Seeing is Receiving: The art of contemplation (8)

7. Sparking

A tale of two churches is central to the story that I sought to tell through my sabbatical art pilgrimage. The two churches are Notre-Dame des Alpes in Le Fayet and Notre-Dame de Toute Grâce on the Plateau d'Assy. Both are only kilometres apart in the French Alps and were built by same architect in a similar style yet they represent different stages in the sparking of inspiration from the Holy Spirit that led to the twentieth century’s revival of sacred art.

My sabbatical art pilgrimage involved visits to significant sites connected with the renewal of religious art in Europe during the twentieth century. In Europe I visited sites connected with the artists surrounding Maurice Denis, Jacques Maritain, Albert Gleizes and Marie-Alain Couturier, while, in the UK, I primarily visited sites which highlighted the influence of the innovatory commissions undertaken by George Bell and Walter Hussey. These were they that were primarily responsible for the sparking of inspiration in church commissions in this period of time.

At the beginning of the twentieth century modern art looked, sounded and felt very different from the art that had traditionally been made for the Church. This meant that the Church tended to avoid using modern art while many modern artists were excitedly exploring new ways of creating art and often couldn’t see any connection between what they were doing and the styles of art which the Church continued to use.

As a result, a whole segment of society – artists and art lovers – was not being impacted by Christianity. Denis, Maritain, Gleizes, Couturier, Bell and Hussey made it their life’s work to reconnect the Church with modern art. The key debate that they had, through their actions and writings, was whether the sparking of inspiration was best done by artists who were Christians and who primarily focused their work on church decoration or by artists who were reckoned to be contemporary masters, regardless of whether or not they practised the faith.

It was that debate which was played out through the commissions for the churches at Le Fayet and Assy. The decoration of St. Paul Grange-Canal in Geneva by Denis, Alexandre Cingria and others in 1913 – 1915 served as a manifesto for the renaissance in modern sacred art that they and others facilitated. This led to the founding in 1919 of the Ateliers d’Art Sacré in Paris by Denis and Georges Desvallières as well the Group of St Luke and St Maurice in Switzerland by François Baud, Cingria, Marcel Feuillat, Marcel Poncet and Georges de Traz. Both groups produced significant work for many churches in subsequent years.

In 1935 the Group of St Luke secured the decoration of the new church of Notre-Dame-des-Alpes by means of a tender process assessed by Maritain, the Catholic art critic Maurice Brillant and the director of the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Geneva, Adrien Bovy.[i] The process and the resulting work was a showcase for the renaissance of sacred art in which Denis, Maritain and Cingria had played key roles. It was this stage of the revival that was later challenged by the commissions selected for Notre-Dame-de-Toute-Grâce.

Although he trained at the Ateliers d’Art Sacré and worked on schemes of stained glass with its artists, together with his fellow Dominican Friar Pie-Raymond Régamey, Couturier argued in ‘L’Art sacré’, the journal which they jointly edited, that ‘each generation must appeal to the masters of living art, and today those masters come first from secular art.’[ii] Couturier worked with the parish priest at Assy, Canon Jean Devémy, on commissions for the church at Assy.

Initially their commissions were within the earlier phase of the renaissance of sacred art as sparked by the Holy Spirit. On the basis of his work at Le Fayet, Devémy selected Maurice Novarina as architect for Assy. As at Le Fayet, Novarina used his regional style with a chalet-style pitched roof and locally sourced materials. Initial commissions for the nave windows went to artists who had been active in modernist Church decoration before the war but Couturier then moved on to commission Pierre Bonnard, Marc Chagall, Fernand Léger, Jacques Lipchitz, Jean Lurçat, Henri Matisse, Germaine Richier and Georges Rouault.

William S. Rubin noted that this ‘radical aspect’ of Couturier’s plan proved deeply controversial as commissioning modern ‘masters … from secular art’ meant that ‘Side by side with works of the pious Catholic Rouault one saw those of Jews, atheists, and even Communists - a revolutionary situation that struck the keynote of a new evangelical spirit ...’ As a result, ‘Even before its dedication in 1950, the church had become the center of an increasingly bitter dispute which was to cause a marked rupture between the liberal and conservative wings of the clergy and laity during the following years.’[iii]

Despite the controversy caused Couturier’s approach to commissioning sparking inspiration for others and has become part of the commissioning landscape for churches. In England, Bishop Bell sought ‘ways and means for a reconciliation of the Artist and the Church’ while Hussey made it the great enthusiasm of his life and work ‘to commission for the Church the very best artists.’ Both experienced opposition and criticism but at St Matthew’s Northampton, St Michael and All Angels Berwick and Chichester Cathedral enabled commissions by a range of contemporary masters.

