Cartoon Couple — Fortieth Anniversary, Stained-Glass Sculpture, Porto

Forty years, one chapel, and a stained-glass window they had looked at every Sunday for most of that time. The commission came from their children, who wanted something that was neither a bench nor a photograph.

The brief

A pair of figures, about 2 m, cartoon rather than realistic, for the chapel garden. And then the instruction that made the piece: use the window. Not the pattern of it — the materials and the logic of it.

Thinking like glaziers

A stained-glass window is not a painting. It is an assembly of separate pieces of coloured glass, and the black lines are the lead that holds the pieces together. Nothing can overlap and nothing can blend.

So the sculpture is divided into sixty-eight panes, each one a single flat colour from the chapel window’s five: deep cobalt, ruby, emerald, amber and pale gold. The five colours are distributed evenly, with no two adjacent panes sharing one, exactly as a glazier would work.

The lead lines are physically raised, about 6 mm proud of the surface with a rounded profile, so that the sculpture has real shadow between its colour fields. That is the detail that makes the whole thing work: a stained-glass window has depth because the lead sits in front of the glass, and ours does too.

Where the faces had to bend the rules

In a real window, eyes are the hardest thing to render, because a rounded eye cannot be made from flat panes. We solved it by making the two eye panes on each figure the only pieces small enough to read as a single shape, and by giving them a slightly deeper recess. They are the only soft edges on the piece.

In the chapel garden

It stands at the end of the cobbled path, at 2 m, so the figures are seen against the granite wall. In late afternoon the low sun comes through the hedge behind and the panes pick up a genuine reflected glow. The grandchildren have already assigned a colour to each member of the family, which was not in the brief and is the best thing that has happened to it.