John Reilly, who died last month, once wrote that his ambition had “always been to paint a picture which perfectly weds form and content” in order “to express in visible form the oneness and unity of [the] invisible power binding all things into one whole.”
‘The Painted Word’, which was published in 2009 and which brought 50 colour plates of his paintings together with the Biblical and other texts that inspired him, was therefore both an argument for the unity of the material and spiritual and an opportunity to judge whether Reilly has succeeded in his intent.
Reilly used the greater freedom of expression that modern movements in art have given to artists to develop a visual language of forms and colours which he hoped expresses “something of their deeper spiritual significance.” Using lessons learnt from Orphism and Rayonism, Reilly frequently based his works on a central circle (often, the sun) from which facets of colour emanate, like ripples on the surface of a stream. The painting’s imagery was then set within these facets, each figure or object being embedded in the overall patterning of the painting and related to the environmental whole that Reilly created. By these means fragments of form and colour (the facets of the painting’s patterning) and the images that they contain are united to circle harmoniously around and within God, the central life and intelligence which is the light of the world.
Reilly made a profound use of the circle in his work in order to depict the wholeness that he found in the world and life that God created. His technique of colour fragments emanating from a central source enabled him to suggest that his archetypal images of creation and the landscape were both, filled with the emanating rays and linked by them into a unified circle. His paintings therefore suggested the way in which we are linked both by being the creation of God and by being indwelt by his spirit. A similar approach can also be seen in the work of Vincent Van Gogh and Cecil Collins where movement, of brush stokes, line, dots, and dashes, indicate a sense of force that informs both the natural world and human beings. Van Gogh described this as expressing "that something of the eternal which the halo used to symbolise". Such paintings recreate afresh, in modern styles, aspects of Celtic Christian thought. These artists found a means of applying the Celtic image of the circle, with its message of a perfect wholeness, through modern fragmentary art techniques.
Works such as Let There Be Light and The Fourth Day of Creation – Universal Power utilise these methods and meanings and both contain and convey huge energy and resolution as a result. Where the power of Reilly’s work dissipates somewhat is through the introduction of a theological and visual dualism which separates the union of the material and the spiritual into disparate zones, as in The Vision where the dreamer in the closed forms of the material world sees in a vision the open forms of the spiritual realm.
Such dualism, which drew on Platonism, muddied the waters and obscured Reilly’s central unitive vision. Taken as a whole, however, Reilly's work reveals the form and harmony of his unitive vision. Guillaume Apollinaire wrote that the “works of the Orphic artist must simultaneously give a pure aesthetic pleasure, a structure which is self-evident, and a sublime meaning”; a description that it would be entirely appropriate to apply to Reilly.
The final word, though, should be from Reilly himself:
"My paintings are not concerned with the surface appearance of people or things but try to express something of the fundamental spiritual reality behind this surface appearance. I try to express in visible form the oneness and unity of this invisible power, binding all things into one whole. I try to express something of the universal and timeless truths behind the stories of the Bible.”
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John Tavener: As One Who Has Slept.
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