My visits to these and other churches confirmed for me the continuing value of commissions made at both stages of the twentieth century renaissance in sacred art. Both churches, Le Fayet and Assy, contain artworks which speak powerfully and movingly of the Christian faith and therefore also inform the spirituality of those who see them. Significant work was done throughout the twentieth century both by artists who were Christians and who primarily focused their work on church decoration and also by artists who were reckoned to be contemporary masters, regardless of whether or not they practised the faith. This continues to be the case in contemporary church commissions and, as a result, one of the lessons we can learn from the twentieth century revival of sacred art and its sparking of inspiration is that debate which sets ‘Christian’ artists against secular masters is unnecessary.

Churches need encouragement and validation to commission challenging and innovative work from either group of artists because the sparking of inspiration by the Holy Spirit derives not from our alignment with statements of belief but from the sharing of our contemplative seeing. As we have been reflecting through this book, this is based on slowing down in order to sustain silent looking by immersing ourselves in the world created by the work combined with reflection on sources. It is this that enables a positive cycle of creativity by sparking inspiration from the Holy Spirit.

Jesus’ disciples spent three years not understanding what he was saying and doing before running away, deserting and denying him at the crucifixion. Then the Day of Pentecost happened and the coming of the Holy Spirit was the moment when it all came together for them, when they finally understood and both knew their part in God’s plan and could begin to play it.

When the Spirit came they could speak in languages they had never learned and were understood, they could explain the scriptures although they were uneducated and their explanations made sense. They could proclaim Jesus as Lord and Christ and people responded to their challenge, and they knew how to structure and organise the new community that grew around them in response to their message. All that Jesus had said to them and done with them suddenly made sense and was useful to them because the Spirit had come and brought clarity and revelation. That is what Jesus had promised them would happen. That is the work which the Holy Spirit comes to do in our lives. Jesus told the disciples that when the Spirit came he would lead them into all truth. In other words, they would have that experience of inspiration being sparked; of revelation, of clarity, of things making sense, coming together and connecting.

This is an experience that is common to artists. Written In My Soul is a series of interviews with some of the most well-known singer-songwriters from the 1950s onward. Many of these great artists – Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Van Morrison and others - felt that their songs were given to them in moments of revelation, that their songs were already written and ‘came through them as though radio receivers – without much conscious effort or direction.’[iv]

That is an experience of the Spirit coming, although often not recognised as such. It has also been my experience, both in creating and preaching. I will often reflect or meditate on an experience, a song, an image, a Bible passage, by putting it in my mind, carrying it around in my mind over several days or weeks, reminding myself of it from time to time and just generally living with it for a period of time. When I do so, then I find that, at some unexpected moment, a new thought or idea or image will come to me that makes sense or takes forward the experience or song or image or passage on which I had been reflecting.

This is not just something for artists or even for preachers, it is something that can happen for us all; not just in major life-changing moments of revelation but also in a series of minor everyday epiphanies. Corita Kent writes that there is ‘an energy in the creative process that belongs in the league of those energies which can uplift, unify, and harmonize all of us.’ This energy or spark or inspiration, ‘which we call “making,” is the relating of parts to make a new whole.’[v]

If done well, this sparking of creativity gives rise to a sparking of response: ‘… the work of art gives us an experience of wholeness called ecstasy – a moment of rising above our feelings of separateness, competition, divisiveness “to a state of exalted delight in which normal understanding is felt to be surpassed” (Webster’s).’ This is as we should expect, as the ‘very word imagination implies that you are into territory no one has ever been to before.’ As a result, ‘a rigid discipline that demands one “right” way is confining and limiting.’[vi]

There is a third spark that precedes those describes thus far. Kent says that new ideas ‘are bursting all around and all this comes into you and is changed by you.’[vii] We are all each other’s sources and anything that comes our way, including the work of artists, ‘is a place for starting’.[viii] Contemplative prayer or reflection enables us to see and grasp these inspirations as they burst around us. Sparks of inspiration and creativity come to us in this way because, as Anaïs Nin notes, there are ‘very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination.’ Instead, we ‘acquire it fragment by fragment on a small scale, successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.’[ix]g

