Church Times - Art review: Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone. The Art of Friendship (National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin)

My latest exhibition review for Church Times is on “Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone. The Art of Friendship” at the National Gallery of Ireland:

'Jellett and Hone are significant as pioneering Irish modernists, as women artists undertaking that mission at that time, and as artists allowing their understanding of the ways in which faith and art intertwine to shape the work they produced. As a result, they are important counterpoints to the narrative that treats modernism as a primarily secular endeavour, and abstraction, through its lack of content, as a primary example of art that was principally for art’s sake alone.'

For more on Jellett and Hone see here, here, here, here, and here.

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.

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Van Morrison - Into The Mystic.

Art review: Natalia Goncharova at Tate Modern

My latest review for Church Times is of the Natalia Gonchorova exhibition at Tate Modern:

'the religious inspiration in Goncharova’s work cannot be contained ... and extends throughout the exhibition — most notably, perhaps, in the room dedicated to her theatre sets for Sergei Diaghilev, where magnificent designs can be found for an ultimately unrealised ballet on the life of Christ.

In their book Modernism and the Spiritual in Russian Art: New perspectives, Louise Hardiman and Nicola Kozicharow suggest that “a narrative of Russian artistic modernism in which the engagement of artists, critics, and scholars with the religious and spiritual tradition” was fundamental is characteristic of this period of Russian art. That engagement was, they contend, “the driving force behind some of the most significant artistic innovations of the period”, including the neo-Primitivism of Goncharova. Goncharova believed that her religious works, based on her study of early icons and frescoes, connected her to the heart of Russian culture. That belief, and the reality of its execution, is clearly demonstrated by the heights and depths of this revelatory exhibition.'

Other of my pieces for Church Times can be found here.

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Mike Peters - Breathe.

Jonathan Anderson: Religious Inspirations Behind Modernism – Artlyst Interview

My latest interview for Artlyst is with Jonathan Anderson, co-author with William Dyrness, of Modern Art and the Life of a Culture: The Religious Impulses of Modernism (IVP Academic, 2016). In a wide-ranging interview, we explore two untold stories about modern art; first, Western art carries the mark of its religious roots; and, second, modern art is always doing theology at some level.

Jonathan says: 'Over the past twenty years or so there has been a remarkable shift in the number of artists who are more explicitly thinking about religion, the number of curators who are staging exhibitions specifically addressing questions of religion in contemporary art, and the number of scholars who are studying the role of religion and theology in modern and contemporary art. There are now shelves of books and exhibition catalogues related to these topics, and they are being written from several perspectives and at the intersection of several disciplines, including art history, religious studies, sociology, and theology. This shift has created a conversation that feels fairly chaotic and unfocused, and there also remains, as James Elkins has said, ‘a complex structure of refusals’ against this kind of conversation both in academia and in the art world. But, nevertheless, the shift has been quite remarkable.'

The ground covered in our conversation includes aspects of art history, hermeneutics, postmodernism, spirituality, and theology.

My other Artlyst articles and interviews are:

• Michael Takeo Magruder: De / coding the Apocalypse – Panacea Museum
• Giorgio Griffa: The Golden Ratio And Inexplicable Knowledge
• Arabella Dorman Unveils New Installation At St James Church Piccadilly
• Can Art Transform Society?
• Art Awakening Humanity Conference Report
• Central St Martins in the Fields Design Then And Now
• The Sacramental And Liturgical Nature Of Conceptual Art
• Caravan – An Interview With Rev Paul Gordon Chandler On Arts Peacebuilding
• Art Awakening Humanity Alexander de Cadenet Interviewed
• Polish Art In Britain Centenary Marked At London’s Ben Uri Gallery
• Michael Pendry New Installation Lights Up St Martin In The Fields;
• Mark Dean Projects Stations of the Cross Videos On Henry Moore Altar;
• Refugee Artists Learning from The Lives Of Others;
• The Religious Impulses Of Robert Rauschenberg;
• The Christian Science Connection Within The British Modern Art Movement;
• Artists Rebranding The Christmas Tree Tradition;
• Art Impacted - A Radical Response To Radicalisation;
• The Art of St Martin-in-the-Fields; and
• Was Caravaggio A Good Christian?

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Leonard Cohen - Born In Chains.

Sussex Modernism and the Church

In the first half of the 20th century Sussex was home to major artists and collectors namely the Catholic art and craft community in Ditchling (home of Eric Gill and David Jones), Charleston (home of the Bloomsbury Group), Farley Farm House, Chiddingly (home of Roland Penrose and Lee Miller) and West Dean (home to surrealist Edward James). In the communities they created, artistic innovation ran hand in-hand with political, sexual and domestic experimentation. Both are explored in Sussex Modernism: Retreat and Rebellion at Two Temple Place until 23 April 2017. Surprisingly in the context of modernism, links to churches is a thread running through this exhibition.

The beginning of the twentieth century saw the formation of many artist's colonies and communities.

The most successful of these was probably at Gödöllő in Hungary, which was based on the writings on John Ruskin and William Morris. Its closest equivalent in Britain was Ditchling in Sussex where the Guild of St Joseph and St Dominic was formed.

Eric Gill, later followed by Edward Johnston and Hilary Pepler, moved to Ditchling, in 1907 seeking the advantages of country living, and this move led directly to the formation of the Guild in 1920. Earlier, in 1914, the three men issued their first edition of 'The Game', an occasional magazine which was to become the main forum for the views of the Guild. The arrival in 1917 of Fr. Vincent McNabb, prior of the Dominicans at Hawkesyard in Staffordshire, became the catalyst for the transition from three friends living and working close by to the formation of the Guild. On 29 July 1918 Pepler, Gill, his wife Mary and his apprentice Desmond Chute joined the Third Order of the Dominicans.

The Guild was set up to be a revolutionary community of artists and craftspeople living, working and worshipping as Dominican Tertiaries. The January 1918 edition of 'The Game' stated 'The object of the Revolution is to replace the worship of Mammon by the worship of God. We adhere to the principle of human freedom, which we believe to be possible only by obedience to God and by recognising the institutions which are of God.' Johnston was unable to follow in their ardent Catholicism and did not join, although he continued to live in Ditchling. David Jones joined the community in 1921 and then, in 1924, moved with Gill to Caldey in Wales as part of an attempt to establish a similar Guild there.

As Fiona MacCarthy has noted: ‘Gill was revolutionary in his attitude to making, a pioneer in reviving the medieval practice of "direct carving" … For Gill, direct carving was part of a whole philosophy of life, a campaign against coyness and adulteration wherever he found it … He developed what became a religion of explicitness, "the making out of stone things seen in the mind".’ Gill also went on a ‘long and sometimes agonising quest to reconcile the sexual and the spiritual.’ However, he eventually became ‘a Catholic artist in a primarily Anglican country, working almost exclusively for Catholic clients’; the Guild likewise.

