Revisiting Dorset

From 1984-1985, I lived in Charmouth and Bridport as part of a British Youth for Christ (YFC) team. Together with Debbie, Jenny and Mark, we were a voluntary youth work team which organized a mission, holiday club, Youth Services, took assemblies/lessons in schools and engaged with those using an Unemployed Workers Centre.

There were some special people involved in this initiative, both locally and centrally for YFC. Rev Bob Lucas and Ray Dobson were two of those involved locally. Bob Lucas was Rector of St Andrew's Charmouth, while Ray Dobson becaame Founding Elder for Bridport Christian Fellowship. Paul and Sally Nash were our YFC mentors and went on to have significant ordained roles in chaplaincy and training. Read more about their experiences and reflections at their blog Marker Posts and Shelters. Mark Ord, who was on the team, became a Baptist minister and is currently ministering at Yardley Wood Baptist Church.

I have just returned from a week's holiday in Dorset and, on the last day, had the joy of meeting up with Ray Dobson at Bridport Christian Fellowship and hearing about the ministry of the Fellowship following its founding soon after our team had been ministering in the area. It was also very special to meet Dave Collins, Leading Elder at the Fellowship, who became a Christian during the year that our team were in the area and later gained valuable experience himself on a different YFC team in another area.

For our holiday, we were based in Litton Cheney, where our holiday cottage had artworks by John Gosbee who lived in the cottage from 1996-2016. Our holiday included visits to Lyme Regis, Abbotsbury Swannery, Charmouth beach, Lulworth Cove, Dorset Museum and Art Gallery, Max Gate, Monkey World, and West Bay, among other locations.

Lyme Regis nestles in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty at the point where the dramatic West Dorset and East Devon coastlines meet – right at the heart of the UNESCO World Heritage site known as the Jurassic Coast. The town is regarded as the 'Pearl of Dorset' and is renowned for its natural beauty, fossils, literary connections and extraordinarily rich heritage, it is also famous for being the birthplace of Mary Anning, one of history’s most important fossil collectors and palaeontologists.

The East beach at Charmouth is a good place to find pyrite ammonite and also belemnite fossils loose amongst the pebbles. Charmouth beach is divided into two by the mouth of the River Char which is often dammed by the beach forming a lagoon suitable for boating or watching the many ducks and swans. In summer the expanses of sand and gently shelving waters make it the ideal family beach. In autumn and winter the effect of storms and the waves on the cliffs create a haven for fossil collectors. Charmouth Fossils have appeared on numerous television programmes, and are displayed in museums throughout the world.

The pebble beach and blue waters of Lulworth Cove make it an extremely popular destination. The Cove and surrounding coastline are part of the world famous Jurassic Coast - a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Low tide reveals wonderful rock pools teeming with sea creatures – great for exploring with children. It is just a short walk to other famous landmarks along the coast such as Stair Hole and Durdle Door. Stair Hole is reputed to be the inspiration for the location of Enid Blyton’s book ‘The Rubadub Mystery’. The coast around Lulworth is also a fantastic place to see blow holes, caves, arches and coves.

With the stunning golden glow of the majestic sandstone cliffs and the shimmering radiance of Golden Cap, West Bay is the Golden Gateway to the Jurassic Coast. West Bay nestles south of Bridport, between Eype with Seatown to the west and Freshwater with Burton Bradstock to the east. Situated at the western end of Chesil Beach / Chesil Bank, the area forms part of the Dorset Jurassic Coast World Heritage Site within Lyme Bay. West Bay is a wonderful location for coast and countryside walks, fossil hunting, fishing / angling trips, scuba diving, paragliding, golfing, river boating and more. The Dorset historic market town of Bridport lies one and a half miles inland from the West Bay coast.

The Dorset Museum and Art Gallery began by collecting natural history and archaeology. Literature, fine art, textiles, costumes, local history, and photography collections grew over time. The Thomas Hardy collection was a major bequest in 1937. 30 sculptures and over 100 prints and drawings by Elisabeth Frink were provided to the Museum in accordance with the wishes of the artist’s late son, Lin Jammet. One of the Museum's Founder's was Revd Henry Moule, a radical reformer who fearlessly campaigned for the poor, and was an early conservationist and environmentalist.