The acquiring of fragments and creative linking of these to form a mosaic as commended by Kent and Jan Steward via Nin may remind us of Betty Spackman’s approach with ‘A Creature Chronicle’. Another artist inspired to create in this way, as a means of mirroring or depicting the contemplative creative process itself, was Marc Chagall. Chagall’s art is one that connects and reconciles disparate images of Bible, experience, history, memory and myth on the canvas through colour and composition. In his work Chagall links up different, unusual and unlikely images in a way that makes visual and emotional sense; in a way that communicates his love of his home, his world, his people, its sights, sounds and smells. He succeeds in ‘achieving a pictorial unity through the yoking of motifs taken from different realms of given reality.’[x] He reconciles emotions, thoughts, and reminiscences with lines, colours and shapes to create harmonious, meaningful paintings. Walther and Metzger have suggested that ‘no other twentieth century artist had Chagall's gift for harmonising what were thought to be irreconcilable opposites.’[xi] That was actually far from being the case, yet the fact that this might seem so is to recognise the lack of awareness and understanding shown to the art of contemplation in modern and contemporary art by critics and the Church alike. This has been to the wider detriment of society and has meant that some artists using the approaches described in this book have been under-appreciated in regard to recognition and, in other respects, as to intent.

The approaches to creative and Spirit-inspired sparking of these artists have synergies with the approaches of David Jones in The Anathemata and T. S. Eliot in The Waste Land. What these poets did in constructing a whole from fragmentary materials is also essentially similar to the form and construction of the Bible itself. Writer and minister, Mike Riddell has described the Bible as 'a collection of bits' assembled to form God’s home page while the Anglican priest Mark Oakley used a more poetic image when he wrote that the Bible is 'the best example of a collage of God that we have.' Riddell continued by saying that, 'what holds all these bits together is the fact that they somehow represent the continued involvement of God with the world in general and humanity in particular.'[xii] Oakley suggested that 'held together, they form a colourful and intriguing picture that draws us into its own landscape' and enables Christians to 'glimpse something of the divine being and his life in the world' and find 'a vocabulary for the Christian life.'[xiii]

What also holds them together is the Spirit-inspired sparking of creativity in creating and linking fragments of meaning that we have been exploring through the work of Chagall, Eliot, Jones, Kent and Spackman. It may be that it is this form of inspiration to which the Bible itself wants to point us when, in 2 Timothy 3.16, we read that ‘All scripture is inspired by God.’ Sparks of the Spirit – the inspiration of God – come not in one fully realised and systematised creation but fragment by fragment, to be creatively linked and held together in a collage of revelation.

This place of renewed inspiration, creativity and revelation is reached by means of learning to see as opposed to merely looking. The ways of learning to see that we have explored enable us to genuinely pay attention by slowing down, sustained looking, surrendering ourselves to art by immersing ourselves within it, staying with the silence inherent in much art, study of sources, the sharing of experiences, and an openness to inspiration, the sparking of the Spirit. In learning to use these ways of paying attention we are opening the gift the artist offers of sharing with us the mindful and prayerful act of seeing; to spend time noticing, looking intently and making careful observation in order to make material from their thoughts and ideas. With these ways of seeing in place, we can now see that there is beauty in all art and life as seen through the concept of sacrament, of heaven in the ordinary, including the artefacts of art. It is this that we contemplate. It is this to which we pay attention. It is this that is prayer.

Explore

Chagall's unitive vision finds echoes in the work of some of his peers and has been taken up, responded to and developed by other later artists.

Cecil Collins, in painting fools and angels found a means of depicting divine and human action and response. Collins viewed art as ‘an interpenetration between worlds, as a marriage of the known with the unknown’. In art, he said, the ‘imagination searches out and prefigures the mysterious unity of all life’. As a result of this metaphysical purpose and exploration ‘a picture lives on many different levels at once, it is an interpenetration of planes of reality, it cannot be analyzed or anatomised into single levels because one level can only be understood in the light of others. The reality or interior life of the picture can only be realised as a total experience.’[xiv] That total experience in Collins' work is unitive experience; whether this is the attempt at reconstituting the world that is Images in Praise of Love or the complex combination of symbol and structure that hymns the marriage union and reconciles masculine and feminine qualities in The Artist and His Wife.

Collins was also preoccupied by our expulsion from the Garden of Eden and our longing to return; in itself a reconciliation. This is a theme that was also taken up by Norman Adams. Adams' produced a questioning, probing work based on the expulsion and inspired by Paul Gauguin's Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going? An everyman figure is on a sloping pathway which he could be ascending or descending. Above him is a mass of blooming flowers, below a confused, muddy zone of swirls and scraping. His predicament poses the question to us as viewer, are we returning to Eden reconciled to God or descending into confused self-interest? The religious subject matter of Norman Adams' paintings provides him with geometry, a structure of lines and circles that allows his complex colours, his masterly and distinctive use of watercolour, to work their magic.’[xv] For Sister Wendy Beckett this ability of Adams' suggests that a mystical sense of oneness is making itself visible in his work.[xvi]

