Southend on Sea: Beecroft Art Gallery, Focal Point Gallery and Prittlewell Priory

Beecroft Art Gallery in Southend has a permanent collection of over 2000 works, ranging from 17th-century Dutch paintings to contemporary works. The collection includes examples by artists such as Molenaer, Ruisdael and Berchem plus 19th-century artists including Rossetti, Constable and Edward Lear. There are works by Carel Weight, the Great Bardfield Group, and a fine bronze by Jacob Epstein. The local artist Alan Sorrell is represented by his Drawings of Nubia series depicting a visit to Egypt prior to the building of the Aswan Dam. The Thorpe Smith Collection of local landscape views contains paintings, drawings and prints from as early as 1803.

Current exhibitions include:

Old Leigh Studios - Time & Tide which celebrates the work of 5 artists working together in Leigh-on-Sea. The exhibtion shows the work of Richard Baxter, Julie O'Sullivan, Sheila Appleton, Ian Smith and Joe Spurgeon, all based at Old Leigh Studios. The exhibition explores the personal and emotional connections they all have to the life, colours and textures of the Thames Estuary, and to the tidal nature of its shoreline. See more of Appleton and Smith's work in their online exhibition, A View of Retrospection. I was glad to catch up briefly with Richard Baxter, who was part of commission4mission for a time. He makes finely thrown porcelain in distinctively bright, bold and beautiful colours and favours forms with simple clean profiles reminiscent of mid-century-modern Scandinavian ceramics. On each piece he varies the curves and applies the bands of bronze pigment to fit each form, so every pot is unique.

Jennie Sharman-Cox and Simon Monk - Double Take: Jennie Sharman-Cox and Simon Monk are two artists living and working in the Southend area. Their outlook and activities are quite distinct, the former working predominantly in three dimensions while the latter produces paintings and drawings. Despite these essential differences there are notable areas of common ground, the meticulously crafted nature of their work being the most clear. Both artists invent fictional worlds for the viewer to enter and inhabit, Jennie through the use of immersive box constructions and Simon through trompe l’oeil illusion. Jennie and Simon are both Southend natives and perhaps something of the culture of the British seaside resort in which they grew up, with its novelties and amusements, remains present in their work. For this exhibition both artists are presenting a body of new and recent work as well as selections from their studio archives. To mark the occasion of the show Jennie and Simon have each produced a new piece responding to the the Beecroft Gallery building and its history as a library.

Colour 2: This exhibition explores the use of colour within painting, sculpture and sound. The power of colour has fascinated psychologists, philosophers, chemists and artists for hundreds of years, with certain colours long being associated with class, status and authority within many cultures. The emotion colour can evoke within us has encouraged many artists to consider the way they are using colour and why. Utilising the Beecroft Art Gallery collection in conjunction with loans from Essex University and Essex Collection of Art from Latin America ESCALA, this exhibition aims to explore the way colour has been used, the narrative of particular colours, and the power colour holds. The exhibition includes some great works by significant artists including Roderick Barrett, Allin Braund, Canaletto, William Crosbie, David Hockney, Elsa James, Karólína Lárusdóttir, John Nash, Jacob van Ruisdael and Carel Weight. I was particularly interested to see a painting by George Morl, who will be showing his own art collection at St Andrew's Wickford in May, as part of the One Beautiful World Arts Festival.   

Located on the lower floor of the Beecroft Art Gallery is The Jazz Centre UK which celebrates jazz music’s heritage, and actively supports and promotes contemporary performance and education. The charity (No: 1167421) was registered in 2016 and founded by musician, broadcaster and writer Digby Fairweather. The organisation’s mission stated on the Charity Commission website is “To preserve promote and celebrate the art of jazz music in all its forms”. The Jazz Centre includes a walk-through history of jazz feature, a heritage museum, a performance space, research facilities, a media room, a cinema/lecture theatre and a retail outlet for jazz books and records.

The Rise and The Fall: Liz Magor is at Focal Point Gallery Organised in collaboration with the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, the exhibition will subsequently tour to The Douglas Hyde Gallery of Contemporary Art, Dublin (14 July-24 September 2023) and Fondazione Giuliani, Rome (26 October 2023 – January 2024).

‘The Rise and The Fall,’ by Liz Magor presents a focused selection of works from the last five years that explore our relationship with the material world. Working with ubiquitous, manufactured objects that often go unnoticed, she transforms them using inventive sculptural techniques that locate them on a spectrum between still life and the uncanny. Things such as blankets, containers, clothing and toys are found in relationships that generate a sense of care and meaning beyond their original use or function. The exhibition offers a focused selection of work that consider Magor’s understanding of the presence of ‘agency’ within inanimate, material objects and her enquiry as to the source of their intrigue and emotional resonance. The way in which Magor’s work draws attention to discarded and apparently mundane objects, seems particularly relevant to current discussions about the economy of things and the role of material in our social, political and psychological lives.

Focal Point Gallery is South Essex’s only public contemporary art gallery, open to all. Offering an exciting and ambitious programme of largely free workshops, talks, outdoor film screenings and offsite projects, they also present four major exhibitions a year featuring both international and local artists. Their aim is to inspire curiosity by producing and presenting thought-provoking art made today that explores our locality, sense of self and the importance of communities through investigating current concerns that resonate internationally.