Timothy Elphick describes much of the Guild's work as being devotional: 'Wood engravings of religious subjects were cut in profusion by Gill and Chute and the newly arrived David Jones, many for use as illustrations in THE GAME. Pepler's St Dominic's Press was printing Mass-sheets, ordination cards and music for psalms and canticles, as well as books and pamphlets written by guild members and their friends. One such book, a translation in 1923 of Jacques Maritain's Art et Scholastique, was to be of the greatest importance'.['Eric Gill and the Guild of St Joseph and St Dominic', Hove Museum and Art Gallery, 1990]

As a result, the specifically Christian modernism of the Guild of St Joseph and St Dominic was part of The Third Spring, a flowering of Roman Catholicism among artists and intellectuals which had G.K. Chesterton and Jacques Maritain as its guiding lights and which saw a flourishing of sacred art societies, similar to that at Ditchling, across Europe.

A similar flowering of Anglicanism among artists and intellectuals also occurred in Britain, primarily as a result of the ministries of George Bell and Walter Hussey. On 27th June 1929, the day he became Bishop of Chichester, Bell expressed, in his enthronement address, his commitment to a much closer relationship between the Anglican Church and the arts:

‘Whether it be music or painting or drama, sculpture or architecture or any other form of art, there is an instinctive sympathy between all of these and the worship of God. Nor should the church be afraid to thank the artists for their help, or to offer its blessing to the works so pure and lovely in which they seek to express the Eternal Spirit. Therefore I earnestly hope that in this diocese (and in others) we may seek ways and means for a reconciliation of the Artist and the Church—learning from him as well as giving to him and considering with his help our conception alike of the character of Christian worship and of the forms in which the Christian teaching may be proclaimed.’

Bell had been intent on re-establishing the link between the Church and the arts from his early days as Dean of Canterbury where he had begun with religious drama, commissioning in 1928 a new play for the cathedral from John Masefield; an event which in large part led to the establishing of a series of Canterbury plays, including Murder in the Cathedral by T.S. Eliot. He went on to commission drama, music and visual art, put structures in place (e.g. the Sussex Churches Art Council and its ‘Pictures in Churches Loan Scheme’) to support a wider commissioning of artists, placed his trust in the vision of artists when they encountered opposition and he was called on to adjudicate on commissions and strongly supported the appointment of Walter Hussey as Dean of Chichester Cathedral to take forward the commissioning programme he had initiated there.

Bell viewed his drive to re-associate the Church and the Arts as being ‘an effective protection against barbarism, whether the barbarism was Nazism, materialism or any other threat to civilization.’ Murals commissioned from Duncan Grant, Vanessa and Quentin Bell in 1941 for the Sussex Church of St Michael & All Angels Berwick represented a fulfilment of his vision to be a catalyst for promoting the relationship between the Arts and the Church. As Sir Kenneth Clark wrote in 1941: ‘...with a little judicious publicity it might have the effect of encouraging other dioceses to do the same. If once such a movement got under way, it would have incalculable influence for the good on English Art.’

At Berwick, for the first time a modern artist of national standing, Duncan Grant, undertook ‘a complete decorative scheme for an historic rural church’. ‘Duncan Grant was the lead artist for the murals and put forward the initial proposals. He had moved with Vanessa Bell and her husband, Clive, to Charleston Farmhouse at the foot of the Downs, three miles to the west of Berwick Church, in 1916. Quentin Bell, the son of Vanessa and Clive, undertook all the paintings within the Chancel as well as ‘The Supper at Emmaus’ at the end of the north aisle.’

They ‘had in view a ‘decorative scheme’ which, rather than simply being a series of individual paintings within frames, would create an environment with its own particular feeling and aesthetic.’ A study for one of the six larger works in the scheme, Christ in Glory, can be seen in the exhibition.

Grant’s work was ‘influenced by his travels in Italy where, as an art student, he had seen the mosaics at Ravenna and copied the frescoes of Piero della Francesca (1420-1492) at Arezzo. Then in Paris he had copied works by Chardin (1699-1779) portraying scenes from everyday life, ordinary people in work or recreation. At the same time he studied the work of the Impressionists and was later greatly influenced by the Post-Impressionists such as Cezanne, Seurat, and others …

The murals at Berwick exhibit influences from all these traditions, but also something of the artists’ focus on the intimacy of the home and personal relationships and their love of the beauty and simplicity of the Downland landscape.’

The murals themselves looked back in terms of style to the grand ‘tradition of ecclesiastical art’ while their content was nostalgic for a past picture of rural England which was rapidly being lost. Both factors meant that the scheme at Berwick did not serve as a model for Church patronage of modern art as had been the hope of Bell and Clarke. Although the artists at Berwick were considered ‘avant garde’ in their day what they actually produced for the church was a scheme which looked back to earlier traditions of ecclesiastical art, rather than one which looked forward.

Bell’s colleague Walter Hussey wrote, in preparation for his final commission that it had been the great enthusiasm of his life and work ‘to commission for the Church the very best artists I could, in painting, in sculpture, in music and in literature.’ He was guided by the principle that, ‘Whenever anything new was required in the first seven hundred years of the history of the cathedral, it was put in the contemporary style.’ Like Bell, Hussey believed that ‘True artists of all sorts, as creators of some of the most worthwhile of man’s work, are well adapted to express man’s worship of God.’ When this is done consciously, he suggested, ‘the beauty and strength of their work can draw others to share to some extent their vision.’

Hussey, as noted in his Pallant House biography, “was responsible for commissioning some iconic works of twentieth century music and visual art, first as Vicar of St Matthew's Church Northampton and subsequently as Dean of Chichester Cathedral, from likes of William Albright, Leonard Bernstein, Benjamin Britten, Henry Moore, Graham Sutherland and William Walton”:
Kenneth Clark spoke at the unveiling in 1961 of Graham Sutherland's Noli Me Tangere, another Hussey commission, this time at Chichester Cathedral, and reflected on the situation when Hussey first began to commission contemporary artists: ‘... when in 1944, a small body of artists and amateurs made a bomb-stricken journey to Northampton for the unveiling of Henry Moore's Virgin and Child, Canon Hussey had lit a candle, which is still very far from being a blaze ... The artists commissioned by Canon Hussey were ... little known outside the company of those directly interested in art. I think that even then collectors - both private and public - were shy of their work, and to put it in a church was a wonderful act of vision, courage and persuasive skill.’
Bell and Hussey made a major contribution to reinvigorating the Church’s patronage of the Arts, as evidenced in this exhibition by works from Hans Feibusch and Graham Sutherland related to commissions for Chichester Cathedral. The inspiration they provided for modernist commissions by churches continues in the permanent commissions, temporary installations and exhibitions undertaken by many British churches and Cathedrals today. This is a revolution, stemming initially from Gill’s 1915 Stations of the Cross at Westminster Cathedral, to which Sussex modernists made major contributions.