John Reilly was as strong and explicit as Collins in setting out his intentions: ‘My paintings are not concerned with the surface appearance of people or things but try to express something of the fundamental spiritual reality behind this surface appearance. I try to express in visible form the oneness and unity of this invisible power, binding all things into one whole.’[xvii] Using lessons learnt from Orphism and Rayonism he constructed a pattern of rippling rays emanating from a central source of light. Within this structure he set objects and figures composed of abstract shapes and colours that are indicative of their spiritual qualities. A painting like No Parting includes natural formations, animals, human figures and plants held together, underpinned, in eternal circulation by the central point, which some may see as a pictorial device structuring a work of beauty and others as symbolic of God. In Universal Power - The Fourth Day of Creation we are shown a snapshot of creation, of the first reconciliation of shape and form. As Reilly's abstract shapes spiral out from the central point they coalesce into those same fundamental, elemental shapes of bird, plant and human life.

For David Jones reconciliation comes through the tangle of associations and allusions triggered by words and images. Caroline Collier has noted his ‘fondness for entwinings, for complications, interrelationships, layers and correspondences.’[xviii] We see this most clearly in his use of line but, as Nicolette Gray notes in her comments on Curtained Outlook, the level of unity achieved throughout his work is much greater than simply this alone:

‘The artist has woven a complex of components into a new unity. The verticals of the window-frame, the windows and balustrade of the house outside, and of the jug on the table, are counterbalanced by the horizontal of the sill and the balcony, and by the outward-moving diagonals of the table, the toothbrush and box lid, and the downward-moving lines of the house. Movement runs throughout the composition - there is not a single straight line, not a flat wash of colour. The sudden accents of colour/tone/drawing pick up the movement of the composition. The drawing itself is part soft pencil, part brush drawing in colour, here sketchy, there emphatic. All the elements are worked together: form and content have been reconciled, unity combined with movement.’[xix]

Giles Auty, in writing of Norman Adams, noted that he belongs ‘to a relatively small tradition of painters whose outlook is positive’: ‘An affirmative vision such as his is especially rare in the modern art of the West, artists preferring to shelter more frequently behind masks of disillusionment and cynicism. Indeed, such negative views of life have the additional bonus of being perennially in fashion, the large black-humoured painting sharing something of the timeless chic of the little black dress.’[xx] The tradition of affirmative, unitive, figurative art may be small yet it remains significant, if undervalued.

Wonderings

I wonder if you can recall a moment when something new was sparked in you.

I wonder if you can remember what led to that sparking and how it felt.

I wonder what you did with that new something.

Prayer

Creating God, for whom creation is your prayer, may I see creativity as noticing and naming, letting all things be by attending to them for your sake and to see your goodness; that all may be well and all manner of thing be well. Amen.

Spiritual exercise

Take the phrase ‘Through the veil’ and ruminate on it in your heart and mind. Create a list in whatever way you wish of all that this phrase brings to mind for you. Use your list to begin a creative project of whatever kind you wish entitled ‘Through the veil’.

Art actions

View John Reilly’s work at http://thejohnreillygallery.co.uk/index.htm.

Watch the documentary ‘Bill Viola: The Road to St Paul’s’ which follows the world’s most influential video artist Bill Viola and his wife and close collaborator Kira Perov over a twelve-year period as they undertake and complete the installation of their two permanent video works, Mary and Martyrs, in St. Paul’s Cathedral.

 

Click here for the other parts of 'Seeing is Receiving'. See also 'And a little child shall lead them' which explores similar themes.


[i] L. Mamedova, ‘L’église Notre-Dame des Alpes à Saint-Gervais-le Fayet : une collaboration entre un architecte savoyard et un artiste genevois’, Publié dans L. el-Wakil et P. Vaisse, Genève-Lyon-Paris. Relations artistiques, réseaux, influences, voyages, Genève, Georg, 2004 - http://www.okam-design.com/lada/files/Fayet-article.pdf

[ii] M-A Couturier, ‘What Assy Teaches Us’ in Sacred Art, University of Texas Press, 1989, p.52

[iii] W.S. Rubin, Modern Sacred Art and the Church of Assy, Columbia University Press, New York & London, 1961

[iv] B. Flanagan, Written In My Soul, Omnibus Press, 1990, p. xii

[v] C. Kent & J. Steward, Learning by Heart, Allworth Press, 2008, p.5

[vi] C. Kent & J. Steward, Learning by Heart, Allworth Press, 2008, pps.90-91

[vii] C. Kent & J. Steward, Learning by Heart, Allworth Press, 2008, p.50

[viii] C. Kent & J. Steward, Learning by Heart, Allworth Press, 2008, p.48

[ix] Cited in C. Kent & J. Steward, Learning by Heart, Allworth Press, 2008, p.94

