Painting on glass and ‘found poems’

My water lily

… This is what I was doing last Saturday, at a Creative Arts Day at St Columba’s Retreat Centre in Woking. Christian artist and theologian Emma Phillips led the day. The theme was Living Water, based on Bible passages like Psalm 42 and John 4, about Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well.

Our creative exercises took two forms: visual and word-based.

We were each given a glass panel and a template. The image I chose was of a water lily floating on a pond. We then laid our panels flat, fixed securely, on top of the templates. We painted the outlines onto the glass in thick black lines, copying the templates. The black paint had to dry fully before colour could be added – the black lines will then hold the colour in. Glass paint is thin and quite runny, so you have to dob the paint in, using dabbing motions. You can’t blend colours – that won’t work on glass, apparently, or at least not for beginners: the paint is added in solid blocks of colour.

I'd not painted on glass before, and found it both challenging and enjoyable. I was quite proud of the result. Unfortunately, later that evening when I showed my painted glass lily to some friends, I forgot that the white paint wasn't quite dry, so it ran, leaving my water lily with an impressionistic white streak. You live and learn!

While we were waiting for the black paint on our glass panels to dry, Emma had invited us to create a ‘found poem’. She gave out scripture passages and magazines – I got ‘Country Living’. We had to find and cut out fourteen lines consisting of two or three words, seven from the Bible and seven from the magazine. Grammatical correctness wasn’t necessary, as we weren’t creating complete sentences or aiming to write perfect poetry. Our mission was to seek out the words that spoke to us, and we had to include two examples of the phrase ‘living water’.

For a writer, this was a simple, but rewarding, exercise. This is my ‘found poem’ in its pristine state, just as I pasted it onto paper to make a simple collage:

discover the way
living water
all your waves
your waterfalls
Beautiful Living
experience the freedom
living water
welling up
flow from within
sustainable living beautiful
life more wild
brings me peace
never thirst

I’ve since added a few words to make it into a more ‘proper’ sort of poem. But I like the raw version too.

It’s rewarding to try out a new art form. And good, too, to find a new way of creating a poem.

I work for the United Reformed Church at URC Church House in London. I’m also an Anglican lay minister. I wrote a devotional for the anthology Light for the Writer’s Soul, published by Media Associates International, and my short story ‘Magnificat’ appears in the ACW anthology Merry Christmas Everyone.