Max Gate, an austere but sophisticated town house a short walk from the town centre of Dorchester, was the home of Dorset's most famous author and poet Thomas Hardy. Hardy, who designed the house in 1885, wanted to show that he was part of the wealthy middle classes of the area, to reflect his position as a successful writer, and to enable him to enter polite society. The house was named after a nearby tollgate keeper called Henry Mack. The tollgate was known locally as ‘Mack’s Gate’, which Hardy then used with a different spelling when he named his house, ‘Max Gate’.

Abbotsbury Swannery is home to a colony of over 600 Mute Swans, located on the dramatic Dorset Coast. The Swannery was established by Benedictine Monks who built a monastery at Abbotsbury during the 1040s. The monks farmed the swans to produce food for their lavish Dorset banquets. St Peter’s monastery was destroyed in 1539, during the dissolution.

Set amongst the woodland of Dorset lays 65 acres of sanctuary for over 250 primates. Monkey World was set up in 1987 by Jim Cronin to provide abused Spanish beach chimps with a permanent, stable home. Today Monkey World works in conjunction with foreign governments from all over the world to stop the illegal smuggling of apes out of Africa and Asia. At the park visitors can see over 250 primates of more than 20 different species. At the Centre refugees of this illegal trade as well as those that have suffered abuse or neglect are rehabilitated into natural living groups.

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Jeremy Enigk - Amazing Worlds.

Paul Nash and James Ensor

Paul Nash opens at Tate Britain on 26 October. Paul Laity has an excellent piece in The Guardian on Nash and his work:

'Nash’s transformations of reality were the product of a visionary sensibility that harked back to William Blake and Samuel Palmer; he searched for inner meanings in the landscape, what he called the “things behind” ...

he was caught up, as ever, in looking at the world and seeing patterns and mysterious “things behind”. An artist both full of wonder and wonderful, knowing the end was near, painted pictures that were stranger than ever.'

Paul and Margaret Nash practiced Christian Science, and Paul shared a Christian Science practitioner with Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson. Hepworth, Nicholson and Winifred Nicholson were profoundly influenced by Christian Science (a faith that was of great importance to Stanley Spencer’s wife, Hilda Carline).

For Intrigue: James Ensor by Luc Tuymans at the Royal Academy of Arts from 29 October 2016 — 29 January 2017, Tuymans, a fellow Belgian and admirer of Ensor, will look back at Ensor’s singular career through a selection of his most bizarrely brilliant and gloriously surreal creations.
Astrid Schenk has written that

'It was 1888 when James Ensor began work on his monumental painting Christ's Entry into Brussels in 1889. The painting would become one of his most iconic and eagerly analysed compositions, and is now regarded as a milestone in the history of modern art. Not surprisingly, perhaps, it has also encouraged art historians to take a closer look at the representation of religious subject matter in Ensor's oeuvre in general. The focus of this scholarly attention has been mainly on Ensor's various approaches to the Crucifixion (especially the grotesque or sinister elements in some of his renderings), as well as on the series entitled The Aureoles of Christ or the Sensitivities of the Light, which Ensor first exhibited in 1887, and on different versions of The Temptation of Saint Anthony, Abbot of Egypt ...

The size of his religious oeuvre, the great variation in religious subject matter, and the fact that he continued throughout his life to produce religious work are strong indications that, to Ensor, religious sources of inspiration were key to achieving his artistic goals. This relevance went well beyond the supposed identification of the artist with the suffering of Christ and the exploration of particular visual effects. Ensor borrowed from the Christian iconography in order to be able to visualise his ideas in a recognisable idiom and to conduct visual experiments in his quest for exaltation.'

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Gungor - You.

Eric Newton - artist, art historian and critic

Eric Newton was an artist, art historian and critic. 'He became the full-time art critic for the Manchester Guardian, and after a spell at theSunday Times (1947-1951), he returned to the Guardian in 1956 and remained there until his death. He promoted the work of among others Stanley Spencer, Paul Nash, Graham Sutherland and Henry Moore, whom he counted a personal friend. His European Painting and Sculpture (1941) remained a standard text into the 60s, as did War through Artists' Eyes (1945). He was actively engaged in the renaissance in the arts that characterised the post-war years in Britain. He became a household name in Britain in the 1950s, largely through BBC radio talks and The Critics.' 

