Contrary Rhythm

The Intermediate walkers were on a route around the Healey area today. Martin led us along country roads and then across fields and through woods. The sun shone.

We stopped outside Healey Church for our coffee. Inside I found this modern stained glass window which I thought might interest some of you.

Winner of the ACE Award for Art in a Religious Context 2015.

"In St John's Church, Healey, Northumberland, the Healey Windows by Anne Vibeke You and James Hugonin - very different in conception - form one commission in this remote village church. They are a memorial to two parishioners. The brief asked for windows which would contrast with the narrative style of earlier glass in the church. The artists were to achieve 'meditative power, poise and stillness'

"The Mountain window* is hand engraved, comprising thousands of small marks punched into the surface of the glass to create a cloud-like effect. The Hugonin window, by contrast, comprises 2160 small squares and rectangles of coloured antique glass, sandwiched between two clear sheets, each of which is laser-etched with a grid. (From Art+Christianity website)

James Hugonin (b. 1950, British) is an established painter.  His paintings evoke rhythm and sensation through a meticulous working of colour on a grid. 

He wrote:
 'The grid I use is a forming principle, a structure to work with and to work against. It is a systematic structure imposed upon the surface, but if I use it inventively, it gives me tremendous freedom to create complexities of rhythm and pattern. I need something stable: the very regularity of the grid is needed to oppose the irregularities of the rhythms. All of these configurations that I put down are intuitively arrived at, they do not conform to any pre-planned system. I always want to make something that will defy the system I have initially imposed - the system of the grid itself' (quoted in James Hugonin, exhibition catalogue, Serpentine Gallery, London 1991.

* the Mountain Window is not pictured here