The Queen’s Window at Westminster Abbey by ACC Art Books

Every effort has been made to acknowledge correct copyright of images where applicable. Any errors or omissions are unintentional and should be notified to the Publisher, who will arrange for corrections to appear in any reprints. Courtesy Bing McGilvray: p. 4 © David Hockney, photographer Jonathan Wilkinson: pp. 5, 9, 10, 14 bottom left, 15 top both, bottom left, 20 bottom, 27 both, 31 right all, 35 top, 36 bottom, 38 top & centre, 40 all, 46 © David Hockney, photographer Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima: pp. 6, 12, 13, 14 top both, bottom right, 15 bottom right, 22 © David Hockney, photographer Richard Schmidt: p. 7 © Lamberts Glass, www.lamberts.de: pp. 16/17 all, 18 © Succession H. Matisse/ DACS 2019 Image: London/ Bridgeman Images: p. 21 ‘Tree of Life’ Stained Glass behind the Altar in the Chapel of the Rosary at Vence, 1948–51 (stained glass) by Henri Matisse Courtesy Barley Studio: pp. 28 top, 29, 30, 32/33, 34, 35 bottom, 36 top, 37

This edition © Scala Arts & Heritage Publishers Ltd, 2020 Text of interview © Tacita Dean and David Hockney Remaining text © Westminster Abbey Enterprises Ltd Photography © The Dean and Chapter of Westminster except as listed above First published in 2020 by Scala Arts & Heritage Publishers Ltd 10 Lion Yard Tremadoc Road London SW4 7NQ, UK www.scalapublishers.com ISBN 978-1-78551-237-7 Project management by Jessica Hodge Design by Raymonde Watkins Printed in Turkey 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of Scala Arts & Heritage Publishers Ltd.

THE QUEEN’S WINDOW BY DAVID HOCKNEY WESTMINSTER ABBEY

Acknowledgements The Dean and Chapter of Westminster and the publishers gratefully acknowledge the material assistance given to them in the preparation of this publication by: Tacita Dean; Hockney Studio; Barley Studio; and Lamberts Glashütte, Germany.

‘I became aware that I was going to do something quite important for the Abbey … I’m proud of the window. It looks terrific in there.’ David Hockney, March 2019 The Queen’s Window was designed by renowned artist David Hockney for Westminster Abbey and unveiled in autumn 2018. In an extended conversation between Hockney and fellow-artist Tacita Dean recorded specifically for this publication, the artist reflects on his approach to the design and his use of colour, as well as on the underlying themes that the window represents. The work was commissioned in autumn 2016 by the Dean of Westminster, The Very Reverend Dr John Hall, to celebrate the reign of Queen Elizabeth II as England’s longest-serving monarch. The resulting design is a vibrantly coloured and quintessentially English country scene featuring a Yorkshire landscape with the hawthorn blossom that Hockney loves, reflecting his sense of The Queen’s own abiding delight in the countryside. The artist himself describes it as a ‘celebration’.

THE QUEEN’S WINDOW BY DAVID HOCKNEY WESTMINSTER ABBEY

The Queen’s Window by David Hockney Westminster Abbey follows the process of making the window from design to installation, illustrating traditional glass-making techniques that have been in use since the Middle Ages. It provides detail on the conception, consultation and creation, from initial commission and choice of subject; through colour selection, glass-making and cutting, leading and finishing; to the final dedication ceremony only two years after the initial commission. The text also draws on the knowledge and expertise of Barley Studio, makers of the window, and is richly illustrated with photography generously supplied by both Hockney Studio and Barley Studio, as well as by Westminster Abbey.

F OR E W OR D

By The Very Reverend Dr John Hall, Dean of Westminster

The Dean, The Very Reverend Dr John Hall, and the artist stand in the north transept admiring The Queen’s Window.

