Big Ben

The wonderful design for this window was created by my customer Doug. Together we collaborated on the design and rummaged through my many sheets of glass to get just the right colours and textures we needed to create and “paint” the window. No actual paint was used. Just wonderful, glorious glass.

Doug was raised southwest of Nelson in Aotearoa New Zealand with the mountain Ben Nevis in view. Named after the Ben Nevis in Scotland, the distinctive shape and snowy peaks of the local namesake, known affectionately as Big Ben, are seen in the central part of the window’s design. A further link with Scotland can be seen in the lower third of the design. The Glaswegian artist Charles Renee Mackintosh famously influenced the development of art nouveau and art deco styles. Doug lived in Vienna in the 1980s and 90s and often enjoyed finding Mackintosh influences in the work of Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, and Adolf Loos.

Having worked nearly thirty years with the United Nations, the wreath at the base of the design is a nod to the olive branch emblem of the UN. But it could also allude to heads of wheat and the old dusty combine harvester which Doug knew as a child.

The middle section of our window is more abstract. While visiting Zurich, Doug was struck by the style of the Fraumunster Church windows and thus began his interest in the work of Marc Chagall and particularly the interplay of light and colour. Here we have used Antique & modern glass .The straight-lined green may allude to forestry which is prominent in our region.

The circle itself has a deeper symbolic meaning. The concave curves & convex curves are drawn using the same radius as the whole circle. During Doug’s years in Vienna, he was drawn to the music of Richard Strauss. A contemporary of Mackintosh, Strauss set Hermann Hesse’s Beim Shlafengehen (Going to Sleep) to music. The lyrics refer to soaring, free in flight, to live life deep a thousand-fold in the magic circle of the night. The sweeping curve above Big Ben is perhaps that magic circle of the night.

As a whole, the window design captures multiple styles and themes which have personal significance. The sense of calm, acceptance and completeness as expressed in Beim Shlafengehen, is the underlying symbolism of the Big Ben window.