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Over The Rhine - All My Favourite People Are Broken.

Poem: ... if we attend ...

Supple sensuous sinuous pencil lines combine
with sketchy swathes, swatches
and blotches of liquid colour,
minimal modelling merging near and far,
present and past on shallow space.
Glass chalices, open windows,
flowers and thorns, still life and landscape.
The Eucharist - one reality in the form of another,
heaven in ordinary - frames and forms his making –
all human making - sacramental signification,
inutile and gratuitous; graceful, playful,
light and loving, abundant and affirming.

If we attend the waters are freed,
aqueous light floods static subjects
as fluid flecks, flurries and washes of colour
suffuse, invade, imbue and inform
playing freely on forms creating flux,
confusing boundaries, circling round
transparent images, blending, merging all -
the wood and the trees - bringing all within
imaginations reach. The spiritual shimmering,
shining through the material, the universal
in the particular - seeing with, not through
the eye - for to pay attention, this is prayer.

A Londoner of Protestant upbringing,
Catholic subscription, and of particular
Welsh and English stock.
A Christian modernist chasing connection
through heritage and lineage,
interlinking, interleaving past and present;
like iconographers writing images,
David Jones opened windows into the divine
in Harrow-on-the-Hill, Capel-y-ffin,
Pigotts, and Portslade.

David Jones: Vision & Memory is at Pallant House, Chichester, until 21 February 2016. A concurrent exhibition The Animals of David Jones is on show at Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft. ‘if we attend’ (2015), a white, wall-mounted vitrine with translucent glazing and 16 porcelain vessels, is a new piece by Edmund de Waal produced especially for the David Jones exhibition at Pallant House. It references the calming slowing down effect of these words in the second line of Jones’s poem The Anathemata: ‘We already and first of all discern him making this thing other. His groping syntax, if we attend, already shapes…’.

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David Jones - In Parenthesis.

still small voice: creating sacred space

My latest exhibition review for the Church Times is of still small voice at The Wilson in Cheltenham. The collection of British biblical art currently on show there 'begins with the Nazarene and Pre-Raphaelite styles of William Dobson and William Bell Scott, and continues, with Eric Gill as the bridge between Modernism and the earlier Arts and Crafts movement, through the inter-war period of the 1920s and 1930s, the Second World War, the post-war era, and the later 20th century, into the early 21st century.'

Included is a stunning Craigie Aitchison piece: 'Completed just a year before his death, Body of Christ (Red Background) is an example of the spiritual depths of modern art, with its full-on expressive use of colour combined with the stripped-back minimalism of its imagery. Christ is the cross, the cross is the wound at the heart of the canvas, and this gash in the blood-red background is the point at which light enters the space ...

this is art that creates sacred space by taking you "somewhere beyond yourself and outside of your own little world".'

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Krzysztof Penderecki - St. Luke's Passion.

Is There a Return of the Religious in Contemporary Art?

As well as significant series of posts on the engagement between Christianity and the Arts (see Airbrushed from Art History and Sabbatical Art Pilgrimage), this blog has tried to highlight places where discussion about faith and art has been occurring (see, for example, here, here, here, here and here).

A 2013 ArtMag article, as well as featuring some positive views, highlights some of the mindsets in the mainstream art world which continue to limit the engagement of faiths and arts:

Anselm Franke writes: 'There is an important movement of engaging with religious topics, but there is not a wave of religious or sacral art in contemporary art. That is an important difference ... The historical break with religion continues. We would not think of hanging something that someone prays to in a museum ... Faith is incompatible with art end even destroys the sovereignty of art and the kinds of experiences we are looking for when we frequent art spaces.'

Silvia Henke argues that 'Religious art is taboo! Religious art exists in churches, in historical museums, at most in museums for non-European art, or in the vicinity of mentally confused artists, but not in the white cubes of major art temples.'

While Beat Wyss suggests that 'artistic activity depends on the achievements of society, which I term the “four virtues of the art system”: 1) respect for the individual; 2) a valuing of work within society; 3) open practices in relation to exchange and trade; and 4) freedom of speech in the public realm.
If only one of these aspects is missing, then art is endangered or even rendered completely impossible. These societal achievements have evolved over centuries as the philosophy of Humanism developed into bourgeois economic ethics, the politics of legally constituted forms of democracy and onwards to colonial liberation movements.'

On this basis, modernism requires a complete break with religion because it is only humanism that can guarantee the freedom which art needs in order to genuinely be itself as opposed to dogmatic religiosity. 

Silvia Henke is constructive when she suggests that 'contemporary art to accept the long-standing diagnosis of Western society put forth by philosophers and sociologists of religion, namely: That it finds itself in a “post-secular” phase, a term which allows for critical self-reflection through religious thought, while considering the ubiquity of the religious in its various manifestations within the secularization process, through secular thought (Jürgen Habermas).'

She notes that in this context: 'Artistic works which precisely deal with religious form and meaning have the ability to mediate between blind faith and rational knowledge; they belong neither to a dogmatic religiosity that confuses belief with conviction, nor to a totally individualized “who cares how or what” religiousness, in which faith is an utterly private thing. When artistic works successfully translate sacred symbols into the language of secular art (masterfully done by Mark Wallinger), it happens not as blasphemy or a deconstruction of the religious but rather, in Jean-Luc Nancy’s sense, as “redeeming deconstruction.”'

All this means that research, such as that being undertaken or initiated by Ben Quash and Angus Pryor, is of real significance in understanding the complexities of the current relationship between faith and art.

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Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Oh My Lord.

Airbrushed from Art History: Stained Glass from Welsh Churches

Martin Crampin is an artist working in West Wales. Since 1999 he has been based at the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies in Aberystwyth, where he has worked on research projects concerning aspects of visual culture in Wales. He has been recording stained glass in Wales since about 2005, and thousands of his photographs of stained glass in Wales can be found on the Stained Glass in Wales Catalogue.

His fully illustrated book Stained Glass from Welsh Churches brings together over six years of research and an archive of thousands of high-quality photographs, to produce a detailed narrative outlining the range and development of stained glass in Wales from the 14th century up to the present day.