[x] Ingo F. Walther and Rainer Metzger, Marc Chagall 1887 – 1985: Painting as Poetry, Taschen, 2000, p. 20

[xi] Ingo F. Walther and Rainer Metzger, Marc Chagall 1887 – 1985: Painting as Poetry, Taschen, 2000, p. 89

[xii] M. Riddell, God’s home page (Oxford: The Bible Reading Fellowship, 1998), pps.24 & 25

[xiii] M. Oakley, The Collage of God (London: Darton, Longman and Todd Ltd, 2001), p.21

[xiv] Writings and statements by the Artist, Cecil Collins A Retrospective Exhibition, Judith Collins, Tate Gallery, 1989

[xv] M. Walters in ‘Images of Christ’, Modern Painters VI/2

[xvi] Sister W. Beckett, ‘Norman Adams’ in Modern Painters IV/1

[xvii] J. Reilly, ‘Introduction’ in The Painted Word: Paintings by John Reilly, Cross Publishing, 2008

[xviii] Caroline Collier, ‘Under the Form of Paint ...’ in David Jones: Paintings. Drawings. Inscriptions. Prints., The South Bank Centre, 1989

[xix] N. Gray, The Paintings of David Jones, Lund Humphries Publishers Ltd, 1989

[xx] G. Auty, ‘An Affirmative View’ in Norman Adams, R.A., Christopher Hull Gallery, 1991


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Bob Dylan - Every Grain Of Sand.

The Imagination of God

'The Imagination of God' was an online Parish Day at St Martin-in-the-Fields today with Guest Speaker, writer and poet, Malcolm Guite.

Malcolm Guite is a much-loved English poet, singer-songwriter, Anglican priest, and academic. Born in Nigeria to British expatriate parents, Guite earned degrees from Cambridge and Durham universities. His research interests include the intersection of religion and the arts, and the examination of the works of Shakespeare, J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, and British poets such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Donne and George Herbert. He is currently a Bye-Fellow and chaplain of Girton College, Cambridge and associate chaplain of St Edward King and Martyr in Cambridge. His poetry offers not only deep insight into our Christian faith but also humour and shows his own irrepressible imagination. We hope this day will be will be a day of inspiration for your own imagination and creativity.

  

The day began with Morning Song led by our Choral Scholars and continued with an introduction and talk 'The Imagination Bodies Forth' by the inspirational priest and poet Malcolm Guite. Following Q&A and small group reflections, Great Sacred Music was led by Sam Wells, Andrew Earis and St Martin’s Voices. Malcolm Guite then spoke on 'Finding your own form - how we can use our own imagination'. This was followed by sessions on using our imagination:

• In poetry: with poet Malcolm Guite
• In prose: with writers Sam Wells and Douglas Board
• In art: with artists Jonathan Evens, Andrew Carter, and Vicky Howard
• In music: with Director of Music, Andrew Earis

Evensong followed with the Choir of St Martin-in-the-Fields and the day ended with the beginning of an art project plus drinks in the courtyard.

For the Art Project participants are asked to construct a geometric star. All of the stars will vary in size and complexity adding to the overall mesmeric and spatial pattern. All the stars will form part of a large wall hanging based on Giotto’s fresco of stars on the ceiling of the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua. Stars are a symbol of truth, spirit and hope and are seen as something beautiful, good and positive. Stars can also be a symbol that embodies the notion of spiritual revelation in each of us. We hope that the finished piece will look beautiful and positive and a sign of hope for us all.

In the session on 'Using our Imagination in Art,’ Andrew Carter, Vicky Howard and myself, shared some of our favourite artworks and discussed why these were important to us. Andrew, Vicky and myself are all part of the artists’ and craftspersons’ group and Andrew has also led on the art project that we are began today.

Our hope was to explore areas such as:

• what it is that we are primarily responding to in those artworks;
• the ways they work visually;
• how ideas and emotions are explored visually;
• how a sense of the spiritual might have been engendered; and
• how the imagination of God appears in human creations.

Andrew’s choice was 'Annunciation’ by Duccio. Vicky spoke about a series of prints by Rembrandt, including 'Christ presented the the People' and 'The Three Crosses', while I discussed ‘Life Eternal’ by John Reilly:  

John Reilly’s “ambition has always been to paint a picture which perfectly weds form and content” in order “to express in visible form the oneness and unity of [the] invisible power binding all things into one whole.” I was fortunate enough to meet him at his home on the Isle of Wight, while there on a family holiday. I didn’t know of his work before going on that holiday but found cards and prints of his amazing work in some of the shops there and had to find out more. He was kind enough to invite me into his home and show me his work and works in progress.