There is some good stained glass in the Abbey – the G.F. Bodley rose window in the south transept and the James Thornhill rose window in the north transept. There is also post-war glass by Hugh Easton, Alan Younger and Hughie O’Donoghue. But there have also been windows at the lower level in plain glass. For many years I had contemplated a plain glass double lancet window on the west side of the north transept and thought how wonderful it would be to re-glaze it in celebration of The Queen’s remarkable reign, in view of Her Majesty’s particular role as Visitor of the Abbey. But who would do it? It occurred to me that the only artist who was a member of the Order of Merit, in the personal gift of The Queen, was David Hockney, such a celebrated and imaginative artist and known

and loved so widely. Could he possibly do it? How could I reach him? I mentioned the question to our Surveyor of the Fabric, Ptolemy Dean, who assured me that his sister Tacita Dean lived in Los Angeles and knew David Hockney quite well. She could approach him. Such a miracle, it seemed to me! On 29 June 2016, the great feast of our patron St Peter, after the Sung Eucharist and with incense hanging heavy in the air, David Hockney with colleagues was seated in the nave, awaiting me. I took him round and showed him the window I had in mind. He was immediately interested in colours. He told me he could do nothing for six months. Two days later, he sent me an iPad sketch: wonderful. This guidebook tells the story of what happened next and the marvellous outcome that we celebrate here.

F OR E W OR D

By The Very Reverend Dr John Hall, Dean of Westminster

The Dean, The Very Reverend Dr John Hall, and the artist stand in the north transept admiring The Queen’s Window.

CO M M I S S I ON I N G David Hockney was born in Bradford in 1937. He trained at the Bradford School of Art (1953–58), followed by the Royal College of Art (1959–62). In 1964 he moved to Los Angeles but regularly returned to the UK, particularly during the 1990s prior to his mother’s death in 1999. In 2003 he moved back to Yorkshire to work on plein air landscapes of the Yorkshire Wolds. He continued to travel between Los Angeles and Yorkshire, finally returning to Los Angeles in 2013. In 2019 he moved to Normandy to paint the changing seasons. He has been honoured with several awards, including Companion of Honour (CH, 1997) and the Order of Merit (OM, 2012), and became a Fellow of the Royal Academy in 2012.

David Hockney interviewed in Los Angeles, March 2019, by fellow-artist Tacita Dean

David Hockney in the north transept, recording the window’s location. David Hockney and Tacita Dean, photographed in Los Angeles by Bing McGilvray.

TD: Had you been to Westminster Abbey

– you must have done – in your life? DH: Yes, I’d been in it before. TD: But do you have any particular memory? DH: I’d only been in it maybe three times. I remember the Poets’ Corner. I mean, it is an unusual church in that it has got so

many statues and carvings in it; it’s not quite like an ordinary church, is it? TD: No, and it has a special responsibility, doesn’t it? DH: Yes, it does. And actually it’s even in the Bayeux Tapestry. The Bayeux Tapestry begins with Edward the Confessor in Westminster Abbey. He said he was going

David Hockney accepts the commission from Westminster Abbey to design The Queen’s Window, his first work in stained glass ■ SEPTEMBER 2016

to give the crown to William of Normandy and he sent Harold to tell him this, and the Bayeux Tapestry shows this happening. The Bayeux Tapestry covers the four years up to 1066 and it’s 70 metres long. It has no shadows so when did shadows begin in European art as that’s the only place you find shadows? Westminster Abbey is

depicted in it. But then I had another little book, which showed Westminster Abbey depicted around 1320 when it was the biggest building in London. And it was the tallest building until the late nineteenth century. Westminster Abbey has a function; it’s where kings and queens are crowned and some are buried.

David Hockney interviewed in Los Angeles, March 2019, by fellow-artist Tacita Dean

David Hockney in the north transept, recording the window’s location. David Hockney and Tacita Dean, photographed in Los Angeles by Bing McGilvray.