In a post describing the scope of the book Martin has written:

'During the 1950s some tentative steps towards Modernism can be seen, and in Wales the beginnings of its own tradition of stained glass are also found. From the 1840s there is little to distinguish Welsh ecclesiastical stained glass from that made for English churches, and exported around the British Empire. The work of the Swansea firm Celtic Studios, and the course established in Swansea by Celtic Studios main designer, Howard Martin, laid the foundations for a Welsh tradition of making stained glass. This ‘Welsh’ tradition became increasingly internationalist in character, and some windows in churches of the late 1970s and 80s were made by Swansea students and ex-students, who sometimes came from other parts of the country and around the world, and have gone on to be distinguished artists in glass.

From the 1970s my chosen title of Stained Glass from Welsh Churches is all the more significant. More stained glass was being made for buildings that were not places of worship, and consequently some of the interesting work by artists based in and around Swansea such as Amber Hiscott, David Pearl, Alexander Beleschenko and Catrin Jones is not found in the book. Work in churches however becomes ever more vibrant, and exhibits a wide variety of personal styles, although often staying closer to traditional methods of making stained glass, rather than the growing vocabulary of techniques encompassed in the term ‘architectural glass’.

The book closes with an attempt to see what has happened in the last fifteen years and tentatively suggest what might lie ahead, as intimated by the gradually decreasing number of commissions and the creation of internal divisions in churches that invite the use of architectural glass techniques such as etching, enamelling and bonding.'

Martin also writes that, 'The chapters on Modernism and the creative artists of the end of the last century touched on the problems of commissioning stained glass for churches, and the freedoms of the artists within these commissions. What I also found was that changes in position of the Diocesan Advisory Committees had a huge effect on the work that was commissioned. Unfortunately it's now more of a historic problem, as here in Wales the number of new commissions is seriously limited by funds and diminishing congregations. Which is why commission4mission is such an important project!'

He thinks that the engagement of the church with visual arts has not been properly celebrated, probably 'because stained glass, murals and other church furnishings have been on the periphery of the core art market of painting and sculpture, which has largely determined which artists we now define as 'mainstream' according to the accepted narratives of western art.'

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Bryan Ferry - Gates of Eden.

Brutalist churches

Several churches feature in the A - Z of Brutalism by Jonathan Meades in yesterday's Guardian. Meades writes:

"Vatican II was a godsend to architects. The Roman Catholic church was a generous, adventurous patron, and its buildings were to be advertisements for the church's newfound modernity. With few functional demands to take into consideration, architects enjoyed carte blanche. God can, apparently, live anywhere – and in the 1960s, he shared the widespread taste for open-plan spaces and theatre-in-the-round."

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Scott Stapp - Jesus Was A Rockstar.

Australia at the RA

With 200 works by 146 artists, Australia is the most comprehensive survey of Australian art to have been mounted outside of Australia itself. The story told is one of cultural interaction between Australia’s indigenous peoples and its non-indigenous settlers. Sitting alongside this cultural story is the art historical story of the introduction and dominance of Modernism within Australian art.

The art of Australia’s indigenous peoples possesses an integrity and harmony with life and land which is initially absent from the figurative landscape-based art of the early white settlers. Aboriginal art is both made from the land and about the land. Shapes and symbols of the land are mapped on rocks, ground, bark, bodies and, in more recent years, canvas to enact and embody creation narratives and the balance which exists between the spiritual, natural and moral elements of the world.

While the indigenous peoples of Australia lived in the land and the land lived in them, the early white settlers brought with them an observational approach to landscape. Beginning with views of settlements and gradually expanding to depict the wilderness around them, the early settler artists established landscape as the dominant feature of Australian art. The variation and expanse of Australia’s land mass has provided endless opportunities to celebrate its terrain, vegetation, light and human settlements.

Within this has been a conflicted relationship with its indigenous peoples beginning with observational paintings of aboriginal settlements and rituals, through heroic dramatisations of settler activity which excluded on canvas, as in life, the indigenous peoples, and two-way influences (vis-à-vis Aboriginal artist Albert Namatjira mastering European styles while Margaret Preston, a supporter of Namatjira, adopted the palette, flat planes and aspects of mark marking of indigenous art), to contemporary commentaries on race relations which are intentionally provocative.

Modern art began in Australia with the plein-air Impressionism of Tom Roberts, Frederick McCubbin, Arthur Streeton and Charles Condor, among others. The work they produced adapted Impressionism to the particular light and terrain of Australia and artists began to talk of a specifically Australian tradition. The early Modernists emphasised colour and composition in cityscapes, with the newly constructed Sydney Harbour Bridge a particular focus, but the greatest period of Australian art to date featured the Expressionism of Arthur Boyd, Sidney Nolan and Albert Tucker. In their works, land, emotion and symbol coalesced by means of Modernism which, nevertheless, had parallels with Australia’s indigenous artists. In them, the land was speaking powerfully, albeit with strangeness and stress, once again.

Within both the cultural and art historical stories told within this exhibition are hints of another spirituality, the Christianity brought to Australia by the settlers. While the key catalyst for the recognition by the art world of Australia’s indigenous art is identified as being the work of Geoffrey Bardon, an art teacher at the local school in Papunya during the 1970s, Christian missions in Eastern Arnhem Land and Hermannsburg in the 1930s led to monumental panels of ancestors by Yolngu artists placed beside the altar of the local mission church together with the launch of the successful career of Albert Namatjira.
Roy de Maistre wrote that colour "constitutes … the spiritual speech of every living thing." Margaret Preston used The Expulsion to protest at the exclusion of Aborigines from their natural lands. Arthur Boyd set the casting out of the money changers from the Temple in Bendigo and Port Melbourne in his protest at materialism and greed. G.W. Bot’s Garden of Gethsemene, with its three slashes representing three crosses, was a response to the death of her daughter in 1999. These examples from the exhibition are symptomatic of a deeper, broader pool of Christian imagery and spirituality within Australian art which is not plumbed by this exhibition but includes work by Justin O’Brien, Leonard French, Eric Smith and Idris Murphy, among others, much of which has been stimulated by the Blake Prize for Religious Art. When explored alongside the spirituality of Aboriginal art, searching for meaning through this strand of Australian art and creativity can, as Sr. Rosemary Crumlin (author of Aboriginal Art and Spirituality and Images of Religion in Australian Art) has said, lead to the finding of deeper ways into our questions about life and meaning.

Similarly, as the RA’s own guide states, this exhibition "reflects the vastness of the land and the diversity of its people, exploring the implications of these realities - and mythologies - for national identity."

