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Saturday 23 December 2017

Andrew Gadd: sparking certain motions in the spirit

My sermon for Midnight Mass at St Stephen Walbrook on Christmas Eve is based on The Bus Stop Nativity, a painting by Andrew Gadd for a Church Advertising Network Christmas campaign

'Gadd was born in London and studied painting at the Chelsea School of Art. In 1990 he graduated from the Falmouth School of Art with a degree in Fine Art Painting, he returned to London where he continued to study painting at the Royal Academy of Art in London til 1993. He was awarded a Gold Medal for Art and the Richard Ford travel scholarship from the Royal Academy which enabled him to continue with painting at the Prado Museum in Spain. His work has a distinctly figurative and narrative allegorical style.'

'Gadd’s talent encompass the straightforward still-life and portrait but range more happily towards the allegorical. He frequently embarks upon large and complex figure paintings, sometimes interiors, others set in a landscape, of exalted scale and ambition. He has developed a formidable battery of artistic strategies and devices to realize his ends. Timing and placement, movement and stasis, lighting and concentration – all are crucial ways in which Gadd rises to the challenges he sets himself.'

In writing about Gadd's 'The Day Begins' exhibition, John Berger said "Something like a prophecy of vision and talent being fulfilled. The paintings both awaken and haunt. Bus Stop Nativity, The Day Begins and God and his Dog are indelible. Because of the indivisible " fit" between your methods methods as a painter and your vision as a seer." Andrew Lambirth wrote, "His highly individual approach results in images that manage to exist outside time by reconciling in unique combination the ancient and the futuristic. Gadd's present is otherworldly and thus timeless,which helps to explain it's unusual resonance: a resonance which ( in Michel Leiris' evocative phrase) sparks certain motions in the spirit."

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Bruce Cockburn - Mary Had A Baby.

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