The artisans working at the highest level of their craft

The challenge of the project was that it was to be artificially lit. “When you display stained glass in artificial light, it can flatten it – removing any movement or variations in the glass itself – so the choice of glass and painting technique was crucial,” she says. “Each sheet was chosen individually to work well with the artificial light.”

It was fortunate that she was able to liaise with Renaissance’s owners directly for the brief, a couple with a great love and appreciation of art.

“They really liked John Piper’s Green Man print series based on the four seasons, and they wanted the stained-glass panels to be based on these initially, but once I had begun designing they were happy for me to create what I thought would work. I created four different sets of watercolour designs and they chose one of them almost immediately.”

The Four Seasons is made of 160-square-centimetre panels, made in three sections to echo the design of the saloon’s wall dividers. The project took Ayson 10 months to complete, and was created entirely by herself. “I miss all the colours and glass that filled my studio while I was making them!” she says. “Plus Dickie and the team at Bannenberg & Rowell were lovely to work with.”

Ayson found her love of accuracy made her at home in the yachting world, working to a 2mm tolerance in all of her planning, and she was relieved when Bannenberg turned down her offer of encapsulating the panels in a protective casing. “He really wanted people to see the materials.”

Ayson sees great possibilities for stained glass on board yachts. As she points out, glass doesn’t have to be used for windows – it can be a focal point or blend into a design, used as room dividers or in spas.

One of the nicest things about working in glass, she goes on, is its longevity. Treated properly it can last for hundreds of years. “I love knowing that whether it’s something I’ve restored or made, there’s a little bit of me there that will be there for centuries – and that’s really special.” graceayson.com

Jewby’s first official job was working for a company in London that restored fine 18th-century English furniture, supplying Partridge Fine Arts of Bond Street among others.

“It was the best that money could buy,” he recalls. “Giltwood, Chippendale, Adam, and you learned about different styles [of carving]... but then after 9/11, the antique trade in London died a death. It was fuelled by Americans coming over and buying, and they just stopped flying.”

Many of the older antique dealers were on the cusp of retirement anyway, so it was fortuitous for Jewby that just as many began to shut up shop, Winch Design approached him to do some work on a superyacht. “As soon as I met them, I thought, ‘This is where I want to be,’” he remembers. “It has snowballed ever since.”

Today, he works for numerous yacht designers and builders, as well as with architects and on other bespoke projects. “A lot of the time [people] have a concept and they’re pretty fixed on it,” he says.

The art of carving, however, is translating a 3D picture into what will work best with the medium. “As you’re working on something, you always change your mind a little bit, or you decide, actually, if I just do it slightly like this it’ll be better – so the work develops,” he explains.

One of his early works for Winch was for 62-metre Sea Owl, the 11-metre-high, three- metre-wide Tree of Life that he believes is “probably the single biggest carving done in a couple of hundred years”, and is incredibly proud of.

His BACA commendation, meanwhile, was for a series of carved wooden panels that formed 12 doors on board Amoa – a challenging physical task as the oak was kiln dried to such a degree that “there’s very little give in the tool – you really have to push it”, he explains. It was back-breaking too – long days were spent leaning right over the wide panels in order to work on the centre.

The whole project took two years to develop, with Jewby largely working alone. Each panel took two weeks as a minimum to make – some took closer to five – and the fact that the oak was made up of numerous strips added an extra element of complexity to the job. “You’ve got the grain of one strip running one way and the other grain running another way. So you get a rip in the grain which is challenging to carve,” he explains.

Jewby is not only talented but also enthusiastic about his profession. As a personal challenge, he once tried to make an exact replica of a piece by Grinling Gibbons, an Anglo-Dutch sculptor who is widely regarded as England’s greatest carver of all time.

“I went to Trinity College Library in Cambridge where there’s some of his work, these little scrolling leafworks that entwine in and out of themselves, and I took a measure of the drawings, came back and carved it,” he states. Today, Jewby’s version hangs above his fireplace. “I look at it every day,” he says, “and I like to think Gibbons would have said it’s good enough to go on a job!”

There aren’t, as you might expect, a shortage of carvers in Britain. “What I feel sad about is that there are a lot of them – most people get trained now at City and Guilds Art School in London – and they leave there thinking that they are really good carvers. In fact, a lot of times they’re not,” he says.

“To learn how to use your tools and to cut wood takes two or three years. But to learn what to do, what to cut, what forms to shape, that takes decades. It’s about having the confidence to take that big chisel and whack a great bit off. You can’t be timid,” he adds.

For him, the best thing about the superyacht industry is it allows him to practice his craft to the best of his ability, and for a fair price for his time. “I know that people aren’t going to turn around and say to me, ‘You’ve done too good a job,’ which I’ve had several times before. They want the absolute best; I love that – it’s what I strive for.”

First published in the May 2024 issue of BOAT International. Get this magazine sent straight to your door, or subscribe and never miss an issue.