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Midnight Oil - One Country.

The Bible: Backward and forward influences

For T. S. Eliot, Malcolm Guite writes (in Faith, Hope and Poetry), "there was a sense in which all poetry is contemporary" as what is written now "is not only influenced by what has been written in the past but in itself modifies the way we read the poetry of the past."

Guite gives as example:

"a powerful moment in The Waste Land when Eliot describes London commuters walking mechanically in a great dull crowd all looking down and seeming to breathe in unison and he says: ‘So many, I had not thought death had undone so many.’ When I first read this poem I felt this line simply as a poetic insight into the ‘nightmare life-in-death’ that modern living had imposed upon ‘lost’ souls, but later I came to read Carey’s great nineteenth-century translation of Dante’s Inferno and came to his harrowing description of his first sight of the dead, the crowd of souls in Limbo who had just drifted through life neither struggling to the heights of real virtue nor sinking to the depths of real depravity. Looking on them in horror as they trudge in step together endlessly round and round in a circle, Dante exclaims, ‘… I should n’ere / Have thought that death so many had despoiled’."

Guite then asks, "what happens at such a moment of echo and allusion, congruence and connection?" His answer is that:

"At one level I am remembering The Waste Land and suddenly realising that Eliot had been alluding to Dante and seeing what a brilliant thing it was to compare the rush-hour crowd to the crowds in Limbo. But at another level, at the level of the effect that Dante’s poem is having on me now, it is Dante who is alluding to Eliot, Dante who is brilliantly comparing the crowds in limbo with the London rush hour! There is a profound sense in which, after Eliot, Dante’s poem is changed forever. Each poem subtly modifies all the poems with which it is connected running backwards and forwards through time across the great web of Poetry itself."

Maggi Dawn has noted in The Writing on the Wall a similarity between the middle style of Dante which moves between different modes of expression and the way "the Bible tells its stories, moving backwards and forwards between primitive and sophisticated forms, and covering a wide range of genres, again conforming to Dante’s ideal of an unmediated accessibility to God." Dawn uses the standard image of a small library to describe the diversity within which this movement occurs: "It’s stories are not laid out chronologically, and it is the work of so many different authors, in different genres and from different times, that although it seems like a book it would be more apt to call it a small library." Other helpful images for this diversity of form and content include Mike Riddell’s description of the Bible as "a collection of bits" assembled to form God’s home page or Mark Oakley’s more poetic image of the Bible as "the best example of a collage of God that we have".

Similarly, Gabriel Josipovici, in The Book of God, quotes James Barr’s comment "about the Bible needing to be thought of not so much as a book but as a cave or cupboard in which a miscellany of scrolls has been crammed." He notes that "many modernist works might well be described as more like cupboards or caves crammed with scrolls than like carefully plotted nineteenth-century novels or even fairy stories and romances." As a result, a "generation which has experienced Ulysses and The Waste Land (to say nothing of Butor’s Mobile and Perec’s La vie mode d’emploi)" should be to view this image of the Bible positively more easily than would a generation "whose idea of a book and a unity was a novel by Balzac or George Eliot."

One key aspect of what Josipovici is referring to is the modernist generations’ ability to recognise the diversity of scripture and to note the significance of the movement backwards and forwards within its form that Dawn mentions which also has synergies with the way in which contemporary poems subtly modify all the poems with which they are connected running backwards and forwards through time across the great web of Poetry itself.

Josipovici has described how this effect occurs within scripture. The Bible works, he argues, "by way of minimal units laid alongside each other, the narrative being built up by slotting these together where necessary":

"This is an extraordinarily simple and an extraordinarily flexible system, which can lead from what could almost be described as shorthand to rich elaboration ... a narrative which can spend nine chapters getting from the Creation to Noah and his descendents, or else cover the ground in just four verses, as in Chronicles: ‘Adam, Sheth, Enosh, Kenan, Mahalaleel, Jered, Henoch, Methusalah, Lamech, Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth’ (1 Chron. 1: 1-4)."

Each new element or unit "helps to bring into focus prior elements which we would have overlooked had we not been alerted to them by what follows" but, because the events are laid out alongside each other without comment, "we are never allowed to know whether the pattern we see emerging at one point is the true pattern."

As a result, he concludes that "the Hebrew Bible … chose not to stay with the fulfilment of man’s desires but with the reality of what happens to us in life. We all long in our daily lives for an end to uncertainty, to the need for decisions and choices, with the concomitant feeling that the choices we have made may have been the wrong ones. Yet we also know that life will not provide such an end, that we will always be enmeshed in uncertainty. What is extraordinary is that a sacred book should dramatize this, rather than be the one place where we are given what we desire. But that is precisely what the Hebrew Bible does …"

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Bob Dylan - Where Are You Tonight? (Journey Through Deep Heat).

Airbrushed from Art History (20)

The interviews which James Romaine carried out for Objects of Grace provide an interesting survey of artists expressing their faith in and through contemporary art and those that they view as peers or influences.

Dan Callis is a visual artist/educator whose work includes painting, drawing, and installation. Currently, his work explores issues of visual hybridization, arising from the interaction between artifice and ecology, spontaneity and the mediation.

When he spoke to Romaine, Callis explored connections between his work and that of Anselm Keifer:

"There is a strange sense of longing and mourning, also a sense of reckoning. The layering of imagery and material makes the work operate somewhere between memory and vision ... The work is so grounded in the history of painting and at the same time it transcends the issues that have hamstrung painters in the last two decades. This what I hope for my work. To acknowledge my traditions and use those traditions as a vehicle (or at least the fuel) to break free of the current orbital confines ...

Memory is made in place. Place is the ecosystem for memory. memory is story, individual and/or collective, and that occurs in place. This is history. That idea has been the common connection of all my work, the idea of memory, location (place) and community ...

I understand part of my role as an artist is to be a storyteller and I understand this role to be a redemptive act. I think that is one of the things that our works share: this belief in the redemptive quality of the art. The redemption comes, in part, from remembering. I would hope to evoke something forgotten, something important yet forgotten. I see that in Keifer's work. I also see in his work the role of the artist as a mediator or facilitator between memory and place ...

As a culture we are creating images at such a rapid pace and the bulk of these images are purely for consumption. Our memories are so meshed in the audio and visual drown of our commodity economy that we desperately need places to slow down, to reflect, to remember. And in this remembering there can be mourning, there can be celebration, and there can be reconciliation. I hope in some way my work locates or fixes the viewer in the space they are occupying and at the same time transcends that space. Keifer's work does that for me."

