MASTER OF A MEDIAEVAL CRAFT

By Kim Johnson

Sunday Express Section 2

November 23, 1997

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Generally it is a rare man who leaves his mark on society - as opposed to on his family and friends - after a mere 34 years on this earth, so you might dismiss the papers and books of Mike Watson, who died at that tragically young age, as insignificant. You'd be wrong.

The four cardboard boxes donated on November 14^th to the UWI Library by Watson's mother Mollie comprise an invaluable record of Watson's remarkable stained-glass work, a mediaeval craft as unknown in Trinidad as it was pervasive in Watson's life. "That," said Mollie Watson, "is what his life centred around." And every important project of Watson's is documented in the collection in minute, loving detail.

There are, first, his many evaluation reports on the stained glass windows of churches throughout the country, complete with the relevant correspondence. Each one comprises diagrams and photographs of every window in the church, identifying each individual piece of glass. There are lists of every way attrition has affected each component of the window: the glass corrosion, cracking and breakage; the lead disintegration and warping; the exhumation damage; the metal corrosion in the casement.

"I have given a considerable amount of my time in order to assess and analyze the damage necessitating restoration and repairs, along with a design for job in question," he wrote tetchily on February 23^rd, 1987 to the Rev. Carl Buxo of St. Margaret's Anglican church in Belmont, complaining of Buxo's non-response. "As you know stained glass is a luxury item and with the present state of the country's economy we have had no choice but to take serious measures in streamlining our studio."

Clearly Watson's finicky documentation arose partly from a need to justify his expensive services to potential but skeptical clients. "Any existing stained glass should be considered an asset to the church, if not financially then historically," he cajoled Fr. Winston Joseph of the All Saints Anglican Church. "The rose windows now in existence would be worth 75,000 Pounds Sterling against the hammer at Christie's or Sotheby's."

But the documents tell of much more than Watson's persuading impecunious priests. And as the St. Margaret's project burgeoned into the creation of two entirely new windows, that too was documented in the obsessive detail of a man in love.

In one of the large black folders are, for instance, over 200 photographs and step-by-step verbal descriptions of every stage of the project, starting with the "cartoons" - diagrams not unlike full-size paint-by-numbers drawings of the projected panels.

In this case the two panels included children of every race singing the praises of God, Yoruba drummers invoking Him, an African man offering a bunch of bananas and an Indian woman picking a hibiscus flower.

From each cartoon a "cutline" pattern is traced as a template along whose lines every piece of glass is cut. The resulting shards, each one a piece in the overall jug-saw puzzle, are painted and fired.

Watson's kiln had a capacity of ten panes, firing them for six hours, after which it took 24 hours to cool. Each pane had to be fired three times.

At this firing stage in the Trinity Cathedral restoration Watson recorded one of the setbacks he encountered. "The painting and firing of glass constituted a tremendous amount of work and time for the patterning (of) designed windows (and) motifs to be reproduced," he wrote. "Initially, however, upon firing the studio found the paint to be actually firing almost entirely away…This disappointment was after trying laboriously to obtain the correct texture and colour."

The shards were then reassembled on the cutline for leading. That is, each shard of glass was framed by a strip of hot lead moulded like an H in cross-section. This is still done today as it was 1,000 years ago, although in a rose window for the Rhand Credit Union on Abercromby Street, Port of Spain, Watson developed a significant innovation to the traditional leading process by using overlaid strips of lead to achieve broader outlines.

Once leaded, the shards were joined together, the pattern reassembled, waterproofed with putty and framed, and the windows mounted.

Like most medieval crafts, stained glass demanded a meticulous attention to detail, and some of this Watson carried into his documentation. He was not living in 12^th-century Ile-de-France, however, but in 20^th-century Trinidad, and his artistic solitude also seems to have fed his obsession to record and explain his work. It is as if he were desperately trying to create a community of like-minded craftsmen.

So every step in the restoration of the Holy Trinity Anglican Cathedral windows, for instance, is recorded in photographs, down to the dismantling of the old windows and the extraction of the pieces of glass from their casement. Even the jewelry he made, bracelets and brooches of coloured glass filigreed with silver like miniature stained-glass sculptures, prompted detailed instructions and diagrams.

He explained, for example, how and why to anneal the silver: "Gently heat metal with torch and quench in water. This makes metal softer and therefore easier to work with. Also prevents cracking and splitting. It will harden again only as you work with it."

Stained-glass windows in mediaeval churches inspired the worshipful with the divine light of God's love. And a millennium later the glazier's art kindled the passion of Mike Watson's brief life so it can blaze today, even after his light has been extinguished.

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From childhood Mike Watson was fascinated by the glazier's art. Inspired by a Tiffany-style lampshade at home, he began early on seeking out information on stained glass, much to his mother's dismay, for such books, necessarily illustrated in colour, were expensive.

Watson attended St. Anthony's College in Diego Martin where his performance was unimpressive and by 1978 he was still barely able to scrape through four O-Levels. His passes couldn't get him into art school, and besides, he wasn't interested in courses irrelevant to stained glass.

Still, he painted glass, which he sold as decorations, saved his money, and went to London in the early 1980s. Eventually, he got a chance to apprentice in a stained-glass studio in Hertfordshire, Chapel Studios.

On his first day at work Watson broke a precious glasswork. His bosses wondered aloud if they'd been wise to take on "this young, clumsy West Indian".

Outside the studio was a shed where the messy cement work was done, and there Watson had to work, even in winter, when he'd wear a double layer of clothing. He was ungloved, though, and sometimes his fingers would stick to the glass.

With his determination came Watson's urge to document his work, and when his mother visited England a year into his apprenticeship he had her photograph him working in the shed with snow packed three-quarters of the way up the walls outside.

Later, when he was back in Trinidad with his own apprentices he'd produce the photograph whenever they were late, for instance, because of rain. He'd point out to them how easy they had it.

In the mid-1980s he returned to Trinidad at the request of the parishioners of Rosary RC Church, who wanted him to restore the church's windows. This job was never completed, as the parishioners' fund-raising lost steam, but Watson formed a company, Sun Studios, and remained in Trinidad.

He wrote to churches throughout the country for permission to examine and catalogue their windows. To tide him over rough times he made and sold jewelry, although even that was more an extension of his stained-glass art.

If the stained-glass business had its slumps, there were also booms during which Sun Studios was hired by churches to repair and replace their windows. Watson's work can be seen at San Rafael, Santa Rosa, All Saints, Rosary, Holy Trinity and St Margaret's, to list a few.

At St Margaret's Watson designed and built two new windows, for by then he was doing more than refurbishing old stained glass. His windows for Rhand Credit Union, Temple court and Workers' Bank were completely new creations.

Watson died of Aids-related complications on September 27^th, 1994.

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