'He produced several books in addition to his newspaper and radio work and created mosaics for Ludwig Oppenheimer Ltd, mostly on a religious theme.' These include: St John the Baptist, Rochdale; Sacred Heart Church, Hillsborough; Our Lady and St Edward, RC Church, Chiswick; Honan Chapel, Cork; Royal Hospital School Chapel, Holbrook; and Saint Colmcille's Church, East Belfast. 

'He was a man of profound religious convictions' whose 'last work before his sudden death in 1965' was The Christian Faith in Art, a history of religious art and its impact on the spiritual development of Western civilisation. In this book, co-written with William Neil, he explores the centuries-long interaction between Christianity and all forms of art: “For Christian faith, unlike a jug, has no visual existence…For the artist, in such a world, only symbolism will serve.” As a result, he viewed Expressionism - 'the art of discovering a visual equivalent for the emotions' -  as the necessary term for Christian art to exist at all. In the twentieth century, it was only through Expressionism that it became possible for the artist, if he or she wished to do so, 'to tackle the unseeen or the supernatural, to work by symbol instead of description, to return, in fact, to the point where Blake had closed his eyes to the world of phenomena and drawn on his imagination to fill the gap, or where the early Pre-Raphaelites had used their eyes in order to select from what they saw only what would intensify the picture's meaning.'   

Here is an excerpt from his Meaning of Beauty, in which he explores our struggle to capture the essence of beauty:

'Beauty, let us say, is a recognisable quality; yet each person would draw up a different list of beautiful objects and give them different æsthetic indices. All that can be agreed upon is the nature of each man's reaction to his own list. In each case the sensation is not merely pleasurable, but pleasurable in the same way, and the sensation produced by objects at the top of the list is an intense one. A's list may be headed by the Sistine Madonna, while B's starts with the Blue Danube waltz - objects so dissimilar that no scientific method could possibly isolate, still less describe, the common factor which A and B would agree to call 'beauty'. And yet the sensations inspired by them have at least the common factors of pleasure and intensity. What kind of pleasure? And why so intense? Reasonable questions surely, yet the philosopher who attempts to answer them is playing a game of chess against desperate odds. Let him screw up his courage to move a single pawn, and he finds himself committed to a battle from which no one has yet emerged victorious. He is engaged - poor soul - in a struggle with his Creator, and his only weapons are words.'

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Tribe of Judah - No One.

Paul Nash: Truth and Memory

Andrew Graham Dixon gave a compelling portrait of Paul Nash in the first programme of the BBC series British Art at War. Graham Dixon argued that:

‘Nash was scarred by the war and the ghosts of those experiences haunted his work throughout his life. A lover of nature, Nash became one of Britain's most original landscape artists, embracing modern Surrealism and ancient British history, though always tainted by his experiences during two world wars. A private yet charismatic man, he brought British landscape painting into the 20th century with his mixture of the personal and visionary, the beautiful and the shocking. An artist who saw the landscape as not just a world to paint, but a way into his heart and mind.’

Nash’s work currently features in Truth and Memory at the Imperial War Museum; ‘the largest exhibition and first major retrospective of  British First World War art for almost 100 years.’ Using artworks drawn mainly from IWM’s national collection and including work by some of Britain’s most important artists of the twentieth century, this exhibition assesses ‘the immediate impact and enduring legacy of British art of the First World War.’

Truth explores ‘how artists encountering the front lines experimented with new forms of art to capture the totally unfamiliar experience of the First World War.’ Through the work of CRW Nevinson, Paul Nash and William Orpen, amongst others, the exhibition considers ‘British artists’ quest for an authentic or ‘truthful’ representation of modern war.’ 

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Ivor Gurney - Severn Meadows.

Brilliant Brits: Bomberg, Carrington, Gertler, Holl, Nash, Nevinson, Spencer and Watts

A pastoral visit in South London followed by a funeral in Sussex gave the opportunity for visits en route to the Dulwich Picture Gallery, Watts Gallery and Watts Chapel.

C.R.W. Nevinson, Stanley Spencer, Mark Gertler, Dora Carrington, David Bomberg and Paul Nash became some of the most well-known and distinctive British artists of the twentieth century. Students together at the Slade School of Art in London between 1908 and 1912, they formed part of what their esteemed drawing teacher Henry Tonks described as the school’s last ‘crisis of brilliance’. As their talents evolved they became Futurists, Vorticists and ‘Bloomsberries’, and befriended the leading writers and intellectuals of their day.