Callis thinks it is very exciting and dynamic time in the contemporary art world which is ripe with opportunity:

"With artists like Keifer, Robert Gober, or Kiki Smith, there are serious, spiritual questions being asked. It appears that we continue to be in a major period of flux and that means everything is up for question. As an artist of faith I believe it is paramount that we maintain a relevant place in the conversation. I think of the Southern California artist Tim Hawkinson, who showed in the 1999 Venice Biennial and ... Whitney Biennial. He and his wife, Patty Witkin (an accomplished painter and professor at UCLA) both are committed artists of faith and very active in the contemporary scene. I also think of Canadian artist, Betty Spackman, and her Austrian collaborator, Anja Westerfrölke. Both women are strong and committed believers and very active in the European art scene (including exhibiting their work at Documenta)." 

Albert Pedulla is a sculptor who makes mixed media installations and who has shown his work at museums and alternative spaces including the Museum of Fine Arts - Houston, Aljira Center for Contemporary Art, City Without Walls, and many college campuses across the North East of America.

Pedulla views his work as questioning some of the Enlightenment foundations of Modernism and its self-satisfaction at the same time that Modernism is still the vocabulary he has to use in order to be engaged woth or relevant to this time. One of his disenchantments with Modernism is:

"The idea that could be created in an autonomous sphere that has nothing to do with the rest of life ... The artist, like anyone else, has to consider the consequences of their work. I think that, to a certain extent, the Modernist artist has done a disservice to culture and the public by not giving back to culture something that is of use ...

a holdover from the Enlightenment and Modernism ... holds that the real truth is in analytic proof that can be factually verified. This reduces Truth to fact ... Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence for which is still unseen ...

What is seen is the subject; the content is hidden except to those who are willing to discern it. In Wall Object #4 (With Fire and Light), the fire which is unseen to the viewer creates the marks which are seen. The illumination is created by a light source which is unseen. The idea, the faith ... also relates to the act of art making in general. It suggests the prayerful attitude that an artist can bring to her work. The artist's work can be a visual manifestation of an invisible prayer. By faith, the artist's prayers may be seen."

As a younger artist, Pedulla was very interested in the work of Sol LeWitt:

"He does many of his works directly on the wall, and my work is also directly on the wall. I find his work to be optically very beautiful but LeWitt's work is less critical of Modernism. I think my work is arguing with him at the same time it is engaging Modernism."

One artist he is very interested in is Robert Gober:

"Even though his work looks very different than mine, he seems to have a similar ambivalence about Modernism and is engaged in the question of true spirituality as contrasted with the clinical, closed, spirituality of Modernism. So I feel a certain kindred spirit with his work. Yet, on the surface, I don't think people would categorize us together."

Tim Rollins says:

"What is funny is that artists like Serrano and Gober, and even Mapplethorpe, were maybe trying to transcend the limitations and boundaries of denominational organized religion by creating these critiques, in which they engaged and challenged church traditions and doctrines. Many people mistake critique for sacrilege. I often wonder what Christ would have thought of Piss Christ? I think he would have agreed with the ethos of it, to be frank. I mean, most people think Piss Christ is a glorious image, glowing, and they're just ready to shout and get down on their knees and pray until they do find out that it is urine. It is a critique. You have a cheap plastic crucifix that represents how Christ was sold and how Christ really had to suffer rejection and hung out with literally the scum of the earth. But the light that comes out of it, and how you can make something that beautiful. When I see particular works, like Piss Christ, I moved by the pathos of them. They're not just vandalizing, or attacking people's faith. It's an honest engagement of what these individuals have been though, often negative encounters with the church ...

Is there something they could say to the artist to persuade them that perhaps this isn't the most beautiful, or this isn't the way to engage with religion or with God? ... That's why it is very important for us to make things that are beautiful, that are glorious, but that can be critical and vital and political simultaneously. Only beauty - love made visible - can change things. I think that is the ethos of Jesus as well. People come to church and they want some of this. I see it in their faces when the choir starts singing and this glory radiates. I see their longing like, "There is something going on here that I have never felt before and I want to feel." We as human beings are biologically wired for spiritual ecstasy. And we try to get it in every form but a one to one connection with the Almighty. I think art is a way to summon that connection. The glory of God - this is what we seek to demonstrate in our art. This is what I feel in front of great works of art."

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The Blind Boys of Alabama ft Lou Reed - Jesus.

Romantic Moderns

I recently saw an episode of Escape to the Country where the mystery house was of a modernist design. The reaction of mother and daughter to this interior was typically British in that they loved its clean lines and open spaces but couldn’t see themselves feeling at home living within its spotless minimalism.

In her Afterword to Romantic Moderns, Alexandra Harris tells a similar story of visiting the V&A for its landmark exhibition on Modernism and moving:

"past cabinets full of competitively patterned tributes to man’s ornamenting instinct, and then – silence. A heavy mahogany door swung shut and I was in an immaculate world of suspended spirals, steel tubes, and slick, shiny architectural models. Manifestos, neatly typed, occupied the walls in orderly agreement about the aims of design in the twentieth century: ‘espousal of the new’, ‘rejection of history and tradition’, ‘embrace of abstraction’, the desire to ‘invent the world from scratch’.

There were few English contributions on display because the curator saw Englishness and modernism as being antithetical; modernism was cosmopolitan and English art was pastoral.

Harris’ book is a sustained plea for a more nuanced look at English responses to modernism than was the case in the V&A’s exhibition. The book is an expansive overview of architecture, art, conservation, cookery, criticism, gardening, literature, music, religion, restoration, topography and tourism which enlists modernists such as T.S. Eliot, John Piper and Virginia Woolf in a modern English renaissance celebrating the particularity of the English climate, localities and homes.

The career of Piper in some senses is illustrative of this story with an early milestone being his involvements with the modernist 7 and 5 Society and Axis, the modernist journal edited by his wife Myfanwy. Yet he moves from the creation of purist abstracts to celebrate and record, in forms that are both romantic and modern, an English provincial world of old churches and stately homes. Harris’ book provides the wider context into which Frances Spaldings’ magisterial biography of John and Myfanwy Piper sits and the reading of both will illuminate this fascinating period of English cultural life.

Ultimately, Harris’ book reads more as an elegy for a passing period of privilege than as a manifesto for a national engagement with modernism. The continuing influences of the English renaissance which she documents seem primarily to lie in the fields of conservation, restoration and tourism while not all the initiatives she notes are followed into their present manifestations.

This is certainly true of the revival of the commissioning of art for churches where in the chapter entitled ’Parish News’ Harris summarises the achievements of George Bell and Walter Hussey. Their legacy, however, does continue into the present as has recently been documented by the Commission exhibition and book; an engagement with contemporary art which still to some extent negotiates between the romantic and modern.