TD: Had you been to Westminster Abbey

David Hockney accepts the commission from Westminster Abbey to design The Queen’s Window, his first work in stained glass ■ SEPTEMBER 2016

SUBJECT CHOICE

DH: Yes, and I thought how would you

In 2003 David Hockney moved back from Los Angeles to Bridlington, East Yorkshire, to paint the landscape of his youth. He arranged his annual diary to be in Yorkshire for ‘action week’, when the hawthorn blossom and the spring colour arrive. He painted a series of works celebrating his love of the hawthorn at different times of year.

do that? In old-fashioned windows, you’d have a little figure here and stuff there and it gets niggly… TD: Which reminds me that I went recently to see the stained glass in King’s College in Cambridge and they used a lot of shading in the glass. Was it a deliberate decision not to use shading on your window or did you not even go there in your head? DH: I was thinking of pure colour, yes. I didn’t want shading. Helen (Whittaker) from Barley Studios told me about shading. TD: So they did propose shading? DH: Well, she showed me how you could do it but when we’d been to the Abbey, and you’d suggested landscape and well, I thought, yes the hawthorn, I thought, the hawthorn is celebratory. It is. It only lasts a week at the most. I thoroughly enjoyed it in Bridlington every year. When David Hockney, The Big Hawthorn, 2008, oil on 9 canvases, painted in David Hockney’s Yorkshire studio.

The artist working on Woldgate Before Kilham in 2007.

TD: Did you go up to the Triforium Gallery? I was thinking what would you do for it… DH: Yes, fascinating up there. I became And I was thinking of The Queen…? aware I was going to do something quite TD: Do you think it was the fact that they

important for the Abbey… TD: Only after you did it? DH: Yes… TD: I picked up on that in a way… I remember when the Dean [The Very Reverend Dr John Hall] asked my brother [Ptolemy Dean, Surveyor of the Fabric] to ask you … you took your time? DH: Well, yes. It was only when you said: what about a landscape, because otherwise

David Hockney sends initial iPad design to Dean of Westminster Barley Studio in York commissioned to make window

■ SEPTEMBER 2016 ■ OCTOBER 2016

called it ‘The Queen’s Window’ that made you think you had to take another road? DH: Yes. But I think it was the right road because I think it works. TD: No, it totally works. I just wonder if it had not been called ‘The Queen’s Window’ whether you would have hesitated in the same way initially because you thought you might have to illustrate that concept, which is impossible?

the hawthorn came out, we’d drive all over. There was a fantastic lot of it in East Yorkshire and I did point out that if this had been Japan, there’d have been ten thousand cars on these roads, there would… TD: Like the cherry blossom…? DH: There’s nobody there. Somebody even asked me what time of the year the hawthorn came out and I thought, how do you mean? It’s spring! I mean, don’t you know? They’ve lost contact with nature. I think that’s a mad thing, really. Driving around is like champagne has been poured over everything. It’s fabulous. Fabulous. Little valleys you go down and all this hawthorn. The only people who observe nature right now are the farmers and they always see it in a certain way; they have to deal with the weather … the rainy day… TD: But you’re right. What is the most exuberant thing you can celebrate about Britain right now, and The Queen, and it is nature. It’s still the thing I miss about England.

SUBJECT CHOICE

DH: Yes, and I thought how would you

The artist working on Woldgate Before Kilham in 2007.

David Hockney sends initial iPad design to Dean of Westminster Barley Studio in York commissioned to make window