He has said: "My paintings are not concerned with the surface appearance of people or things but try to express something of the fundamental spiritual reality behind this surface appearance. I try to express in visible form the oneness and unity of this invisible power, binding all things into one whole. I try to express something of the universal and timeless truths behind the stories of the Bible.”

So, for Reilly, the unseen reality manifests itself both through pattern - “the oneness and unity of this invisible power, binding all things into one whole” - and through story - “the universal and timeless truths behind the stories of the Bible”. He has also used the greater freedom of expression that modern movements in art have given to artists to develop a visual language of forms and colours which he hopes expresses “something of their deeper spiritual significance.” His work draws on cubism, fauvism and orphism in particular.

Reilly has made a profound use of the circle in his work in order to depict the wholeness that he finds in the world and the life that God has created. He frequently bases his works on a central circle (often, the sun) from which facets of colour emanate, like ripples on the surface of a stream. The painting’s imagery is then set within these facets, each figure or object being embedded in the overall patterning of the painting and related to the environmental whole that Reilly creates.

By these means fragments of form and colour (the facets of the painting’s patterning) and the images that they contain are united to circle harmoniously around and within God, the central life and intelligence which is the light of the world. Works such as ‘Life Eternal’ utilise these methods and meanings and both contain and convey huge energy and resolution as a result.

His technique of colour fragments emanating from a central source enables him to suggest that his archetypal images of creation and the landscape are both, filled with the emanating rays and linked by them into a unified circle. His paintings (including 'Life Eternal’) therefore suggest the way in which we are linked both by being the creation of God and by being indwelt by his spirit.

Sister Wendy Beckett compared aspects of twentieth century art to the Way of Affirmation in Western Christianity which approaches God through creatures and imagery. “In Christianity,” she says, “the divine is constantly in process of passing into the human”. This leads, she suggests, to “an unapologetic religious yes to sense-pleasure” shown in the way the painting of the last century is “no longer trying to create an illusion, or to have us looking away from itself … Heaven in a grain of sand; the Sacred in the immediacy of sensuous experience”. In her meditations on art she exemplifies this unapologetic religious yes to sense-pleasure and shares the work of artists that embody it in their work.

Artists like Norman Adams, who unites in his work many of the factors that we have briefly examined - a heightened experience of nature, bright passionate colour penetrating depths and crossing frontiers of understanding beyond ordinary experience, cultivation and order, and ideas drawn from deep down in the unconscious. Margaret Walters has noted how the religious subject matter of Norman Adams' paintings provide him with "a geometry, a structure of lines and circles that allows his complex colours, his masterly and distinctive use of watercolour, to work their magic". For Sister Wendy Beckett this ability of Adams' suggests that a mystical sense of oneness is making itself visible in his work. 

My favourite works of art, therefore, are those that are incarnational - in that they unite heaven and earth, the human and divine - and which also show us the Way of Affirmation.

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Etta Cameron - I Have A Dream.

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Malcolm Guite - Your Poetry is Jamming My Machine.

Beyond 'Airbrushed from Art History' (6)

Lord Harries' begins a series of lectures this week on Christian Faith and Modern Art at the Museum of London.

The last century has seen changes in artistic style that have been both rapid and radical. This has presented a particular problem to artists who have wished to express Christian themes. These illustrated lectures will look at how different artists have responded to this challenge whilst retaining their artistic integrity.

The Explosion of Modernism. Wednesday, 19 October 2011 - 1:00pm: The period before World War 1 saw an extraordinary burst of creativity in all the arts which has decisively effected all subsequent developments. This lecture will look at the emergence of expressionism and amongst other artists will consider in detail the work of Nolde, Jacob Epstein and Rouault.

Distinctive Individual Visions. Wednesday, 16 November 2011 - 1:00pm: As at the end of the 18^th century William Blake developed a highly individual style that did not fit easily into the categories of the age, so in our time artists like Marc Chagall, Stanley Spencer and Cecil Collins, in their very different ways, have sought to express an intense, highly personal religious vision of the world.

Catholic Elegance and Joy. Wednesday, 14 December 2011 - 1:00pm: In the period under consideration a fair number of the artists considered have been Roman Catholics, but at one time there was a particular symbiosis between two of them, Eric Gill and David Jones, who will be discussed along with others who shared their faith.

Post World War II Optimism. Wednesday, 18 January 2012 - 1:00pm: After World War II, without forgetting the terrible suffering earlier in the century, there was a new confidence expressed in the artistic commissions of the time. Older artists who had been active before World War I such as Epstein and Matisse received commissions as well as younger artists such as Graham Sutherland, known especially for his work in Coventry Cathedral, Ceri Richards and Henry Moore.

