alfred fisher glass

 

 

Sixty five years of working in glass unsurprisingly produces a great deal of work, some of which will always give pleasure if not complete satisfaction while conversely some may have been better not started.

James Hogan, that great designer of an earlier era whose work had flowered throughout Britain and across the U.S.A. used to say that if you were satisfied with your work you might as well give up at once and I don’t know of a single work where I wish I’d done something just that little bit different.

Starting in the relatively traditional post-Hogan environment of James Powell of Whitefriars I simultaneously had the enormous privilege of spending evenings in the studio of the eminent Hungarian artist Erwin Bossanyi while working on his Washington and Canterbury Cathedral windows.

It was also the period which saw the emergence of the John Piper and Coventry era and the massive influence of German design which followed from the seventies onwards. It was therefore inevitable that I would absorb a wide range of influences, conscious and otherwise, all of which contributed ultimately to an independent recognisable style.

Yet like an actor there is a risk that one becomes type cast and frequently one’s best works are tucked away in situations where they are little seen and thus unknown. At one end of the scale in this group are several convents and private houses, while the private chapel of Buckingham Palace is equally impenetrable for utterly different reasons.

With modern information technology so advanced everything seems possible to all men but the misrepresentation of one’s work occurring on websites can be utterly infuriating, especially when mixed up with windows which have nothing to do with one’s own work.

 Hence the decision to make this little selection from a life’s work, at least those windows and objects which I can still face and respect. In this way the art historian of the future will have their path eased and hopefully you the onlooker will at least enjoy something of what you see.