Seen and Unseen - Matthew Krishanu: painting childhood

My latest interview for Seen & Unseen is with Matthew Krishanu on his exhibition 'The Bough Breaks' at Camden Art Centre:

'He thinks that this show has “set up a kind of a world philosophy” for him: “The core, the heart of the show, for me, is family, particularly of my late wife and my daughter. In and amongst the drawings, there are some pictures of our baby, and my late wife holding our baby or, indeed, holding the tree that my daughter is climbing. For me, that is where my faith is, in love, in the love of family, in all that a baby calls upon us to give it. That is the closest thing to divinity.'

See also my exhibition review for Church Times, plus my latest Art Diary for Artlyst for more on this exhibition and my review of Everyday Heroes for more on Matthew Krishanu.

My first article for Seen and Unseen was 'Life is more important than art' which reviews the themes of recent art exhibitions that tackle life’s big questions and the roles creators take.

My second article 'Corinne Bailey Rae’s energised and anguished creative journey' explores inspirations in Detroit, Leeds and Ethiopia for Corinne Bailey Rae’s latest album, Black Rainbows, which is an atlas of capacious faith.

My third article was an interview with musician and priest Rev Simpkins in which we discussed how music is an expression of humanity and his faith.

My fourth article was a guide to the Christmas season’s art, past and present. Traditionally at this time of year “great art comes tumbling through your letterbox” so, in this article, I explore the historic and contemporary art of Christmas.

My fifth article was 'Finding the human amid the wreckage of migration'. In this article I interviewed Shezad Dawood about his multimedia Leviathan exhibition at Salisbury Cathedral where personal objects recovered from ocean depths tell a story of modern and ancient migrations.

My sixth article was 'The visionary artists finding heaven down here' in which I explored a tradition of visionary artists whose works shed light on the material and spiritual worlds.

My seventh article was 'How the incomer’s eye sees identity' in which I explain how curating an exhibition for Ben Uri Online gave me the chance to highlight synergies between ancient texts and current issues.

My eighth article was 'Infernal rebellion and the questions it asks' in which I interview the author Nicholas Papadopulos about his book The Infernal Word: Notes from a Rebel Angel.

My ninth article was 'A day, night and dawn with Nick Cave’s lyrics' in which I review Adam Steiner’s Darker With The Dawn — Nick Cave’s Songs Of Love And Death and explore whether Steiner's rappel into Cave’s art helps us understand its purpose.

My 10th article was 'Theresa Lola's poetical hope' about the death-haunted yet lyrical, joyful and moving poet for a new generation.

My 11th article was 'How to look at our world: Aaron Rosen interview', exploring themes from Rosen's book 'What Would Jesus See: Ways of Looking at a Disorienting World'.

My 12th article was 'Blake, imagination and the insight of God', exploring a new exhibition - 'William Blake's Universe at the Fitzwilliam Museum - which focuses on seekers of spiritual regeneration and national revival.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Byrds - Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is A Season).

Church Times - Art review: Matthew Krishanu: The Bough Breaks (Camden Arts Centre)

My latest exhibition review for Church Times is on The Bough Breaks: Matthew Krishanu at Camden Art Centre:

'Krishanu shows us the world from the perspective of a child and asks us to pay attention as the child does. Accordingly, we see the vastness of the world around us, whether its foreground expanses or the complex climbing frame of banyan trees or the immense depth of pools, rivers, and oceans. In the adult world of human beings, we are often at the back of crowds looking through beings like trees in a forest, or looking up because we cannot look through.'

See also my latest Art Diary for Artlyst for more on this exhibition and my review of Everyday Heroes for more on Matthew Krishanu.

Other of my pieces for Church Times can be found here. My writing for ArtWay can be found here. My pieces for Artlyst are here, those for Seen & Unseen are here, and those for Art+Christianity are here.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Innocence Mission - Beginning The World.

Come as a child

Here is the reflection I shared in today's Eucharist at St Martin-in-the-Fields:

The poem called ‘Song of Childhood’ by Peter Handke which features in the film Wings of Desire captures, for me, something of the openness of childhood when the world lies open before us and we encounter it without cynicism or prior knowledge. The big questions of life are in front of us but we have yet found answers or the pretence that we can know all the answers.

In the poem the child has retained that openness to life and existence as she or he has grown but in our gospel reading (Matthew 11. 25-30) today we hear of people who have not. When Jesus speaks about the wise and the intelligent, he is speaking of those who think they already have knowledge of what God wants. They are those who cannot receive the new thing that God wants to give because they think they already know all there is to know. As a result, they are closed off to what God wants to share.

Jesus says that those able to receive are like children. They are not worldly wise or information wise and, as a result, they are open to what is new and what is revealed. This is how we need to be if we are to receive what God has revealed to us in Jesus.

