My first tapestry was completed when I was 7 years old. It was a small picture of an owl sitting on a branch at night and behind it a full moon. When it was finished I gave it to my Gran. It was 25 years before I did another one. This time several small sailing boats in a harbour, following a pattern in the Women’s Weekly, a once ubiquitous magazine in homes of people like my mother who enjoyed stories, recipes, knitting patterns and the occasional craft suggestion. It used different stitches, gobelin, half cross stitch, satin stitch, tent stitch. Two tapestries in quarter of a century. At this rate I might manage two more.
But then I visited Durham Cathedral in the late 1980s and was transfixed by bold shafts of rainbow light coming from the far end. Like the glory of the Lord in Isaiah’s vision, coloured light filled the worship space. Still pristine clear, it filtered bright sunlight into a spectrum in which all the colours of the rainbow had been rearranged as if scattered and regathered into a giant kaleidoscope. The new stained glass window functioned like the stage lights of a rock concert, announcing the presence of the main act, in this case, God who is the energy source of light.
The window in question is ‘Daily Bread’, designed by Mark Angus, and dedicated in 1984. It was a gift from the staff of Marks & Spencer to celebrate the centenary of the company. I spent a long time staring at it.
‘Daily Bread’ is an abstract representation of the Last Supper, viewed from above. Words like stunning, breath-taking, cool, brilliant, and all the other over-used superlatives wow social media images – to use another evaluative cliché, they didn’t come close.
Transfixed. Amazed. Silenced. Eucharist. These are better. I fell in love with the sacrament of colour. Texts I knew by heart from 20 years of celebrating the Lord’s Supper moved from monochrome print to dynamic image, creating in me a different kind of spiritual receptiveness. Stained glass as exegesis of the deepest truths in our faith; oh I knew about medieval windows narrating Bible stories to those who could not read.
This, however, was different, for me at least. This window opened windows in my mind, compelled attention to the very feelings it was creating. I felt addressed by a Presence I recognised, but in a medium that was new, strange, and beautiful in a way that expanded my inner awareness of what external beauty can do to a soul.
I bought a slide, remember them? I had an idea. If I could take home some of the richness, texture, luminosity, sheer There-ness of that window, and what that first look conferred on a tourist knocked off his spiritual stride – if only! Somewhere and sometime between leaving the cathedral and arriving home, I had decided to do a tapestry of that blessed window.
Those were still days of slide projectors; digital technology, image transfer, and photo reproduction were still 20 years away. With my slide, and the guide book with its colour photo of the window “he wondered, he stood in his shoes and wondered…”
Forgive the random line from a poem I once recited in early primary school and won second prize! But I did have to wonder. How to capture enough of the image, and the memory of the experience, to make it worth the effort, and more importantly, worthy of the memory.
On a sheet of drawing paper, pinned to the wall, I traced the bare outline of the window from the projected slide. It had to be a reasonable size to allow for variations in colour, and recognisable shapes. Tapestry canvas is made up of tiny squares, how to recreate images that are flowing, curved, circular is a perpetual challenge. One essential is sufficient scale to allow sharp angles to be softened.
Then the colours – wools didn’t come near the vivid contrasts and bold luminosity of the sun shining through the Daily Bread window into the dulled dustiness of Durham Cathedral unlit on a summer’s day. That’s when I decided on stranded cotton. It comes in bright colours, bold as brass, or any other loud colour. But stranded cotton is made in numerous shades of the same colour, and its strands are separable making it possible to mix and match on a different kind of palette.
I traced a bold but quite accurate outline on to the canvas, and with the colour photo as guide, set to work. The canvas was 20 mesh, (20 holes to the inch) the finished size 18×40 cm approx. It took a while. Well over 30 years on, it has faded a little, it has been reframed and remounted, but it still carries the excitement and the memory of that minor epiphany in Durham. And it set me on the way to a form of art which has increasingly become expressive of spiritual experience, and in the doing of it enriches my own spirituality. That’s a post for another time.
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