Prittlewell Priory was founded by the Cluniac Order in the early 12th century as a cell to the Priory of St Pancras at Lewes, Sussex. It was one of the lesser monasteries housing not more than 18 monks. In 1536 much of the building was destroyed and what remained was much altered during the 18th Century. Alterations were made again in the early 20th Century, when the Refectory was restored and partly rebuilt. A number of original features do survive, including a 12th Century doorway with chevron and dog tooth ornamentation. After the Dissolution the Priory was a private residence and it was granted to Lord Chancellor Audley, who conveyed it to Robert, son of Lord Rich. It afterwards passed with the manor to various families. The last family to live there, the 19th Century Scrattons, are explored in an exhibition inside the house. In 1917 the building was purchased by Robert Jones, and in May 1922 it opened as Southend's first museum.

In 2011 works began on refurbishing the existing buildings and the construction of a new Visitor Centre. The £2 million works were in part funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund and the Cory Environmental Trust in Southend and were undertaken by The Facility Architects and Ibex Interiors. Works were completed in the summer of 2012 and the Priory re-opened in the June of that year. The new Visitor Centre, adjacent to the Priory, opened in February 2013.

St Catherine's Wickford has a possible connection to Prittlewell Priory as the chancel ceiling is reputed to have come from the Priory Refectory.

‘Totems of Hope’ by Heidi Wigmore was funded by an Arts Council England ‘Developing your Creative Practice’ award in 2021 for Prittlewell Priory. 

Wigmore writes:

"The work functions as an installation of seven 1m x 1.5m textile banners, they symbolise a resurrection of the creative spirit; they are ‘guardians’, a force for hope and unity in an increasingly fractured world.

Sacred banners have long been used as a symbolic tool to communicate the spiritual realm and to celebrate revival and regeneration. I visualise them imparting a grandiose impact in heritage spaces.

The imagery evolved from an analogue collage series evoking the ‘Sacred Feminine’; images of transformation and empowerment reference both modern and classical mythologies, synthesizing ancient Western and Eastern cultural traditions as hybrid ‘totems’. Sources include medieval religious paintings and icons, Tudor/Baroque era royal portraiture, and myriad sculptural and symbolic/natural forms.

The banners incorporate sumptuous velvet and damask fabrics, hand-constructed with all their human imperfections alongside the precision of cutting-edge digital technologies; a fusion of tradition and the contemporary. Embroidered motifs, reminiscent of the Ecclesiastical, are partly deconstructed by my interventions with the machinery."

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Paul Weller - Still Glides The Stream.

Walbrook Art Group Talks

The Walbrook Art Group spans the e-congregation of the London Internet Church and the St Stephen Walbrook community bringing both together. Twice a year people gather at Walbrook for a presentation on artists and faith and make visits to galleries, artist studios etc to reflect further on the connections between art and faith. Talks this Lent have been given by: Revd Stephen Baxter, Lynda Keen, Sarah White and Dharshan Thenuwara.

Last Wednesday Alan Everett and I both gave talks to the group. Alan spoke about his 'Foundations of the City' exhibition in terms of its origin in his recent sabbatical and inspiration gained from 'The Dream of the Rood'. I gave a brief summary of modern sacred art in order to give a context for the viewing of Alan's exhibition. 

In relation to Alan's work I said the following: In inviting Alan Everett to exhibit here I was engaged by the organic nature of his work as he combines the deliberation of his rhythmic mark marking with the more random effects of drips and splashes; all cohering through his overall perception of the evolving work. Nicholas Cranfield, too, has noted that Alan Everett’s “technique is to bring some definition to a range of splashed and thrown paint that explodes into shapes, some more legible than others, making marks that appear both out of focus and out of time and yet never stray far from the first idea.” This brings the work of the Abstract Expressionists, and Jackson Pollock in particular, to mind. Nicholas Cranfield also sees that "There is something Mark Rothko-like in the way that the artist has explored the contrast between the coloured shape of the cross and the stark background of unrelenting darkness.” As a result, Alan seems to be engaged with that non-representational sense of the divine which has links to the idea of art as a window into the divine.

At 1.00pm on Wednesday 9 March and Saturday 12 March Art Group member Dharshan Thenuwara is offering tours of the outside of William Morris' Red House and garden. The tours will last about an hour and a half and will cost £3.00 a head. This does not include admission to the house.
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M Ward - Confession.

Walbrook Art Group talks

Last week at the Walbrook Art Group we heard excellent presentations from Stephen Baxter on photo collages and Lynda Keen on photographs of wildlife in the city.

This week's meeting will feature two more artist-led presentations. This week's speakers are Sarah White and Dharshan Thenuwara. Both are young artists and will be telling us about their work.

On Wednesday 2nd March, the speakers will be Alan Everett and myself. Alan will give a guided tour of his exhibition 'Foundations of the City', while I will give a brief overview of twentieth century Sacred Art.

All meeting are from 1.00 - 2.00pm at St Stephen Walbrook.

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Enya - Paint The Sky With Stars.

The Upside-Down Kingdom of God

Here is my sermon from today's Eucharist at St Stephen Walbrook:

At my first training weekend as a curate the then Bishop of Barking, David Hawkins, performed a handstand to demonstrate the way in which Jesus, through his teaching in the beatitudes, turns our understanding of life upside down. His action turned our expectations of Bishops and their behaviour upside-down at the same time as it perfectly illustrated his point.