■ SEPTEMBER 2016 ■ OCTOBER 2016

Detail from upper right section of The Queen’s Window. left

David Hockney, Hawthorn Blossom, Woldgate No. 2, 2009, oil on canvas. right

DH: Yes, it is what I miss… TD: But David, I read recently in Robert

Macfarlane’s book Landmarks that the Oxford Junior Dictionary had dropped a lot of words to do with nature. [Reading] ‘Under pressure, Oxford University Press revealed a list of the entries it no longer felt to be relevant to a modern-day childhood. The deletions included acorn, adder, ash, beech, bluebell, buttercup, catkin, conker, cowslip, cygnet, dandelion, fern, hazel, heather, heron, ivy, kingfisher, lark, mistletoe, nectar, newt, otter, pastime and willow…’ and they replaced them with words like chatroom and celebrity. That’s what your window reminds me of, everything those words conjure up… DH: Yes. Yes. [Reading] ‘A sharp-eyed reader had noticed there’d been a culling of words connected to nature.’ Why? TD: When I read that, it broke my heart as I, like you, had an English childhood that was full of meadows and damson trees and buttercups and cow parsley... David, I think you are an artist who has transcended your Englishness and are known as an artist in Los Angeles who has managed to shake off national identity but in a way you keep it too and use it and return to a sort of Englishness, and the window becomes a combination of this…

DH: I feel deeply English. I do. I’m an

English Los Angelino. As far as I know my family was always English going back to agricultural labourers in the nineteenth century. They were English peasants at one time, I’m sure. That’s all I can be; that’s what I am. I’m not Scottish. I’m not Welsh. I’m English. TD: If I think about England, it is about the countryside… DH: Lots of people said to me when I did my show at the Royal Academy (2012) that I’d made them look at trees again. People didn’t notice trees. When I was sitting for Lucian Freud was when I noticed the spring again. I was walking from the bottom of Holland Park, where I live, to the top of Holland Park, where he lived. I walked up every day and I watched the spring, and I saw it. I thought, well, I’ve missed this for 20 years. I mean you don’t get it here [in Los Angeles] and it was a marvellous experience, actually. One time, I sat down to watch rabbits. There were black rabbits and white rabbits there. I’m sitting on a seat watching and I have a cigarette. And then magpies come, and they’re black and white. It’s a marvellous little scene. I’m just watching, smoking a cigarette. And three girls come jogging by and look at me and say (about me smoking), ‘Oh no, no,

Detail from upper right section of The Queen’s Window. left

David Hockney, Hawthorn Blossom, Woldgate No. 2, 2009, oil on canvas. right

DH: Yes, it is what I miss… TD: But David, I read recently in Robert

DH: I feel deeply English. I do. I’m an

no...’. They think they’re very healthy but I think I’m healthier; I’m seeing the rabbits. They never saw the rabbits. They never saw the magpies. TD: So something came out of that portrait? DH: I sat for him for 120 hours. I was three months walking up and down. And I remember the spring. It began in February or March. I saw the whole thing come out. TD: So do you think being in LA has made you more attuned to seasons in England? DH: Well in LA, there’s a lot of nature; I have a nice garden here. You don’t really get the seasons like in Northern Europe. You don’t go from a very bleak winter to a full summer, and that takes about two months, doesn’t it? Spring happening is about two months. In America, it’s a week. TD: Do you miss it being here? DH: Yeah, you get a bit. Going down Outpost Drive is always the same mostly, as they’re almost all evergreen trees. So you don’t get from bare trees to full trees. When Stravinsky composed The Rite of Spring, which Disney animated in Fantasia, he made it about dinosaurs clomping around. Well, that wasn’t what I thought Stravinsky’s percussion was about; it was about plants coming up. And in Russia, in Northern Europe,

David Hockney, Hawthorn Blossom, Woldgate No. 3, 2009, oil on canvas. right

Detail from lower right section of The Queen’s Window. opposite

you’d go from very, very bleak trees to a full summer. Well, that’s a marvellous thing. We’re about to go and watch this in Normandy. I couldn’t think of anything better to do during the next few months than that. People have forgotten about spring and that Oxford Junior Dictionary thing is very telling. Why would they do that? TD: It’s because they don’t think it’s important but childhood is entirely about those things, every child, even an urban child must have a relationship to a conker or a dandelion or a weed? DH: Conkers. I don’t suppose anybody plays it now, do they? TD: Well, horse chestnuts have this disease now in Europe… DH: Have they? There are horse chestnuts on the corner of Edward Square and you’d get these conkers. You used to play with them as a kid, you put a hole in one and put it on a string and you’d attack the other one and if it broke and you won, your conker would become a one-er. And if it broke another, it became a two-er. If you broke a two-er, you’d then become a three-er. This is what we did when I was about eight years old, just at the end of the war; there weren’t many toys. Every kid had conkers.