Searching for New Ways. Wednesday, 22 February 2012 - 1:00pm: From the 1960s to our own time artists who have wished to express Christian themes have explored a number of very different artistic ways of doing so. Amongst those considered in this lecture are Albert Herbert, Norman Adams, John Reilly and Craigie Aitchison.

Contemporary Christian Art. Wednesday, 21 March 2012 - 1:00pm: Contrary to much opinion, the current scene of faith-related art is very much alive. There are new commissions for churches and cathedrals, a number of artists pursue their work on the basis of a deeply convinced faith, and other artists often resonate with traditional Christian themes, albeit in a highly untraditional way. The challenge for the artist, stated in the introduction to the course of lectures above, is still very much there: how to retain artistic integrity whilst doing justice to received themes.

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King's X - Faith, Hope, Love.

John Reilly RIP

John Reilly, who died last month, once wrote that his ambition had “always been to paint a picture which perfectly weds form and content” in order “to express in visible form the oneness and unity of [the] invisible power binding all things into one whole.”

‘The Painted Word’, which was published in 2009 and which brought 50 colour plates of his paintings together with the Biblical and other texts that inspired him, was therefore both an argument for the unity of the material and spiritual and an opportunity to judge whether Reilly has succeeded in his intent.

Reilly used the greater freedom of expression that modern movements in art have given to artists to develop a visual language of forms and colours which he hoped expresses “something of their deeper spiritual significance.” Using lessons learnt from Orphism and Rayonism, Reilly frequently based his works on a central circle (often, the sun) from which facets of colour emanate, like ripples on the surface of a stream. The painting’s imagery was then set within these facets, each figure or object being embedded in the overall patterning of the painting and related to the environmental whole that Reilly created. By these means fragments of form and colour (the facets of the painting’s patterning) and the images that they contain are united to circle harmoniously around and within God, the central life and intelligence which is the light of the world.

Reilly made a profound use of the circle in his work in order to depict the wholeness that he found in the world and life that God created. His technique of colour fragments emanating from a central source enabled him to suggest that his archetypal images of creation and the landscape were both, filled with the emanating rays and linked by them into a unified circle. His paintings therefore suggested the way in which we are linked both by being the creation of God and by being indwelt by his spirit. A similar approach can also be seen in the work of Vincent Van Gogh and Cecil Collins where movement, of brush stokes, line, dots, and dashes, indicate a sense of force that informs both the natural world and human beings. Van Gogh described this as expressing "that something of the eternal which the halo used to symbolise". Such paintings recreate afresh, in modern styles, aspects of Celtic Christian thought. These artists found a means of applying the Celtic image of the circle, with its message of a perfect wholeness, through modern fragmentary art techniques.

Works such as Let There Be Light and The Fourth Day of Creation – Universal Power utilise these methods and meanings and both contain and convey huge energy and resolution as a result. Where the power of Reilly’s work dissipates somewhat is through the introduction of a theological and visual dualism which separates the union of the material and the spiritual into disparate zones, as in The Vision where the dreamer in the closed forms of the material world sees in a vision the open forms of the spiritual realm.

Such dualism, which drew on Platonism, muddied the waters and obscured Reilly’s central unitive vision. Taken as a whole, however, Reilly's work reveals the form and harmony of his unitive vision. Guillaume Apollinaire wrote that the “works of the Orphic artist must simultaneously give a pure aesthetic pleasure, a structure which is self-evident, and a sublime meaning”; a description that it would be entirely appropriate to apply to Reilly.

The final word, though, should be from Reilly himself:

"My paintings are not concerned with the surface appearance of people or things but try to express something of the fundamental spiritual reality behind this surface appearance. I try to express in visible form the oneness and unity of this invisible power, binding all things into one whole. I try to express something of the universal and timeless truths behind the stories of the Bible.”

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John Tavener: As One Who Has Slept.

Airbrushed from Art History (15)

An animal and a green faced man gaze lovingly into each others eyes as the man offers the animal a glowing branch that scatters light. Above them the green, yellow, blue and red houses of a Russian village turn onto their roofs while a man and woman move up the main street, the man upright, the woman upside down.

The painting is called I and the Village and can be viewed as laying out the key parameter's for what I call the art of reconciliation. Things and people are turned upside down, everything is in the foreground, and is alive, dramatic, moving. The artist, Marc Chagall, is linking up different, unusual and unlikely images in a way that makes visual and emotional sense; in a way that communicates his love of his home, his world, his people, its sights, sounds and smells. He has succeeded, as Walther and Metzger write in Marc Chagall, in "achieving a pictorial unity through the yoking of motifs taken from different realms of given reality". He has reconciled emotions, thoughts, reminiscences with lines, colours and shapes to create a harmonious, meaningful painting.