Jesus is depicted upside-down in the painting Jesus Striped and Stripped created by Cedric Baxter for a set of Australian Stations of the Cross. Victoria Emily Jones has written that “Baxter's tenth station captures Jesus mid-tumble, naked and abused and down on his way to death, but what Christians know and glory in, especially during the Easter season, is that he's circling back. He's turning a cartwheel! The upside downness of Jesus in this image challenges us to look at Passion Week with the right perspective: as a journey that brings Christ low only to raise him up.”

G. K. Chesterton used a similar image in writing about St Francis of Assisi: “[Saint] Francis, at the time … when he disappeared into the prison or the dark cavern, underwent a reversal of a certain psychological kind … The man who went into the cave was not the man who came out again … He looked at the world as differently from other men as if he had come out of that dark hole walking on his hands … If a man saw the world hanging upside down, with all the trees and towers hanging head downwards as in a pool, one effect would be to emphasise the idea of dependence … It would make vivid the Scriptural text which says that God has hanged the world upon nothing.”

In what ways do these images and Jesus’ teaching in the beatitudes turn our understanding of life upside down? Donald Kraybill writes in The Upside-Down Kingdom that Jesus startles us as paradox, irony and surprise permeate his teachings flipping our expectations upside down: the least are the greatest; adults become like children; the religious miss the heavenly banquet; the immoral receive forgiveness and blessing. Things aren’t like we think they should be. We’re baffled and perplexed; uncertain whether to laugh or cry. Again and again, turning our world upside down, Jesus’ kingdom surprises us.

It is the humble poor who know their need of God and those who have nothing who know they need everything. So we should pray for those moments when we and others become poor in spirit, bereaved, meek, hungry, thirsty, as they are moments when we are more likely to turn our faces to God looking for salvation. We need to pray for the opening of doors in us and others that gain and comfort have locked tight.

The Gospel announcement, our salvation, is truly comprehensive, is truly for all, because it is offered to losers, by circumstance or choice. The poor have no means of becoming rich but the rich have within themselves the possibility of becoming poor. There is nothing that we don’t have that will bar our entry to this upside-down kingdom and so we can pray to be rid of what we do have that God’s kingdom may truly come to all.

In this way, as the Beatitudes state, our lives are turned upside down and we are blessed with poverty, with grief, with meekness, with hunger, with mercy, with purity, with peacemaking, and with persecution (Gerard Kelly, Humanifesto).

As opposed to the survival of the fittest or looking after No. 1, the kingdom of God, as it is described in the Beatitudes, is a place of happiness for those who know they are spiritually poor, a place of comfort for those who mourn, a place of receptivity for those who are humble, a place of satisfaction for those whose greatest desire is to do what God requires, a place of mercy for those who are merciful, a place in which God is seen by the pure in heart, a place in which those who work for peace are called God’s children, and a place which belongs to those who are persecuted because they do what God requires.

This is what those, like St Francis, that we call saints came to realise. It is what we must seek through prayer as we too respond to our calling to be saints.

May God forgive our attempts to be loved, our pride, our pleasure-seeking and our leisure-seeking and instead turn our lives upside down and bless us with poverty, with grief, with meekness, with hunger, with mercy, with purity, with peacemaking, with persecution and with his upside down kingdom. Amen.

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T. Bone Burnett - Shut It Tight.

The upside-down Kingdom of God

At my first training weekend as a curate the then Bishop of Barking, David Hawkins, performed a handstand to demonstrate the way in which Jesus, through his teaching in the beatitudes, turns our understanding of life upside down. As opposed to the survival of the fittest or looking after No. 1, the Kingdom of God, as it is described in the Beatitudes, is a place of happiness for those who know they are spiritually poor, a place of comfort for those who mourn, a place of receptivity for those who are humble, a place of satisfaction for those whose greatest desire is to do what God requires, a place of mercy for those who are merciful, a place in which God is seen by the pure in heart, a place in which those who work for peace are called God’s children, and a place which belongs to those who are persecuted because they do what God requires.

I've been reminded of this by a post at The Jesus Question about an artwork called Jesus Striped and Stripped by Cedric Baxter.

Victoria Emily Jones writes that, 'Every year since 2008 (excepting last year, due to ministerial transitions), Catherine Czerw has curated a Lenten art exhibition on behalf of Wesley Uniting Church in Perth, Australia, called Stations of the Cross. She selects fifteen Australian artists to participate, each one choosing a station to depict. Jesus Striped and Stripped was Cedric Baxter's 2011 contribution for Station 10, traditionally articulated as "Jesus is stripped of his garments."'

'Baxter's tenth station captures Jesus mid-tumble, naked and abused and down on his way to death, but what Christians know and glory in, especially during the Easter season, is that he's circling back. He's turning a cartwheel! The upside downness of Jesus in this image challenges us to look at Passion Week with the right perspective: as a journey that brings Christ low only to raise him up.'

Baxter's image would have been perfect for a short liturgy which I prepared a while back for the Barking Area Team meeting and subsequently used at a Deanery Synod and at St John's Seven Kings. This liturgy began with an opening reflection taken from St Francis of Assisi by G. K. Chesterton:

'[Saint] Francis, at the time … when he disappeared into the prison or the dark cavern, underwent a reversal of a certain psychological kind … The man who went into the cave was not the man who came out again … He looked at the world as differently from other men as if he had come out of that dark hole walking on his hands … If a man saw the world hanging upside down, with all the trees and towers hanging head downwards as in a pool, one effect would be to emphasise the idea of dependence … It would make vivid the Scriptural text which says that God has hanged the world upon nothing.'

