ArtWay Visual Meditation - Gwen John: The Nun

My latest Visual Meditation for ArtWay is on the work of Gwen John, which can currently be seen at Pallant House in the exhibition Gwen John: Art and Life in London and Paris:

"The wisdom of quietude and purity which derives from paying prayerful attention is what we find expressed throughout John’s work and is the great gift that she offers to us."

My preview of Gwen John: Art and Life in London and Paris for Artlyst can be found here and my review of Reunited: Gwen John, Mere Poussepin and the Catholic Church for Art+Christianity can be found here. See also 20th Century Women Artists Challenging Conventions In Britain here.

My visual meditations for ArtWay include work by María Inés Aguirre, Giampaolo Babetto, Marian Bohusz-Szyszko, Alexander de Cadenet, Christopher Clack, Marlene Dumas, Terry Ffyffe, Jake Flood, Antoni Gaudi, Nicola Green, Maciej Hoffman, Lakwena Maciver, S. Billie Mandle, Giacomo Manzù, Sidney Nolan, Michael Pendry, Maurice Novarina, Regan O'Callaghan, Ana Maria Pacheco, John Piper, Nicola Ravenscroft, Albert Servaes, Henry Shelton, Anna Sikorska, Alan Stewart, Jan Toorop, Andrew Vessey, Edmund de Waal and Sane Wadu.

My Church of the Month reports include: All Saints Parish Church, Tudeley, Aylesford Priory, Canterbury Cathedral, Chapel of St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face, Hem, Chelmsford Cathedral, Churches in Little Walsingham, Coventry Cathedral, Église de Saint-Paul à Grange-Canal, Eton College Chapel, Lumen, Metz Cathedral, Notre Dame du Léman, Notre-Dame de Toute Grâce, Plateau d’Assy,Romont, Sint Martinuskerk Latem, St Aidan of Lindisfarne, St Alban Romford, St. Andrew Bobola Polish RC Church, St. Margaret’s Church, Ditchling, and Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft, St Mary the Virgin, Downe, St Michael and All Angels Berwick and St Paul Goodmayes, as well as earlier reports of visits to sites associated with Marian Bohusz-Szyszko, Marc Chagall, Jean Cocteau, Antoni Gaudi and Henri Matisse.

Blogs for ArtWay include: Congruity and controversy: exploring issues for contemporary commissions; Ervin Bossanyi: A vision for unity and harmony; Georges Rouault and André Girard: Crucifixion and Resurrection, Penitence and Life Anew; Photographing Religious Practice; Spirituality and/in Modern Art; and The Spirituality of the Artist-Clown.

Interviews for ArtWay include: Sophie Hacker, Peter Koenig and Belinda Scarlett. I also interviewed ArtWay founder Marleen Hengelaar Rookmaaker for Artlyst.

I have reviewed: Art and the Church: A Fractious Embrace, Kempe: The Life, Art and Legacy of Charles Eamer Kempe and Jazz, Blues, and Spirituals.

Other of my writings for ArtWay can be found here. My pieces for Church Times can be found here. Those for Artlyst are here and those for Art+Christianity are here.

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Sinead O'Connor - Take Me To Church.

Pallant House: David Jones, Edmund de Waal & Evelyn Dunbar

As if the prospect of a David Jones retrospective was not enough of a draw to Pallant House, the gallery supplements the Jones show with a new work by Edmund de Waal (whose new book The White Road has recently been published) and also has a remarkable collection of lost works by WW2 Official War Artist Evelyn Dunbar.

De Waal's "‘if we attend’ (2015), a white, wall-mounted vitrine with translucent glazing and 16 porcelain vessels, is a new piece produced especially for the David Jones exhibition. 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…’. The work, displayed alongside two other porcelain works – ‘in the north north east’ (2014) and ‘thirteen circles’ (2014) - will be accompanied by a series of poems by David Jones, creating a contemplative space reflecting the nature of the work."

Evelyn Dunbar [was] "a Christian Scientist throughout her life, and the church’s influence suffuses all her work.

“She held her beliefs to be self-evident,” writes Campbell-Howes on his blog. “The only doubts she had concerned the readiness of humankind to play its part in the Covenant. The Covenant – my term, not Evelyn’s – as she conceived it, was the promise given by the creator to the human race of a fertile and eternally abundant land, in return for mankind’s promise to cherish it, to appreciate it and to care for it through intelligent and devoted husbandry.”

That explains, no doubt, why nature rarely appears untamed in her work. “She didn’t really do landscapes on a grand scale,” says Ro. “She was more interested in hen coops, worked fields, and the business of tending the land.”

Indeed, almost all the art at Pallant House shows her love for mankind’s nurturing of God’s creation." (The Guardian)

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Emmylou Harris - Every Grain Of Sand.

David Jones leaves out everything except the magic

Fiona MacCarthy salutes a modernist maker on the brink of a major revival by writing in today's Guardian about the work of poet and artist David Jones in advance of exhibitions of his work at Pallant House and Ditchling Museum of Arts and Crafts. 

She notes that: 'Kenneth Clark, in the mid-1930s, was describing Jones as “the most gifted of all the young British painters”. TS Eliot regarded In Parenthesis, Jones’s modernist epic of the first world war, as “a work of genius”. Auden judged The Anathemata, published in 1957, as “very probably the finest long poem to be written in English this century”.'

'One of his art teachers at college recognised his talent, saying of his work, “Look at that, you see, Jones leaves out everything except the magic.”'

MacCarthy suggests 'We need to view him as fundamentally a maker. He formed things with his hands as he shaped things in his mind, combining the visual and verbal with creative intensity not seen in Britain since the time of William Blake.'

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David Jones - In Parenthesis.