All are situated in areas rich in evocative history, both human and geological. These various homes, perhaps unsurprisingly, reflect a deeply romantic aspect of the British landscape. His current home and studio are in the Vale of Blackmore, deepest Dorset. Later, as a student at Edinburgh College of Art, Denny lived in the red-soiled rolling Scottish coastal region of East Lothian. The family then moved to Daneway House in the Cotswolds, Gloucestershire, an idyllic fourteenth-century yeoman’s hall remodeled in the seventeenth century as a manor house. He was first brought up near Constable’s Hampstead Heath in London. Perhaps even more influential was the genius loci, the spirit of place. Josef Albers’s teaching maxim was “to open eyes.” Denny’s art does just that for both our interior and exterior perception.ĭenny was born in 1956 into a family with strong links to art and architecture: his father was an architect, his mother a painter, and his uncle Robyn Denny a painter of international repute. To experience a Denny window is to enter an installation of symphonic color combined with stunning narrative details, painted with great tenderness. He is best known for the ravishing fields of color in his windows, works that are etched, stained, and painted with a peculiar combination of meticulous care and expressive brio. His windows adorn buildings ranging from Durham Cathedral to the smallest of rural parish churches and are scattered across Ireland, Scotland, England, and Germany. Since the 1980s and 1990s, Denny has evolved from a widely exhibited landscape artist who regularly showed in New York, London, Bath, and Regensburg, to an innovative stained-glass artist whose work is also strongly marked by tradition. As we will see, literature, particularly poetry and biblical sources, is always close to the heart of Denny’s creative inspiration. The metaphysical conceits of the poem lie hidden in plain sight and draw the reader bit by bit into a mystical meditation. Marvell is not escaping from the world but taking us into God’s very particular, localized sacred space. However, his visions of the bucolic sublime are not rarefied fantasies like Marvell’s garden they are earthed, or rooted, in close observation of natural phenomena. Denny also presents us with scenes of the world saturated with rich color. The soul sees in its own color, a heightened, all-encompassing green. Marvell imagines a soul freeing itself from the gravity of its mortal body and rising through the branches of a tree until it can see a complete vista of the natural world. “The Garden” was written during the turbulent Restoration period that followed the English Civil War, and was published posthumously in 1681. Both poet and artist draw us into a realm of reverie in which our perception of the world is transfigured, becoming sacramental, a communion of the senses. Despite the lapse of nearly four centuries, there are striking similarities in their response to nature, understood as God’s sacred creation. But they offer an uncanny précis of my friend Denny’s life’s work. THESE TWO STANZAS of Andrew Marvell’s well-known metaphysical poem “The Garden” may seem an unlikely starting point for an article on the renowned contemporary British stained-glass artist and landscape painter Thomas Denny.
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