This image of coming out of a cave walking on our hands was used by Mumford & Sons in their song entitled The Cave. I adapted this to form the opening response:

May we come out of our cave walking on our hands and see the world hanging upside down. May we understand dependence when we know the maker's hand. Amen.

The prayer of penitence began by borrowing some phrases from Donald B. Kraybill: Jesus, you startle us as paradox, irony and surprise permeate your teachings flipping our expectations upside down: the least are the greatest; adults become like children; the religious miss the heavenly banquet; the immoral receive forgiveness and blessing. Things aren’t like we think they should be. We’re baffled and perplexed; uncertain whether to laugh or cry. Again and again, turning our world upside down, your kingdom surprises us and so we pray now to see your world and our lives as you see them.

I put these together with some of T. Bone Burnett's lyrics from Trap Door. The responses were:

Lord, forgive our knowingness, our grasping, our comfort and our self-satisfaction.

Lord, forgive our attempts to be loved, our pride, our pleasure-seeking and our leisure-seeking. As we turn to you, turn our lives upside down and bless us with poverty, with grief, with meekness, with hunger, with mercy, with purity, with peacemaking, with persecution and with your upside down kingdom. Amen.

The prayers of intercession were as follows: 

God of Israel, the God of the Exodus, you hear the cry of slaves and deliver true liberation. New regimes which leave the old order in place, the bullies in power, the greedy with their unjust gains, and which have nothing to say to the oppressed are not good and are not news. Having heard the subversive nature of your kingdom announcement, we pray for an upside-down kingdom that will deliver true liberation.

Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as in heaven.

It is the humble poor who know their need of you and those who have nothing who know they need everything. So we pray for those moments when we and others become poor in spirit, bereaved, meek, hungry, thirsty, and turn faces to you looking for salvation. Open doors in us and others that gain and comfort have locked tight.

Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as in heaven.

The Gospel announcement, your salvation, is truly comprehensive, is truly for all, because it is offered to losers, by circumstance or choice. The poor have no means of becoming rich but the rich have within themselves the possibility of becoming poor. There is nothing that we don’t have that will bar our entry to this upside-down kingdom and so we pray to be rid of what we do have that your kingdom may truly come to all.

Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as in heaven.

Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as in heaven. Give us today our daily bread. Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us. Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil. For the kingdom, the power, and the glory are yours now and for ever. Amen.

The liturgy ended with Gerard Kelly's Let Your Kingdom Come.

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T. Bone Burnett - Trap Door.

McCahon, Baxter and Hayman (2)

More light is shed on the links Colin McCahon shared with James K. Baxter and Patrick Hayman, together with their shared focus on words, by the books Answering Hark and Patrick Hayman: Visionary Artist.

Peter Simpson writes that "McCahon had a considerable capacity and need for friendship. The friends of McCahon's youth in Dunedin - especially Doris Lusk, Rodney Kennedy, Ron O'Reilly, Toss Woollaston, Charles Brasch, and James K. Baxter - remained his friends for life." Mel Gooding adds that Hayman "fell in with a group of young student artists and writers" at Dunedin, "most studying at the small art school there." "Predominantly from South Island, these gifted people were to become a significant part of what constituted New Zealand's avant-garde. They included the young Colin McCahon, now widely regarded as the outstanding figure in New Zealand art in the twentieth century, Anne Hamblett, Elespie Forsyth, Rodney Kennedy and Ronald O'Reilly. Hayman had until this moment clung to the notion that his vocation was to be a writer: 'I had been trying to write, but I simply couldn't, I couldn't get a word out ...' It was at this point that he started to paint. It was as simple and immediate as that. 'It was a miraculous experience; it just broke out of me ... Painting was a marvellous release.'"

"This continuous close contact with an artist of extraordinary gift and essentially religious vision had a profound influence on Hayman: McCahon remained for him a model of artistic integrity and dedication." When McCahon married Anne Hamblett in 1942, "Haymen presented them with a copy of C.A. Cotton's classic Geomorphology of New Zealand, which described, with analytical diagrams, the physical formations of the islands' topographies. McCahon had been for some time struggling with formalistic ideas derived (at a distance) from Cézanne, an artist with whom Hayman felt little empathy. The gift registered an intelligently critical and sympathetic understanding of McCahon's formal preoccupation with the underlying structures of landscapes they both knew well."

"In 'Words for Painting', a sequence of small prose poems written close to the end of his life," Hayman "created a vivid picture of his creative universe and of his unique but immediately recognisable way of working within it." "Here, in a language whose startling immediacy is expressive of an utterly uninhibited spirit, Hayman creates images that at once convey the imaginative compulsion that animates his art and the procedures by which it comes into being. Their phemenological space is that of the reverie, the waking dream, in which outside and inside, psychically and physically considered, are conflated, and in which magical transformations take place, confounding category and defying common sense."

