The Lent & Eastertide Schools are a collection of education, training and skills events across the Diocese of Chelmsford during Lent and Eastertide each year. A series of short courses running across the diocese between Ash Wednesday and Pentecost with a wide variety of themes and costing £15 per course.
The course will take place on five Tuesday evenings beginning 9th April, then from 23rd April - 14th May at St John's Seven Kings (St Johns Road, Seven Kings, Ilford, Essex IG2 7BB). For brochures and booking forms please contact: Liz Watson. Diocesan Office, 53 New Street, Chelmsford, Essex. CM1 1AT. Tel: 01245 294449, email: lwatson@chelmsford.anglican.org.
I have been thinking about books to suggest to participants for further reading as, while many books have been written on the arts and faith, a relative paucity exists of books giving reasonably accurate, comprehensive and unbiased summaries or surveys of the modern period. The resources I am likely to commend include:
Rosemary Crumlin's Beyond Belief: Modern Art and the Religious Imagination, the catalogue from a 1998 exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria. While not being "a survey of religious and spiritual images of the century," the works included and the accompanying essays do nevertheless span the twentieth century. The earliest, Maurice Denis' The Catholic Mystery and James Ensor's Christ calming the storm "hover at the edges of a century of revolutions, wars and new beginnings" while "at the other end of the century, and of the exhibition, are Francesco Clemente's meditations on his journey up Mount Abu in India and Audrey Flack's huge head of the goddess Daphne, with fruit and branches for hair and, on her forehead, a skull, a reminder and warning of the destruction of war."
The foreword by Timothy
Potts contains a particularly focussed summary of religious and spiritual
influences on twentieth century art: "The pervasiveness of broadly
religious and spiritual themes in twentieth-century Western art may at first
seem to stand in contradiction to the secularization of so many aspects of life
and culture during our times. The religious underpinnings of so much Western art
before this century - from its subject matter to its sources of patronage and
its devotional purposes - are obvious and uncontentious. With the art of our own
century, however, the religious dimension is altogether more subtle, often more
abstract and inevitably more personal. From images created with a clear message
and usage in mind, we move into a world of individual spiritual discovery,
personal visual languages and images which seek to explore and evoke rather than
to define and prescribe. Some artists employ familiar religious iconography as
convenient signifiers of an earlier culture and mind set - artefacts to be used
in a quintessentially modern image-making of juxtaposition, anomaly and
incongruity. Others eschew icons altogether to explore more mystical spiritual
concerns in images of diffuse abstraction. The visual languages, the spiritual
purposes and the artistic results are infinitely varied, but all are united by
an absorption in the confrontation between art and religious experience. In this
exhibition, these pervasive currents of religious experience and thinking can be
traced running through the work of many of the twentieth-century's most
important artists and schools."
Rowena Loverance’s Christian Art is both an accessible introduction to Christian Art and a
stimulating exploration of the way in which art from the Christian tradition can
speak to our condition today. To achieve both within the pages of one book is a
considerable achievement. Loverance’s scope is broad, covering Christian
Art from its inception to the contemporary in a way that is genuinely global and
which takes in the decorative as well as the fine arts. She begins with a brief
chronological survey in which she notes the way in which different aspects of
Christian Art emerge from the different periods and cultures of Church history.
The majority of the book, however, explores Christian Art thematically, noting
the way in which the visual arts have engaged with the themes and imagery of
Christian scripture and tradition. While necessarily concise through covering a
lot of ground, Loverance writes with the sensitivity to art that one should
expect of an art historian and with a similar appreciation of theology that
comes from one writing, as a Quaker, out of her own faith tradition. Loverance has written an engaging,
accessible survey of the diversity of Christian Art in which she clearly
identifies the relevance of such art to our contemporary condition and
identifies fruitful new avenues in the Christian tradition for possible
exploration by contemporary artists. Well illustrated and designed, this is a
book to inspire both the creation of new Christian art and appreciation of the
wonderful heritage that we already possess.
Finally, I am also likely to commend the series of lectures given by The Rt Revd Lord Harries at the Museum of London on Christian Faith and Modern Art. The last century saw changes in artistic style that were both rapid and radical. This presented a particular problem to artists who wished to express Christian themes and these illustrated lectures looked at how different artists responded to this challenge whilst retaining their artistic integrity. The lectures in the series are: The Explosion of Modernism; Distinctive Individual Visions; Catholic Elegance and Joy; Post World War II Optimism; Searching for new ways; and Contemporary Christian Art.
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James MacMillan - Credo.
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