Nash, Nevinson, Spencer, Gertler, Carrington, Bomberg: A Crisis of Brilliance, 1908-1922 features over 70 original works by the group and explores the artists’ development culminating with a selection of their paintings made during and after the Great War of 1914-18 generating some of the most provoking visual records of that epochal event.

First opening its doors to the public in 1904, Watts Gallery is a purpose-built art gallery created for the display of works by the great Victorian artist George Frederic Watts OM RA (1817-1904). After a major restoration project, visitors can now experience the Watts Collection in the historic galleries displaying the original decorative schemes. Over one hundred paintings by G.F. Watts are on permanent display at Watts Gallery. Spanning a period of 70 years they include portraits, landscapes and his major symbolic works.

Designed and built by Mary Watts, the Watts Chapel is a unique fusion of art nouveau, Celtic, Romanesque and Egyptian influence with Mary's own original style. The Circle of Eternity with its intersecting Cross of Faith is from pre-historic times and symbolises the power of redeeming love stretching to the four quarters of the earth. The dome is traditionally seen as emblematic of heaven, the four panels on the exterior containing friezes symbolising the Spirit of Hope, the Spirit of Truth, the Spirit of Love and the Spirit of Light.

Watts Gallery is currently presenting the first major retrospective exhibition in more than 100 years of eminent Victorian artist, Frank Holl (1845 – 1888). Widely regarded in his own lifetime as a leading figure in social realist and portrait painting, Holl’s early death meant that the artist never fully received the acclaim his work merited. For the first time, this exhibition brings together around thirty of his major works to examine how, during his short career, the artist became a distinct and insightful voice in British painting.

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Kirsty MacColl - Days.

Airbrushed from Art History: Peter Fuller

Since seeing the stunning Sutherland exhibition at Modern Art Oxford I've been re-reading material on the Neo-Romantics. This has meant that I have also been re-reading Peter Fuller's art criticism. Fuller championed the work of the Neo-Romantics, while also being able to see shortcomings in their work, because:

"... for all these artists, the pursuit of landscape was always something more than the quest for phenomena, or the appearances of natural and human forms. They were intent upon a transfiguration
of what they saw: often they laid claim to a religious or spiritual vision ..."

Fuller described the journey on which his art criticism had embarked in an autobiographical response to the exhibition entitled The Journey:

"I developed an even deeper sympathy for the romantic, the Gothic, and the spiritual dimensions of art ...

It seemed to me that no ‘materialist’ culture – certainly not the ‘modernism’ so celebrated by Clement Greenberg – had ever remotely approached the aesthetic glories of these churches [the great Gothic cathedrals and the medieval parish churches of Sussex]; and I was very much aware of the fact that their splendours, and their intimacies, were dependent upon a faith which I could not share and which was not shared even by contemporary Christians ...

When, in the early 1980s, I wrote the essays, later gathered together in Images of God, I felt that I was being tremendously daring and even perverse in reviving the idea that aesthetic experience was greatly diminished if it became divorced from the idea of the spiritual. What I responded to in Ruskin, above all else, was the distinction he made between ‘aesthesis’ and ‘theoria’, the former being a merely sensuous response to beauty, the latter what he described as a response to beauty with ‘our whole moral being’. My book, theoria, was an attempt to rehabilitate ‘theoria’ over and above mere ‘aesthesis’; I also tried to communicate my feeling that the spiritual dimensions of art had been preserved, in a very special way, within the British traditions. No one recognised this better that the great French poet and critic, Charles Baudelaire, who, as I have often remarked before, say in 1859 that British painters were ‘enthusiastic representatives of the imagination and of the most precious faculties of the soul’.

In my critical writing, I came to emphasise how British artists appeared to have faced up to the aesthetic consequences brought about by the spiritual dilemmas of the modern age. In particular, I became interested in the links between ‘natural theology’ and the triumphs of British landscape painting. I am still convinced that there is a close correlation between British ‘higher landscape’ and those beliefs about nature as divine handiwork which were held with a peculiar vividness and immediacy in Britain.