"'In the garden the trees talk - birds are words' (that rhyme is imperative, it reveals a truth through sound as well as sense): the birds are the insubstantial voices of the trees, bringing a language of sign and sound to the secret world of the garden. In the enclosed room within the house - in the studio - they are transmuted again, into things of visible, plastic substance. As the work comes into being in this interior space, a reverie made substantial, it transforms the room, and the house becomes one with the inner space of the imagination, an image for it, a metaphor ... Paintings - or the magical substitution of words for painting - are like windows through which we may look. Dark falls, darkness completes the work of the imagination. Daydreams give way to the dreams of the night."

Simpson also explores the source of McCahon's interest in words. He writes that partly it was "his fixation on the Bible ('In the beginning was the word ...'), partly his friendship with poets and their affinity for his work (... Caselberg ... Baxter, Brasch, Mason, and others), and partly, perhaps, because of his passionate desire for communication, and his growing conviction that words were necessary to get his 'message' across." "In 1973 McCahon told Pat France: 'Poetry, before painting, is my friend. The one without the other can't exist'."

Simpson writes that "Baxter was a keen admirer of McCahon's work" and wrote "a spirited defence of it in the student journal, Canta." "Baxter identified three main difficulties in appreciating McCahon. The first is ignorance of the art tradition he is utilising (Baxter refers to Hieronymous Bosch, Fra Angelico, William Blake and surrealism). Second is the popular preference for 'naturalistic' art and the distrust of 'all symbolism and subjectivism':

The third difficulty comes from his choice of subject and his handling of it. The raw quality of his crucifixions might well offend a church-goer who wished to forget Christ on weekdays. There is in them a good deal of pity and terror and the monstrously ludicrous element that lies in all suffering ... But McCahon ... is expressing the sour and struggling piety that lies behind the blank mask of Presbyterianism. Instead of revolting from his environment he learns to accept it. His Christs and angels are reconciled with the fertile hills behind them ..."

"Foul-mouthed, honey-tongued, social critic and wild prophet," Baxter also "entranced and scandalised the population in equal measure." Baxter "became one of New Zealand’s finest poets and most controversial figures, often at odds with a society unable to stomach its disturbing reflection in his work." He "once described each of his poems as ‘part of a large subconscious corpus of personal myth, like an island above the sea, but joined underwater to other islands’, and elsewhere commented that what ‘happens is either meaningless to me, or else it is mythology’."

"Baxter first met McCahon in Dunedin in 1943 when Baxter was a 17 year old schoolboy; McCahon's painting A Candle in a Dark Room was prompted by this meeting." Baxter also introduced McCahon to John Caselberg, the poet with whom McCahon would collaborate most frequently. "Caselberg's neo-romantic elevation of perspective and rhetoric ran counter to ... the colloquial directness, social satire and existential self-scrutiny of ... James K. Baxter." Following Baxter's death, McCahon painted a series of Stations of the Cross for him - "mostly black & dirty white moving to purple, violet & yellow." He wrote that he "trembled for days before putting purple & violet & yellow in the last panels." ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 16 Horsepower - Cinder Alley.

McCahon, Baxter and Hayman

I’ve recently read Towards a Promised Land: On the Life and Art of Colin McCahon by Gordon H. Brown. Tracing Colin McCahon’s life and work, from his student days at King Edward Technical College in Dunedin, through learning from Toss Woollaston, and on to his adult life working at the Auckland Art Gallery and at Elam School of Fine Art, Brown analyses key aspects of the paintings: the role of the Bible, the idea of the promised land, the use of words and numbers. In amongst all this are also references to McCahon’s relationships with two other major creative forces, the artist-poet Patrick Hayman and the poet James K. Baxter.

"R.N. Field at the Dunedin School of Art inspired young students to break from tradition with M.T. (Toss) Woollaston, Doris Lusk, Anne Hamblett, Colin McCahon and Patrick Hayman forming the first cell of indigenous Modernism. The Second World War saw the dispersal of these painters, but not before McCahon had met a very youthful poet, James K. Baxter, in a central city studio." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Dunedin)

"Hayman spent most of his twenties in this country [UK], sailing from London on the S.S. Rangitiki early in 1936. The family already had its roots in Dunedin (his parents first met one another there) and when Hayman arrived he came into contact with Colin McCahon, his wife the painter Anne Hamblett, Doris Lusk, Rodney Kennedy, Charles Brasch and Ron O'Reilly. They were all ardent pacificists, bent on pursuing careers as artists and writers. Hayman impressed them by his quiet yet strongly opinionated nature, and although he went to the Dunedin School of Art, he was generally regarded more as a writer, particularly of short stories and poetry (described by O'Reilly as 'Kafkaesque'). After three years in Dunedin he moved northwards, pausing briefly at Mapua then he stayed at Nelson for about a year before settling down in Wellington in 1940. He enrolled at Victoria University, mixing with the more articulate senior students of History and English. John Beaglehole was a vital force in those days; a highly cultivated and civilised personality whose social conscience had prompted the proceeds of his first book on poetry to go towards relief for victims of the Spanish Civil War. Among Hayman's fellow students, who became his friends, were Hubert and Noel Witheford, Janet Paul and the Dutchman Eric Schwimmer. The arrival in New Zealand of European refugees, like Hayman and Schwimmer, stimulated a generation of young minds, already prepared to accept their national identity, and looking to broader philosophies and wider civilisations." (http://www.art-newzealand.com/Issues21to30/hayman.htm)

"Among their wedding presents the McCahons received from fellow painter Patrick Hayman a copy of Professor Charles Andrew Cotton’s Geomorphology of New Zealand. Although an academic textbook, this volume is distinguished by its author’s line drawings of different geological features, each depicted in its bare essentials, stripped of vegetation."

