The Light Fantastic. For as long as I can remember, I have had an... (Beiteddine Palace)
The Light Fantastic. For as long as I can remember, I have had an obsession with stained glass. I blame my (half) Indian genetic inheritance, which has left me with a magpie’s appreciation for all things bright (some might say gaudy) and beautiful. Now mine is not a bling thing (flashy, I am not) but rather an infatuation with colour and it manifests in my choice of clothing, furnishings and attraction to other expressions of chromatic bliss; Holi, eastern Asian neon cityscapes, James Turrell’s colour rooms, the jewel-like Velvia film emulator setting on my camera, LSD. The stained glass part probably dates back to my childhood in England, where I would stand entranced in the streams of colour that cascaded through the panes of church windows, bathed first in indigo blue, then acid orange, then ruby red. My kind of communion, I loved the way the light changed the way I felt, an early introduction to the mood-altering properties of colour. And so imagine my delight, when upon arriving in Lebanon, I discovered that although most modern Lebanese seemed to be terrified of colour (viz the bland palette of pastels favoured for building exteriors), their ancestors had fewer qualms. These windows in one of the diwans at Beiteddine, weren’t at their best when I visited, it being overcast, but the patterns they cast reminded me of the windows in old mudbrick mosques in Yazd and the enchanting wooden palaces of Hunza. Geometric, and a far cry from the techincolour Biblical representations that captivated me as a child, they also reminded me of aspirational Victorian homes, whose wooden front doors inevitably bear similarly-patterned glass lozenges, transporting me from Beiteddine to Bournemouth, via the dustlands of central Iran and the jagged, transcendental peaks of northern Pakistan.
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