'Foundations of the City' by Alan Everett will be at St Stephen Walbrook from 8th February - 4th
March, 10.00am - 4.00pm weekdays.
An exhibition reception will be held on Monday 8th February, 6.00pm, at which the speaker will be The Revd Dr Sam Wells, Vicar of St Martin-in-the-Fields.
Alan Everett will speak about his work to the Walbrook Art Group on Wednesday 2nd March at 1.00pm.
Alan Everett says: "Three paintings in this exhibition are entitled Rood, reflecting their genesis in the Anglo-Saxon poem, The Dream of the Rood. This poem of great imaginative intensity was written when much of England was in deep forest. The Cross appears to the narrator in a dream vision, telling how as a tree it was cut down to share in the Passion of Christ. The paintings show successive stages of the Crucifixion, as if the tree itself is being crucified (Rood I, III and IV). Two cross paintings address further aspects of the Crucifixion. Unclean Cross alludes to the pollution of blood; Salvage to the recovery of the Cross from cultural obliteration.
Three paintings elaborate the unpredictable nature of preservation, with reference to the written word: Fragment, Text and Code. Another group of three paintings represent – in style and content – processes of layering, with both architectural and literary associations. Scaffolding, Bricolage and
Palimpsest resonate with a church such as St Stephen Walbrook, constructed as it is to a neoclassical design, above a Roman city.
Finally, two paintings approach the difficult subject of martyrdom – viewed by early Christians as an
offering at the very foundations of the City of God. 10.00 pm 2 December 1980 El Salvador refers to
the rape and murder of a Catholic lay-worker and three nuns on that date; 12-15 February 2015
Libya to the beheading of 21 Coptic Christians."
Alan Everett - http://www.stclementjames.org.uk/who-we-are/.
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The Dream Of The Rood.