"In this period McCahon stripped away surface details from the landscape to expose the underlying structure of the land, a habit of seeing influenced by the drawings in Charles Cotton's Geomorphology (3rd ed. 1942), a wedding gift from the painter Patrick Hayman. Occasional portraits were also produced in these years, such as Harriet Simeon (1945), a Gauguin-like portrait of a Maori woman which anticipates by nearly two decades his later interest in Maori culture. Still life was another genre he occasionally practised as in The lamp in my studio (1945) or A candle in a dark room (1947), a Picasso-like image which doubled as a symbolic portrait (according to McCahon's own testimony) of the poet James K. Baxter." (http://www.mccahonhouse.org.nz/fifties/5360beforetitirangi.asp)

"Although the subject of some conjecture, it is possible that it was during 1943 that McCahon first met the young poet James K. Baxter, most probably during a visit to the Baxter home in Brighton, south of Dunedin. McCahon had likely gone there to talk with James’ Pacifist father, Archibald.

As well as poetry, Baxter was the author of a number of plays and a widely published critic. McCahon and Baxter shared a preoccupation with the theme of the land, a non-conformist approach to society, and convictions about the nature of religious belief and visionary experience.

Although in his writings Baxter criticised much of what he found wanting in New Zealand society, his commentary was neither negative nor despairing in the way of some of his contemporaries. Instead, he spoke of the need for New Zealanders to engage in a reconstruction of the social order whereby they might build a more inclusive community.

In 1948 McCahon was introduced to the poet John Caselberg by James K. Baxter, who had known Caselberg from his student days at Otago University. McCahon and Caselberg remained friends until McCahon’s death in 1987. Both men shared an interest in religious subjects, as well as an admiration for the writings of William Blake, the early 19th Century mystic poet." (http://www.mccahon.co.nz/files/Q_of_F-Part1.pdf)

"When the religious paintings [of McCahon] were first exhibited, many objected to their apparent rawness and awkwardness. Others, such as the artist Rita Angus and the poet James K Baxter, came to McCahon’s defence. Baxter wrote:

The raw quality of his crucifixions might well offend the church-goer who wished to forget Christ on weekdays … Instead of revolting from his environment he learns to accept it. His Christs and angels are reconciled with the fertile hills behind them." (http://nga.gov.au/McCahon/1.cfm) James K Baxter, ‘Salvation Army aesthete’, Canta, 21 July 1948, reprinted in Peter Simpson, Candle in a dark room: James K Baxter and Colin McCahon, Auckland: Auckland City Gallery, 1995, p. 13.

"McCahon’s long but intermittent friendship with James K. Baxter, which had soured in the late 1960s, was celebrated after the poet’s death in ‘Walk’ (1973), an imaginary and symbolic lifetime walk along Muriwai Beach. This spiritual reconciliation was clinched when McCahon undertook, between March and June 1973, the set designs for a festival of four of Baxter’s plays at Wellington." (http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/5m4/1)

"McCahon and Baxter had first met in the 1940s, and although they had become estranged in the 1960s they continued to share a similar sense of the artist’s mission. Part of that shared sensibility was a concern with Maori spirituality. In Walk (Series C) McCahon journeys along Muriwai Beach in dialogue with his friend, perhaps recounting the shared events of their lives, perhaps seeking reconciliation. This walk runs parallel to another: in Maori belief, the spirits of the departed travel p the west coast towards Te Rerenga Wairua (Cape Reinga), from where they leap off the land to begin their final journey to the afterlife. As McCahon wrote to Peter McLeavey about the painting, ‘The Christian "walk" and the Maori "walk" have a lot in common.’(4) Drawing on personal and particular events in his own life, McCahon used them to address big themes in his art — themes of life and death, time and loss, Christian and Maori spirituality, history and place. Grand and momentous, Walk (Series C) is a painting that is vast enough to encompass them all." (http://collections.tepapa.govt.nz/objectdetails.aspx?oid=657795)

"How remarkable it is - and how little it has been remarked - that two of the major religious artists of the post-war period … should have emerged from virtually the same time and place: Dunedin, New Zealand, in the 1940s … The parallels, both biographical and artistic, are extraordinary: an Otago childhood; rebellion against the conformity of family, school and society; preoccupation with the theme of the land, the people, and in particular the contrast between the natural and social order; assertion of a religious vision despite its being out of time and out of place in a materialistic secular society; alcoholism; rejection of Protestantism for a personal form of Catholicism; an evergrowing commitment to a Maori perspective; an increasingly dark, death-centred pessimissm." Candles in a Dark Room: James K. Baxter and Colin McCahon, P Simpson - Journal of New Zealand Literature: JNZL, 1995 - JSTOR (http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/20112267?uid=3738032&uid=2&uid=4&sid=21100884598701)

The three share a fascination with words. "In the 1940s words began to appear in McCahon’s work. While the resulting paintings were often criticised by the public, it was important to McCahon that his messages were properly understood. He believed the directness of words could help, provide a ‘way in’ to his images. He was aware also of the long tradition of using words within painted images, especially in religious art." (http://collections.tepapa.govt.nz/theme.aspx?irn=947)

"I am not a literary painter though many people think I am.
True. Colin McCahon uses words as forms. They aren’t written but constructed, with fine brushes, and lose almost all conventional associations when considered with their back-grounds. Certainly one remembers the words; but as a visual whole, in the manner in which they were painted. A parallel can be drawn with a large neon sign that stands against a distant sunset. The message, especially if it is only a single word, remains in the mind as an integral part of the landscape, a distinct form whose actual meaning is secondary to the part it plays in the scene as a whole.