David Hockney, Hawthorn Blossom, Woldgate No. 3, 2009, oil on canvas. right

Detail from lower right section of The Queen’s Window. opposite

DESIGN PROCESS The task of converting David Hockney’s initial iPad design into stained glass, to fill the chosen window space in the north transept, was entrusted to Barley Studio in York. Established in 1973, Barley Studio has an international reputation for excellence in both stained glass creation and conservation. In February 2017 David Hockney visited Barley Studio to investigate stained glass techniques and discuss the design. Managing Director Keith Barley and Creative Director Helen Whittaker continued to work closely with him to realise his vision. ‘David Hockney is such a skilled artist, and to think that he was wanting to explore the medium of stained glass was extremely exciting for our profession. It’s not necessarily an art form that people recognise in the art world, so to have artists like Hockney … shed light on it is really positive.’ Helen Whittaker, Barley Studio

TD: Was it a conscious decision to make the

drawing on a backlit iPad because it was for a backlit window? DH: Well, it seemed to me very sensible to do it on an iPad. In fact, I’d drawn out the first one within three days of going to Westminster Abbey and then I just refined it. I was very pleased when I’d done the first one because of the colour; I could get this colour. The colour does shine out there. The artist working on the original design in his Los Angeles studio. ■ NOVEMBER 2016

David Hockney sends iPad design to Barley Studio

TD: Was it a conscious decision to make the

David Hockney sends iPad design to Barley Studio

David Hockney working on the design in his Los Angeles studio with Helen Whittaker of Barley Studio.

‘Our involvement in the project was to translate Hockney’s artwork into stained glass craft; to ensure that the final work was recognisably Hockney while also being structurally sound, following the principles of good stained glass craftsmanship … Windows suffer wind pressure like the sails of a boat. We have to incorporate a horizontal support structure.’ Keith Barley, Barley Studio

David Hockney draws support structure and lead-lines onto design artwork, aided by Barley Studio ■ FEBRUARY/MARCH 2017

‘I was asked if I’d go out to help work on the half-scale design, so I stayed in his house for three or four days, which was incredible. When I opened my bedroom door in the morning, I saw the famous blue balcony that features in so many of his paintings. He’s got a beautiful studio with lots of light, and we were able to see the full colour design at half scale … David had done a lot of the lead-work

already, when I flew out to assist him. Although he’s not trained in stained glass, he did come to our studio in York during the process, to familiarise himself with the various techniques. He chose to follow the traditional way of making stained glass, which involves using glass and lead. Just those two elements.’ Helen Whittaker, Barley Studio

David Hockney working on the design in his Los Angeles studio with Helen Whittaker of Barley Studio.

David Hockney draws support structure and lead-lines onto design artwork, aided by Barley Studio ■ FEBRUARY/MARCH 2017

Detail of top of left-hand section of The Queen’s Window.

TD: Bing [McGilvray, David’s longtime

friend] said earlier that he’d recently read an article where scientists had concluded that the Universe itself has consciousness and that we feed into this consciousness. DH: Well, you’re never going to go to the edge of the Universe in a spaceship. You’re only going to go in your head. And when they say the further away you can see in the Universe, the further back in time you’re seeing, that’s a difficult concept to grasp. You’re seeing the past. I’m suspecting now that the Universe isn’t what we think it is. Did I show you that headline in The New York Times? I put it on the wall at LA Louver [David’s 2019 exhibition]: ‘Less is known than people think’. Yes, I thought, we don’t know much. TD: Do you remember we talked about ‘time’ being the fourth dimension when I was writing about your photography? That time might be the fourth dimension in your recent photographs. Time is the one element we know nothing about. DH: Time is the great mystery. We can’t imagine the absence of time but it must be there. TD: It must have been there. DH: It must have been there, yes. TD: Or maybe not? We just think that everything has to be finite because we are. DH: You know that when they went to the moon and they looked back? They saw the Earth and it was blue, pink and colourful. And they pointed out that the rest of the Universe looked like black and white: it was the only thing with colour. And I thought, well, that makes us really special, doesn’t it? And then you think, well, where is the centre of the Universe? The centre must be everywhere. How do you know where the real centre is because you need to know about edges? TD: Which brings in perspective again, David? DH: Yeah, yeah… I met someone here, a scientist [Carlo Rovelli], who said there was something perspectival about time.