Tom Wright says this: “Jesus had come to know his father the way a son does: not by studying books about him, but by living in his presence, listening for his voice, and learning from him as an apprentice does from a master, by watching and imitating. And he was now discovering that the wise and learned were getting nowhere, and that the ‘little people’ – the poor, the sinners, the tax collectors, ordinary folk – were discovering more of God, simply by following him, Jesus, than the learned specialists who declared that what he was doing didn’t fit with their complicated theories.”

Sister Corita Kent has described the way in which children look and learn:

“Ask [a] child to come from the front of the house to the back and closely observe her small journey. It will be full of pauses, circling, touching and picking up in order to smell, shake, taste, rub, and scrape. The child’s eyes won’t leave the ground, and every piece of paper, every scrap, every object along the path will be a new discovery.

It does not matter that his is all familiar territory – the same house, the same rug and chair. To the child, the journey of this particular day, with its special light and sound, has never been made before. So the child treats the situation with the open curiosity and attention that it deserves.

The child is quite right.”

Unless you come,
come as a child,
not grasping but trusting,
not arrogantly but humbly,
not resisting but accepting,
not feebly but vigorously,
not giving but receiving,
not self-centred but God-centred,
not teaching but feeding,
not gaining life but losing life,
not leaving but returning,
not closed, but open.

Unless you come,
come as a child,
you cannot enter
the kingdom of God.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Van Morrison - Song Of Being A Child.

Review: Edward Burne-Jones and Seen & Heard

My latest exhibition review for Church Times covers Edward Burne-Jones: Pre-Raphaelite Visionary, at Tate Britain and Seen & Heard: Victorian Children in the Frame, at Guildhall Art Gallery.

'Offering us a visual narrative for the huge cultural shift in how society viewed, and treated, children over the course of the “long 19th century”, “Seen and Heard: Victorian Children in the Frame” plunges us into the maelstrom of innovation and exploitation, compassion and sentimentality, which characterised Victorian society.'

'Tate Britain’s exhibition, by bringing together more than 150 works in different media, including painting, stained glass, and tapestry, presents Burne-Jones as the polymath that he would have appeared to be to his contemporary audience; to whom he was a designer and decorative and fine artist with an exceptionally wide range of literary reference.'

The review also considers the legacy of the Victorians, a legacy that I also examined in a review for ArtWay of Adrian Barlow's book Kempe: The Life, Art and Legacy of Charles Eamer Kempe:

'The legacy and reputation of many significant Victorians is complex and contradictory because their often great achievements were fashioned on the oppression of Empire and the superiority and arrogance which fuelled aggressive expansion presenting exploitation of others and their natural resources as being the introduction of civilisation.'

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Rush - The Garden.

Living with Dementia

On Tuesday, at St Martin-in-the-Fields, we continued our exploration of the experience of dementia and faith, through the insight of lived experience and theological reflection, as we looked at how our church life and worship might grow in a more dementia-friendly way. We were helped enormously in doing so by Clive Wright, David Warbrick and Sister Margaret.

David Warbrick said: "I was seeing, pared down, the very fabric of faith: imagination, analogy, metaphor, improvisation, musicality of speech, the power of words to evoke rather than confine and control. In his dementia, Dad laid bare the workings of the equipment God has given human beings for prayer. Half an hour in his real-yet-imaginary world burnished my vision of the world outside. The slowness and sense of presence made me see the exquisite delicacy of facial expressions and listen to intonation as much as to words, so something shifted in me. Just as his paintings have made me stop and behold rather than merely look at the world, maybe in his childlike dementia he has offered me a gift of perception I need to receive precisely now if I am to stay in touch with the kingdom of heaven during this exciting, potentially fruitful but also perhaps dangerously self-important, busily distracted decade of my life."

Several people spoke a sense of hope as a result of the idea developed by John Polkinghorne that "the immensely complex ‘information-bearing pattern’ (memories, character, etc) carried at any one time by the matter of my body ... is the soul and, though it will dissolve with the decay of my body, it is a perfectly sensible hope that the faithful God will not allow it to be lost but will preserve it in the divine memory in order to restore its embodiment in the great divine act of resurrection."

Also of particular interest was the thought that it is our earliest memories which are the last to fade. This is an additional reason for seeking to ensure that children have positive experiences in their childhood, as those memories may well be the place that they inhabit again at the end of their lives.

These are just some points of particular note for me from an evening which was full of value for those who came. Much discussion about dementia is to do with increasing understanding and thinking about the small things that we can do to make a difference to people affected by dementia in our community. That is deeply valuable but this evening took the discussion in very different directions which confronted some of the very real questions and challenges that the experience of living with dementia raises.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

R.E.M. - Talk About The Passion.