Yet it is these verbal paintings (including those whose titles are incorporated) which perhaps provide the gate — a way through — to the man and to the many and varied landscapes that constitute the bulk of his work." (http://www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/authors/young/mccahon.asp)

"one of McCahon's utmost achievements is that he can transform writing into painting--and that this is about meaning. It's not like those painters in the early twentieth century using letters and torn Metro tickets to enliven their surfaces. He uses the language of poets and prophets because he feels close to them. He also preferred to use another voice besides his own, although always to say what he wanted to say. He's aware that that kind of language has a more direct connection with his public, especially the New Zealand poets involved in this search for national identity.

McCahon's paintings all have a performative quality. It's especially clear in Practical religion: the resurrection of Lazarus showing Mount Martha [1969-70], because in all the different letter styles you see McCahon enacting different voices. Again I recall how important the Kaprow performance was for him: He's trying to impart performance to painting. He doesn't need real actors because he can use the writing as an actor in an entirely visual way. Pollock comes to mind, in the sense of a holistic painting, covering the whole surface with a kind of web. McCahon's writing does something similar, and his handwriting changed according to the paint he used, with the late works using easily flowing, fast-drying acrylics." (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_1_42/ai_108691803/pg_4/?tag=content;col1)

"A discursive poetry, Baxter’s work owes much to Yeats, Eliot, Auden and Lowell and a little to Hart Crane and Dylan Thomas. It draws on New Zealand poets R.A.K. Mason and A.R.D. Fairburn and, by the poet’s own account, Lawrence Durrell.

But it is not enough to point out Baxter’s influences, though his early poetry has sometimes been accused of slavish devotion to his literary heritage. To miss Baxter’s stubborn pride in the local—the Maori phrases that pepper his language, the tricky subversion of classical English meters, the strange fusion of Catholicism and post-colonial baggage that drives the verse—is to ignore a great deal of what makes his poetry worth reading. Baxter’s fierce insistence on relating the specific to the mythological results in a kind of writing that pushes against literary parochialism (though I doubt whether the mature Baxter worried much about reaching non-Kiwi readers) and, at the same time, castigates itself for doing so. It is, at heart, a poetry of conflict. Even as it censures the sterility and viciousness of pakeha (the Maori word for white New Zealanders) culture, Baxter’s poetry takes up a dialogue with traditional English language forms—sonnets, ballads, sestinas—stretching them or chiseling them down, pouring indigenous language into the gaps where English seems to fail—aroha (love), Hatana (Satan), tapu (sacred; forbidden)." http://www.cprw.com/Misc/baxter.htm

"O’Sullivan suggests that the real achievement of Baxter’s verse is as ‘the most complete delineation yet of a New Zealand mind. The poetic record of its shaping [being] as original an act as anything we have.’ If, at times, Baxter appears to evaluate New Zealand society harshly, his judgements are always from the perspective of one intimately involved in the social process. His criticisms of national life and his ultimate decision to step out of the mainstream seemed to develop naturally from the preoccupations of a lifetime of verse. Yet these preoccupations were, as a rule, neither negative nor despairing. Rather, the deliberately mythological cast of mind that underpinned his poetry sought to place the individual (and the nation) within a wider frame by directing attention towards universal elements of human experience. The Baxter who, writing shortly before his death, found the Medusa’s head of present-day urban civilisation—with its ‘depersonalisation, centralisation, [and] desacralisation’—intolerable, could still find reason for hope ‘in the hearts of people’." (http://www.bookcouncil.org.nz/writers/baxterjk.html)

"He [Hayman] was an admirer of Marc Chagall, Emil Nolde, and Edvard Munch, as well as Alfred Wallis. Like Chagall, Jewish figures and motifs can be seen in some of Hayman’s work, as both shared this religious heritage. He also felt an artistic kinship with Oceanic artists and Byzantine icon painters." (http://www.petulloartcollection.org/the_collection/about_the_artists/artist.cfm?a_id=27)

"Hayman's roots reach much further back, to the formative visionary William Blake, whose universe was constructed equally through visual imagery and words. Hayman struck a similar chord in A Painter's Notes:

As a painter I write poetry and as a poet I wish to illustrate it. I believe in the integration of poem and illustration, of word and line, word, and painting. The nearer an artist can get to making the whole of a creative production himself the better it is. Perhaps in a time of authoritarianism, monopoly and mass production, some return to a modern equivalent of the illuminated manuscript may be necessary. Furthermore the individual artist will then perhaps be in a position to maintain control over what he produces.