At the end of the ‘Parish News’ chapter Harris quotes Stephen Spender as saying that Piper and Eliot among others were linked in their commitment to the ‘idea of the sacred’. This perception is not developed further, however, meaning that a mystical strand of Romantic Modernism, as seen for example in the exploration of spirituality through imagined landscapes and worlds (which can be found in the paintings of Cecil Collins and David Jones and in the writings of C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien and Charles Williams), is not explored.

More surprising still in terms of omissions are the minimal references to the Neo-Romantics with no mention at all of the work of Michael Aryton, John Craxton or Keith Vaughan, among others. Neither is there mention of the major Church commissions undertaken by Piper and Graham Sutherland, perhaps because these tended to result in more obviously modernist creations as, in Piper’s case, where such commissions facilitated his return to abstraction.

Nevertheless, Harris largely succeeds in making an expansive and original case for an English renaissance in this period. However, in making the case that this renaissance valued the local and particular, it would seem that she also succeeds in confirming the modernist belief in the provincialism and pastoralism of English art.

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OMD - Maid of Orleans.

Of beauty and affirmation (2)

I'm currently reading It was Good: Making Art to the Glory of God which returns me to my earlier reflections on the nature of beauty because the book contains a chapter on 'Beauty transfigured' by Adrienne Chaplin.

Chaplin begins with some art historical reflections by arguing that the concept of beauty has been absent from and even inimical to modern art. Beauty has been associated with the sentimental and shallow while the purpose of modern art was to subvert and to shock. She quotes Barnett Newman as saying, "The impulse of modern art is the desire to destroy beauty."

This changes, she suggests, in the early 1990s as art critics and others begin discussing the concept of beauty once again. She contrasts the Regarding Beauty and Sensation exhibitions suggesting that Sensation was "the last gasp of the modernist belief in art as agent of social confrontation and change, while Regarding Beauty heralding the beginning of a renewed focus on beauty and "aesthetic" experience."

This latter perception would seem to be disproved by subsequent events as the Sensation artists went on to become major figures within contemporary art retaining their ability, as has contemporary art generally, to shock. At the same time, beauty has not generally become a major strand of artistic creation or criticism in the way that Chaplin envisaged in 2000. In her comments on modern art, Chaplin does not seem to acknowledge the interest, attraction or beauty which modern art sees in the 'found object' or the 'ready-made' or the way in which later generations see beauty in art which was once perceived as 'ugly' or 'shocking', as is evidenced by the repeated success of exhibitions showing work from the early to mid modern period.

Chaplin then highlights the confusion which exists regarding definitions of beauty. Entering this debate means entering "a complex interdisciplinary web of theories and views". Where, she asks, "in this jungle of views and opinions should Christians position themselves?"

Firstly, she suggests we need to question aspects of our own tradition including abandoning the Platonic conception of "a two-tier world in which earthly beauty is either a mere shadow of or a pointer to another higher world of capital B beauty." Beauty, she writes, "whatever may eventually decide it means, is an integral feature of the one world created by God and deserves to be honoured exactly as such." Secondly, we need to nuance the idea that God is beautiful as this is a term very rarely used of God in the Bible and which is often seen as "frivolous, seductive or deceptive." A more accurate attribution to God, she argues, is that of glory but glory seen in relation to the self-sacrificial love of Christ which "passes through the ugliness of the cross."

Chaplin then undercuts this significant perception by stating that, "although this account of the "beauty" of Christ may help us gain a deeper understanding of the meaning of the cross, it does not help us very much with the question of beauty in art or nature." I would say exactly the opposite, that this perception helps us to see the beauty of modern art which embraces offence, pain, darkness, death, and ugliness.

Next Chaplin highlights the definition of beauty given by Aquinas as "that which pleases when seen." She nuances this definition by stating that "something may please because it is striking, or stunning or just plain intriguing"; it does not have to be ""pleasing" in a conventional or confirming way." Again, this would seem to encompass the possibility of finding beauty, as modern art has done, in pop, kitsch, the ready-made, and the found object but Chaplin's contrasts in this section - strip malls, highways, subway platforms - suggest not. These are "ugly urban scenes" where there is nothing that "calls for our more focussed attention." Modern art, I suggest, operates within Chaplin's nuanced version of Aquinas' definition but disagrees with her examples of ugliness on the basis of her own definition of beauty.

Aquinas' statement is not, to my mind, a definition of beauty because it depends entirely on subjective responses which will differ instread of providing objective criteria on which many can agree. Chaplin notes that beauty "always appears in particular historical and social contexts" and so is "not the same for everyone at all times" meaning that "we cannot point to an objective feature of something beautiful, which can be considered to constitute the kernel of its beauty." So, if Aquinas' statement is useful to us but not as a definition, how is it to be understood? I would suggest that it can be understood as a way of seeing; an affirmative approach to life which is looking for what we perceive as pleasing, attractive, intriguing, striking or stunning (to use Chaplin's phrases). 

So, we have two perceptions of beauty drawn from the Christian tradition which Chaplin articulates but does not clearly link within the argument made in this chapter. I, however, want to say that they are synergous; that an affirmative way of seeing is analogous to Christ's embrace of human pain and suffering in order to redeem it.

Chaplin ends her chapter on a similar note by highlighting a third exhibition, A Broken Beauty, in which was exhibited works which invite the viewer "to consider the body's capacity for beauty despite its brokenness, in the midst of its brokenness, and, ironically, because of its brokenness." I agree with this perception of beauty, which I think accords with what I have outlined above, but am unclear as to how Chaplin reaches this point through her use of the materials and ideas which she considers in this chapter.

Finally, I think that the picture she paints of modern and contemporary art in this chapter confuses the issue as, in my view, many of the perceptions of beauty which she wishes to commend to us are exemplified by the very examples of modern and contemporary art which she seeks to critique.

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Nickel Creek - Seven Wonders.

Airbrushed from Art History? (1)

One of the books I'm currently reading is Coming Home: Self-Taught Artists, the Bible and the American South which includes an interesting chapter on 'Visualising Faith: Religious Presence and Meaning in Modern and Contemporary American Art'. In it Erika Doss argues that:

"Until recently, issues of religion were largely overlooked in the social and cultural history of twentieth-century American art because of critical misunderstandings of an assumed separation of modernist avant-garde from religious inquiry and of modernism in general from religion."