I read it in the Financial Times. I wrote to him and he came and saw this piece that I’d done [Seven Trollies, Six and a Half Stools, Six Portraits, Eleven Paintings, and Two Curtains, 2018] and said, I see you’re using lots of perspectives… We used to think we were the centre of the Universe and the sun went round the Earth but then they found out that we go round the sun. But we could still be the centre of the Universe. TD: If we’re the only point of colour in it. DH: When you get into this area… TD: It’s too big… DH: Yes, it’s fascinating. It’s big, so big. I think about it sometimes. I think about these things now because I’m 81 and I’ll be 82 in July. So how much longer do I have? I don’t know. Maybe one year, maybe three, maybe five, maybe 10. It’s not going to be 20. I’m not going to see 20 years, fit. If I live to 100, I’ll be pretty shaky and feeble. But I’m not afraid of death; I don’t think. But I’m afraid of pain. TD: I remember hearing on the radio someone talking about the writer Susan Sontag’s true fear of being ‘extinguished’. That was the word, ‘extinguished’: that was what death meant to her, being extinguished and there is something terrifying about that word. I think that’s what frightens me: the fact that there can be no retrospection on death. It’s the one thing we can’t think back over. DH: But we don’t know what death is, do we? TD: No. DH: Nobody does. Nobody does. It might be that the moment you die, you go up into a fantastic place and if anybody bothered looking back to Earth, they would think, well, they’re all going to be coming here anyway so we’ll leave them there. Consciousness – that’s the great mystery: consciousness and time. What is consciousness, really? The Illustrated Secret History of the World reminded me of a book I read about LSD and about this one drug that only lasted for 20 minutes but people thought it lasted for hours and they said it was like being in an indescribable place,

Detail of top of left-hand section of The Queen’s Window.

TD: Bing [McGilvray, David’s longtime

indescribable. Well I thought, what would be indescribable? And I thought indescribable would be just adding one more dimension. Just one more would make it indescribable to us. And if you added two or three… And mathematics plays with adding dimensions. Eleven dimensions! TD: Well that’s beyond my mental scope. Even one more… DH: Well, it’s beyond anybody’s mental scope. Which direction would it be? TD: A direction we don’t know, I presume… too big for our brains… Did you ever have any doubts in the process of making the window, David? DH: No, not really. We made that big photo of the Abbey a long time ago. It was from the Guardian or somewhere and we put the picture in it. And I thought, well, it does look terrific because of the colour... I’m a bit like Van Gogh. He, at one time, was going to be a preacher and then he rejected it all, but he came to see nature as a much more powerful force

than he was. Well, it is. God is in nature. And nature, we’ll never really know why. I remember in about 1900, the President of Harvard said we don’t really have to study physics that much now. They’re just working out the last little bit of it and then it will be finished. Well, the last little bit opened out, didn’t it? I’m sure it’s always going to be like that: you’re almost there and then it’s going to be like that. That seems like a pattern in the Universe, doesn’t it? What can we know about it? So like Bing said, consciousness could be outside our bodies and we tune into it. TD: Yes. DH: It could be... I mean I always assumed that religions were started for social control, really. For instance, the Roman Catholic Church, for a few centuries, commissioned really good artists to paint altarpieces and so on. The last good artist that painted an altarpiece was Delacroix, about 1840. After that, the Church never really commissioned a great artist again. But then, I’ve pointed out: if you wanted to see pictures in 1500, 1600, 1700, mostly you had to go to church. But after 1900… TD: You could go to museums… DH: Images became very big in what we call the media. They’d worked out the photogravure process and images could be printed in a newspaper, and newspapers were started in about 1890. TD: And that correlates with a departure from religion? DH: Yes, but I then pointed out that the media is now broken up and you get images everywhere now. TD: So you’d go into a church for its lack of them? DH: Yes, yes. Now you would. JP [Jean Pierre Gonçalves de Lima, David’s assistant] and I used to go into the little church in Fridaythorpe [East Riding of Yorkshire] if we’d been busy painting and were passing. It’s a tiny little church, eleventh century. We liked it; we’d just sit in it. TD: Just to go back to this idea of the break in tradition of great artists’ work in