Basil Dowling, who was the first to write on Hayman for a New Zealand periodical, spoke of the concentrated imaginative force of his paintings and poetry which produced 'powerful archetypal images and myths (both ancient and modern). . . .'. Sequences are drawn from the Bible, from Shakespeare or modernist drama, from historical incidents such as Riel and Dumont, or they may relate to a topical event, disturbing in its implications, for example Atomic Explosion at Mururoa. We are confronted with a highly personal vocabulary, which is by turn, both sombre and lighthearted. Hayman's illustrated poems, his richly coloured paintings, and Dada-like constructions, are all essentially icons, symbolising man's predicament in the spiritual and material world." (http://www.art-newzealand.com/Issues21to30/hayman.htm)

"Poetic, witty and poignant, his work drew upon a vast range of personal and cultural sources. Subjects from history, myth, religion and literature, and from the experience of everyday life, were drawn into and and transformed by the idiosyncratic world of his imagination. He touched nothing that did not undergo a 'sea-change into something rich and strange'. Hayman's distinctive imagery was utterly his own and yet it seemed to touch upon something deep in the spirit of those that encountered it …

his free and melancholy spirit finding expression in an outpouring of visionary drawings, paintings and constructions, as well as a number of beautiful painted poems."

"And so on dark afternoons one should take up one’s brush and paint a summer sky and beneath it the sea. Or perhaps the light on an angel’s wing. It is important, I believe, to enter another world than the visible one and by painting something which appears to be the opposite of what one sees in nature, it may be possible, momentarily, to enter a different state of being." 
 Patrick Hayman, "A Painter’s Notes" in The Painter & Sculptor, Vol. 2, No. 4, Winter, 1959 – 60 (http://www.belgravestives.co.uk/pages/single/1051/p.html)

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David Downes - You Can Tell My Words Are Crippled Now.

Spiritual Life column

This is my latest Spiritual Life column as published in today's Ilford Recorder:

Richard Baxter has recently had an installation at Southend Museum where each day an unglazed replica of a pot from a different era of human history is submerged in water to be viewed as it decomposes; from the ground you were taken, you are dust and to dust you shall return!


Jesus used the reality of death to teach us about life and the questions he posed include how to live well in the face of the reality of death. The artist Matt Lamb, formerly a funeral director, tells a tale of a man he buried who focused his whole life on working to become a company director only to die of a heart attack at the beginning of his first board meeting in that role. Do those things we are aiming for in this life have meaning in the face of the reality of our death?


Jesus’ crucifixion puts the reality of death (coupled with the promise of resurrection) at the very heart of the Christian faith in a way that is not the case in a society dedicated to prolonging life and avoiding pain. Therefore, one role that we have as Christians is to seek to come alongside people to provide support at times when the reality of death hits home. When we honestly face the reality of death, Jesus’ life, death and teaching say to us, it changes what we value and the way we choose to live in the here and now.


St Paul writes that faith, hope and love remain, while Eugene Peterson paraphrases the final lines of Jesus’ story about weeds and wheat as follows: "… ripe, holy lives will mature and adorn the kingdom of their Father. Are you listening to this? Really listening?"


A version of this piece has also been posted as my latest Gospel Reflection on the website of Mission in London's Economy and can be read by clicking here.


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REM - Everybody Hurts.

Baxter & McCahon: New Zealand's finest!

Blogging about Australia's religious art has reminded me of two fascinating New Zealand artists; one, James K. Baxter, a poet and the other, Colin McCahon, a painter.

James K. Baxter, to quote from his Collected Poems:

"was a man of contradictions: a fine poet who spent much of his time exercising a concern for society's outcasts; a man with intense loyalty to his country who frequently condemned its institutions; a devout convert to Roman Catholicism whose life did not follow many of the usual practices of the Church. But whether he is remembered as the charismatic figure who founded a community for young people among the Maoris at Jerusalem or as the gifted and complex poet, he is certain to be remembered as a man whose life and work was central to New Zealand experience."

Baxter wrote that:

"Writing, in my case, has proceeded entirely from Lower Learning, learning who one is. And this is not learnt in a lecture-room or library, but in the jails and torture rooms of a private destiny, or conceivably planting potatoes, or conceivably kneeling blindly at the Mass."

God first revealed himself to him, "one day when I had reached the middle of a disused railway tunnel, in the grip of a brutal hangover." He confessed that his own conversion:

"controlled by the Spirit of Love who kindles where he desires to kindle, was founded on the natural ground of that utter lack of credulity, that abyss of scepticism which makes me call myself a modern man. Because I doubted all substantial good, it became possible for me to believe in the Unknown God who is also the son of man ..."

To read a small selection of Baxter's Autumn Testament sonnets, click here.

McCahon is considered New Zealand's greatest artist. This brief description of his life and work comes from the introduction to A Question of Faith, a 2003 retrospective held at the National Gallery of Victoria:

"Colin McCahon was born in Timaru, New Zealand in 1919 and died in Auckland in 1987. Particularly since his death, his activities as a teacher and museum curator have become the subject of much discussion. Central to McCahon’s oeuvre is the investigation of the true nature of faith and his own spiritual experience and development. He was deeply committed to the environment and entered into an engagement with Maori culture. Landscape and religion, in particular the language of the bible, are constant factors in his work."

McCahon's work developed from the early figurative styles of the 1940s to the later abstract works as he sought to give visual representation to the existential issues of the human condition by using and modernising the Western Judeo-Christian artistic tradition. To see a wide selection of McCahon's work, click here.

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Steve Taylor - Jim Morrison's Grave.