The experience of the ‘the long-withdrawing roar’ of ‘the Sea of Faith’ and the exposure of the naked shingles of the world’ created a great crisis for art, as for every other dimension of cultural life. The best British artists of the twentieth century, however, faced up to that spiritual crisis: I interpreted the work of David Bomberg, Paul Nash, Stanley Spencer, Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland as differing responses to the phenomenon of Dover Beach. I argued that all these artists were imperfectly modern, and that this imperfection was a source of their strength. Unlike true modernists, they did not deny the spiritual and aesthetic calamity brought about by the ever present weight of God’s absence; none the less they did not merely tease ‘aesthesis’ but struggled to appeal to ‘theoria’, regardless."

Such views seem to have little place in the contemporary art world and, as Jonathan Jones has written, "this fierce defender of figurative painting and enemy of the avant garde has now been almost erased from the history of British art. His legacy has been reduced to the career of his protegee Sister Wendy Beckett and the annual Peter Fuller Lecture ... Even Modern Painters, the magazine he founded in 1987, officially abandoned his editorial policy ... to become broadly sympathetic to conceptual art ... Fuller has disappeared from the story of British art because that story has been mythicised and thinned out."

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Sam Phillips - Reflecting Light.

Airbrushed from Art History (12b)

Here's a little addendum to my 'Airbrushed from Art History' series of posts because the current edition of the Church Times has an interesting feature in which Stephen Laird uncovers the artist’s little-known fascination with the writings of Jacques Maritain.

Laird says that Sutherland had a well-thumbed copy of Maritain's Art and Scholasticism which influenced his 1936 essay 'A Trend in English Draughtsmanship' and Sutherland's Welsh landscapes of the 1930s, well before Sutherland's later 'religious' work for St Matthews Northampton and Coventry Cathedral:

"Visually, Sutherland's Welsh landscapes from the '30s are most reminiscent of some of William Blake's more haunting imaginative illustrations. Intellectually, they are a fully fledged expression of Maritain's theological programme ...

Sutherland borrows Maritain's words to describe how the artist's part is to create something truly inspired and "poetic", and how this cannot be achieved "ex nihilo", as it must be "gathered from the world of created things" ...

discovering one thing with the help of another, and by their resemblance making the unknown known."

This is of interest as it indicates a degree of influence by Maritain on a generation of British painters and sculptors in the immediate post-war years who were known collectively as ‘the neo-romantics’ (Paul Nash, Henry Moore sometimes, Sutherland, John Piper, John Minton, Keith Vaughan, Ceri Richards and others). This movement, as Christopher Frayling has noted, "sometimes chimed with the aspirations of the post-war Church of England" as they "searched for a lost Eden amid the ruins of the contemporary landscape: who wanted to depict its desolation while striving to reach beyond it; who felt it might soon be closing time in the gardens of the West, and who thought of the pastoral as one of the few remaining symbolic ideas in the culture from which to draw hope."

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Jonathan Harvey - Speakings.

Going to Coventry

The Stackyard by Paul Nash

Base of Graham Sutherland's
Christ in Glory in the Tetramorph at Coventry Cathedral

Paul Hill's Christ Stripped with John Piper's Baptistry Window at Coventry Cathedral in the background

Ecce Homo By Jacob Epstein

Reconciliation by Josephina de Vasconcellos

These are photos of some of the art that I saw last week on a visit to Coventry. The Paul Nash can be found at the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, recently reopened after a £20 million redevelopment. Their collection also includes works by other Neo Romantics including John Minton, John Piper and Graham Sutherland.

Sutherland and Piper were, of course, among those commissioned by Sir Basil Spence, to produce works for the 'new' Coventry Cathedral, for which he was architect. The Cathedral is currently hosting an exhibition called 'The Cross, the Resurrection and the Shroud of Turin' which features a modern retelling of the Stations of the Cross called Jesus on the Cross Road by artist Paul Hill, from Castle Vale in Birmingham.

The 'old' Cathedral also contains several significant artworks including Jacob Epstein's Ecce Homo, which captures the sense of Christ setting his face like flint towards Jerusalem, and Josephina de Vasconcellos' Reconciliation, which has become something of an international icon with versions in the Peace Park in Hiroshima, at the Berlin Wall, in the grounds of Stormont Castle, Northern Ireland and at Bradford University, in addition to Coventry.

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Corinne Bailey Rae - Like A Star.