churches. It’s true that churches don’t commission great art anymore. But your window is great art and that’s an interesting return? And maybe the window can have a similar effect as it used to? Unfortunately, we live in a world with a surfeit of images but your language is so bold and emphatic and colourful… DH: Most images today are quite forgettable. Some images, you never forget. That image [pointing to The Tower of Babel by Pieter Breugel], I have always remembered. I first saw it, probably in a little black and white reproduction when I was about 10. They talk about iconic images now but I’m not sure that’s the word. You might say memorable images: some images are memorable and some aren’t. So if I say to you Picnic on the Marne, an image can come into your head… TD: Or not… DH: The [Henri] Cartier-Bresson photograph of the people sitting on the riverbank... Pictures can come into one’s head. Some we remember very vividly. There’s a whole load of images now but I do notice, on Facebook or somewhere,

if you see a little drawing you notice it. TD: Yes, photography has lost its authority. DH: Yes. TD: That’s why I don’t use the word media for the plural of medium anymore because it has lost its meaning now. I say mediums… One last question: Barley Studio in Yorkshire: did you know about them before? DH: Yes. We’d driven past it lots of times. It’s just outside York on the road to Bridlington. TD: I was very impressed by their artisanal skills. DH: Yes, that colour is always going to stay there. TD: That idea about mediums becoming obsolete or anachronistic, it was great just watching that medium – stained glass – function so well in the twenty-first century. DH: Lots of films don’t last. Lots of things won’t last… TD: Yes, most likely my whole medium will be wiped out but the stained glass will remain! DH: Yes, the stained glass will. I’ve always painted to make things last. I knew about this. I use quite thin paint…

Detail of lower right section of The Queen’s Window.

TD: So they don’t crack? Still the window

will outlast your paintings. DH: Yes, it will. And I became aware of that when it was being made that it was going to last. Westminster Abbey is a thousand years old now. It says somewhere ‘established 960’. That’s not 1960, it’s 960 – over a thousand years ago! To make a building like that today, it would have to be enormous – you’d have to do it in a desert or somewhere – it would have to be enormous because, if you think about it, to someone going into that building in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, the building would be enormously tall: you’re looking up to Heaven. I pointed out that space needs edges for us to understand it. When we look at the sky, it’s infinite as there are no edges. We can’t grasp how far away you’re looking or seeing. With cathedrals, it’s about looking up. When I stayed in Cologne, in that hotel by the Cathedral, every morning, I used to go for a walk and when I came back, I used to go into Cologne Cathedral and sit and think. That’s the tallest cathedral… TD: You’re totally right. Now the only things we build are things to look down from. We don’t build negative space anymore, do we? DH: No. TD: We don’t build a vortex that’s so high... DH: When you think about it when the cathedrals were built, how awesome they would be. When you go into Westminster Abbey, it looks tall but there are loads of taller buildings now. TD: What staggered me was learning that a mast on some of these huge schooners was the same size as Westminster Abbey. Climbing that single pole, it would warp your idea of scale. But you’re right. To make a building now that would put people in awe would have to be 15 times the size of Westminster Abbey… DH: Yes. Detail of top right section of The Queen’s Window.

I’m proud of the window. It looks terrific in there… it’s because of the colour.