prepare for you a small-scale painting of what your window or wall— yea, this concrete-set glass is fully tested for fabric use—will look like. You may fall for it instantly, or you may suggest modifications. changes in colour.
Your Amiss agreed, a full-sit s
cartoon is drawn with thick separating lines left for the concrete "filling". The coloured glass is then assembled in thick seven-inch squares: artist, chemist, glassmaker and craftsman combining to harmonise their skills. The pieces are cut to shape, the cutter following a tracing of the full size enlargement, the surface of each fragment cut into facets by hand — flying glass here seems to present no peril!
Between the jigsaw of pieces a copper wire re-enforcing frame is laid. The concrete is then trowelled into the cracks and the whole left to set—for as long as three to four weeks.
I saw windows lying on the brink of departure for St. Nicholas School chapel in I.eeds; I saw cartoons for the handsome traditional leaded style, and also the very tall windows in the concrete stained glass technique which will enrich the new church of St. Aldan at East Acton, windows showing twelve of the Saints and Martyrs. And how too should this parish value the symbolic history of the Church which in window form will flank with fiery colour the entrance to their new church?
A masterpiece too are the nine abstract, sweeping. concrete-set panels Mr. Fourmaintraux has designed for St. Raphael's, Yeading, Hayes. Another new St. Raphael's, that at Stalybridge, Cheshire, has its stained glass from Whitefriars: so too have English Martyrs, Morley, Surrey; St. Thomas of Canterbury. Whyteleafe, and another Hayes church, that at Botwell Lane; St. John's, Bootle, and Holy Cross, Patricroft.
William Davis who set light to his London furnace in 1680 would, I think, feel quite at home at Wealdstone among the men I saw trundling barrows of searing molten iron-red glass: making their own crucibles from fire-clay: watching — as I did — the palest yellow sand arriving from Fountainbleau and pouring gently as if in an egg'imer through an aerating breeze; or standing amid the craftsmen drawing molten glass on a hollow blowing iron from the furnace in unhurried, rhythmic motions—twirling, breathing down the air which will start off the formation of a glass-to-be.
So casually these men work. They have space. They take care, in fact. the whole "glasshouse" speaks of care and pride in a worthwhile craft: a craft founded in antiquity thriving in progress.




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