Doss agrees with art historian Sally Promey that the "Strongest determinant in this "modernist divide" regarding art and religion is the lingering paradigm of the secularisation theory of modernity." In this theory, "religion is viewed as childlike, immature, primitive, and group - or "sect" - oriented" and therefore opposite to modernism which "has been constructed as adult, sophisticated (or complex), innovative, and individualistic - or "self" - oriented."

As a result:

"Works of art that feature religious imagery are often disparaged as coercive forms of religious persuasion and relegated to the category of "religious" art: art that professes a certain faith in the vicinity of the holy - and to persuade nonbelievers of divine authority. As such "religious" art has been less critically engaged with modern art's supposed focus on formal issues and on artistic self-expression and, hence, has been considered "nonmodern" or even "antimodern."

Doss seeks to demonstrate that "issues of faith and spirituality were very much a part of modern art in America as artists of diverse styles and inclinations repeatedly turned to the subjects of religious belief and piety." She cites Henry Ossawa Tanner, Marsden Hartley, Georgia O'Keeffe, Aaron Douglas, Joseph Cornell, Mark Rothko, Mark Tobey, Barnett Newman, Betye Saar, Ana Mendieta, Bill Viola, Lesley Dill, Kiki Smith, Andy Warhol and Ed Kienholz as being "just a few of the twentieth- and twenty-first century American artists who explored the intersections of icongraphy, religious orthodoxy, and issues of faith" not simply by revealing but also negotiating those issues. This is without mentioning the self-taught artists that she also highlights as engaged in the same task.

Essentially, Doss is arguing that religious and/or Christian influences on modern art have been airbrushed out of histories of modern art. What is needed, as Daniel A. Siedell suggests in God in the Gallery, is "an alternative history and theory of the development of modern art, revealing that Christianity has always been present with modern art, nourishing as well as haunting it, and that modern art cannot be understood without understanding its religious and spiritual components and aspirations."

In this series of posts I will aim to highlight at least some of the artists and movements (together with the books that tell their stories) that should feature in that alternative history when it comes to be written.

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Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!

The limits of scientific measurement

There is a fascinating series of posts and subsequent debate on atheism underway at Sam Norton’s blog. Essentially, Sam is arguing that the prevalent form of atheism (which he labels ‘humourless’) is irrational and highly damaging while also arguing that Christianity, when properly understood, is not irrational. He states that these two things do not entail that all Christianity is more rational than all atheism (particularly the atheism he labels 'sophisticated') but does believe that Christian theology is the highest and most exalted expression of the Western intellectual genius, and that it is truth which sets us free. To see where this argument has got to so far, click here.

I got involved in the debate following a statement from Sam that religious belief does not assert that God exists in terms of scientific measurements. Sam, it seemed to me, was asserting that religious and scientific beliefs are not the same and, as a result, that scientific measurement is not a relevant means of assessing the wisdom emerging from religious belief. In modernism, scientific belief was viewed as an objective metanarrative that superseded and overrode other forms of knowing. Many atheists remain stuck in such modernist mindsets and seem unable to deal with the diversity of means of knowing that postmodernism celebrates.

In my comments I argued for a broad rationality that takes adequate account of received experience. To my mind, 'aspect blind' atheism jettisons too much of human experience by insisting on scientific measurement as the only measure of reality. For example, in a evolutionary framework love tends to be understood primarily as part of the survival instinct in humanity, the means by which we perpetuate the species. But, while perpetuating the species is clearly an aspect of our human experience of love, it seems to me to be reductive to argue that the richness of human experience of love (as revealed in life, literature and the Arts) can be explained simply in terms that fit within the means of scientific measurement.

I want an understanding of love that celebrates that richness without reducing it simply to a survival mechanism and I believe that religious and artistic understandings of love provide that broader framework and rationality. In other words, they capture more of the richness and breadth of our human experience of love (including scientific understandings alongside other understandings) than scientific explanations alone do (for all their veracity within the limits of their narrow framework).

It is the same when it comes to both my own personal experience of relationship with God and my engagement with the whole human history of encounter and non-encounter with God, I want a frame of reference that responds to that richness on its own terms not one which seeks again to reduce the richness of that experience to survival mechanisms and the limits of scientific measurement.

To do that, we need more languages for describing and influencing human experience that just the language/metaphor/belief system of scientific measurement. At the end of the day, I think that religious languages and frameworks can, at their best, encompass scientific understandings of the world without perverting the science while scientific understandings of religion tend to reduce our lived experience of relationship with God to narrow perceptions that do not resonate with the richness of that experience. It is the broader of the two rationalities that makes most sense to me.

I am saying that there are things that cannot be measured mathematically and occasions when atheists describe experiences of being awestruck would seem to bear this out. The language that they naturally reach for in order to describe such experiences – “beauty”, “wonder”, “emotion”, “awestruck”, “mystery”, “deep” – is not the language of science and does not have the precision required by scientific experiment. However, they clearly value these experiences and don’t appear to be concerned by the vagueness or lack of precision that is needed in order to adequately describe them, so why should religious people then be criticized for vagueness when such phrases are used to speak of God?

It seems to me that there are, at least, three possible responses to experiences that require a language other than the language of science in order to adequately describe them. The first is to try to lock them up again within the narrow framework of scientific language but this, it seems to me, is reductionist and doesn’t do justice to what we actually feel about such experiences.

The second is to acknowledge that scientific language cannot adequately describe such experiences but to argue that this reveals the inadequacy of our science and that, in time, as our scientific knowledge grows we will be able to adequately describe them. This is a perfectly reasonable position but involves a non-scientific leap of faith as it does not follow that, just because we can measure and describe some things scientifically, we will, in time, be able to measure and describe all things in this way.

The third is simply to acknowledge that scientific language has its limits and that other forms of language are needed in order to adequately describe some experiences. Taking this position does not mean that religious language has to be used to describe these experiences but it does open up the possibility that the languages of religion may provide justifiable descriptions of these experiences. I would argue that this third response is a perfectly reasonable position to hold and, beyond that, that religious languages do provide an adequate language for describing for such experiences.

As a writer and painter it has always seemed to me that there is much in life that cannot be simply described in words or images. When George Herbert wrote a poem about prayer he used 26 different images and still could not capture all that prayer can be for the believer. As an artist and a believer I want to celebrate multiplicity of meanings and paradox in language and life as a form of richness. The precision in language that characterises scientific experiment is a utilitarian necessity within its limited frame of reference but, if it is the only allowable language, then the world is drained of colour, energy, life, richness and meaningfulness. If it is the only allowable language then we are unable to describe the moments when we have been awestruck in terms of “beauty”, “wonder”, “emotion”, “awe”, or “mystery”.

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The Reese Project - The Colour of Love.