BASNewsletter.25-12-e - Flipbook - Page 2
FOUNDED IN 1953
DECEMBER 2025
Artist Pro昀椀le - Angelina Palmer
When I was o昀昀ered the opportunity to meet and talk to Angelina Palmer in her beautiful
Sherborne home with her oil paintings, etchings, prints and lino cuts displayed on the
walls, and glass, coloured, clear and stained in windows and on window ledges, I was surprised and delighted to discover her family history overlapped with my association with
the Worshipful Company of Glaziers & Painters of Glass. Angelina talked me through
her early days.
“I was born in London in 1933. My father Hugh (Hew) Pawle was a partner in the A K
Nicholson Stained Glass Studio which was in St John’s Wood. The designer was Gerald
Smith.
“My mother had studied at the Royal Academy Schools before WW1 where she won prizes. She also worked at
the Nicholson studios, so I suppose art is in my blood!
“WW2 broke out when I was 6 and we left London and lived in North Devon until the end of the war. The
school I went to was evacuated from Broadstairs to a hotel in Mortehoe (100 children and all the Sta昀昀) where we
did Science in the kitchen, Gym in the ballroom, Lacrosse on the beach and art not at all. Our only work of art
pinned to the wall was a postcard of the bust of Nefertiti which a fellow
student sent my mother”. Angelina was very thrilled when she actually
saw it in Berlin while her daughter Camilla was working there for a while
many years later. “Back in Broadstairs, the school had a good Art Room
and I did a lot there.
“After I left school, I attended the Byam Shaw School in Kensington for
4 years. It was very Trad and we drew plaster casts for ages before we
were allowed in the Life Class. I was taught by Peter Greenham (Royal Academician, and keeper of the Royal Academy Schools 1964-85)
and Brian Thomas (Principal of the Byam Shaw School and stained
glass artist).” Angy re昀氀ected on the days in her father’s studio: “I worked
drawing cartoons in the stained glass studio for four years when I 昀椀rst
married. My 昀椀rst husband was an artist whom I met at Art school.
Many years later I took an Open University degree mainly in Art History and also learnt how to be a secretary and worked at Port Regis School
for 13 years.”
Here Angy recalls the stained glass process. “Paper cartoons the size the
windows actually were going to be were cut out and put down on a great
long table. The size of each piece had to take into account the width
of the lead around it. There were four painters, four glaziers and three
draughtsmen. There was a huge window where the individual panels
making up the stained glass windows would be hung and the panels
would be tied and assembled.
“When they are painting them, they put the pieces of glass onto a glass
screen and then they paint the eyes and the nose and the linear (the lines)
then it’s 昀椀red, then put back again and covered with a pigment which
dries and you brush it away to make the form. Many 昀椀rings are involved
and the kiln is unbelievably hot. It was in the basement of this house
in St John’s Wood, in those days everything done with acid and I have
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