Walther and Metzger have suggested that "no other twentieth century artist had Chagall's gift for harmonising what were thought to be irreconcilable opposites". That is not so. Cecil Collins, in Images in Praise of Love, produces a work that brings together the life forms of the universe - astrological, biological, cellular, human and angelic - in a rhythmic, harmonious whole. His key character, the Fool, sums up the reconciling artist:

"The Saint, the Artist, the Poet, and the Fool are one. They are the eternal virginity of spirit, which in the dark winter of the world, continually proclaims the existence of a new life, gives faithful promise of the spring of an invisible Kingdom, and the coming of light."

David Jones drew and painted through a tangle of words and images all laden, for him, with other associations that he aimed to draw into his picture so that the work and the scene became layered with meaning. For him, everything was upfront, part of the foreground. He was a man who did not want to see the wood for the trees. His struggle was, as Nicolette Gray has written, "to put down without loss of meaning or loss of art-form all that he needed to adjust into a unity."


In artists such as these we find an alternative and unremarked strain of modern art. A style of painting that we could term the art of reconciliation. It is a form of painting that begins with Chagall and which reveals the lie that he was just a follower rather than an originator among the principal artists of the 1920's. The art of Chagall is one which seeks reconciliation in all aspects of his painting.

In 'I and the Village' this can be seen firstly, as Werner Haftmann has written, in the pictures' geometrical construction:

"Along the central perpendicular ... a large circle can be seen which seems to hang in the crosslines of the diagonals. ... In contrast to the concentrical calm of the circle, in which the diagonals are refracted as in a glass ball, the leaping, playful, diagonal offshoots bring in many richly contrasted movements. This geometrical net binds the whole construction firmly inside the picture rectangle so that, although in many places the edges of the picture cut through objective details, these do not point outside the picture margins but remain structural elements of the internal design. Nothing projects outside of the self-contained unity of the ornamental surface."

The construction of the painting clearly has no representational function instead its use is to harmonise or reconcile the various elements that Chagall wishes to introduce.

Reconciliation is, then, also seen in Chagall's choice of colour. Haftmann comments that "since the colours are in tone groupings ... colour loses its material quality and becomes the bearer of an independent, immaterial colour-light. ... it is a pure inner picture light, created out of the light values of the individual colours and their interaction. It is split into facets in the spatial and ornamental network of the picture surface, and shines unorientated out of the entire surface of the painting. The colour alone is the source of all light." Chagall's use of colour then also binds together, unifies, the whole composition.

What Chagall is doing corresponds to standard guidance which saw unity as one of the four qualities that should co-exist in a good painting. Unity could then be discussed in terms of unity of colour, unity of pattern and so on. However, in his use of construction and colour Chagall is also uniting some of the great artistic movements of his day. In his composition he makes use of the discoveries of cubism, in his colours the freedoms of fauvism and expressionism and, in his imagery he anticipates aspects of surrealism. His originality and innovations lie in the fact that, when all around him artists were dismantling the jigsaw of art in order to explore to their limits single aspects such as perspective, structure and colour, he was intent on fitting the pieces of the puzzle back together in new and imaginative configurations.

However, his urge to reconcile does not stop here. He takes us further by his unity of content. Throughout his work he brought together disparate images to reconcile them within the frame of his painting. In this picture the images are ones which spring from his childhood memories. This gives them a loose but wholly personal unity. However, the more important unities are in the way that they fit within the geometrical and colour harmonies of the painting and, in the symbolic and emotional links that he establishes between his otherwise disconnected memories.

Colour and pattern emphasise the link between the large human face and the animal face. The eyes are linked by a line that cuts across the other diagonals. The tender green filling the human face highlights the loving gaze directed at the animal. Together they emphasise the emotional unity underlying the picture, that all these objects and images are loved by the painter.

The images can be seen as bringing together four sections of creation; the human, the animal, plant life (the twig, bottom centre) and civilisation (the village). They bring together the strange (topsy turvey houses and people) with the ordinary (a man walking the village street, a woman milking a cow). They connect a person with a community, the 'I' of the title with the people and animals who populate the village.

These, together, may also hint at other unities; those of family where the animal may be symbolic of a mother figure, and the village, and all within it, caught up in a parent-child relationship. Or where the tender love expressed towards all these disparate objects is speaking of a spiritual unity with God expressed in every aspect of His creation and all linked and made worthy of love as a result. Whatever, Chagall has created a unity at every level within his painting so that both the medium and the content proclaim the possibility of reconciliation not solely within the confines of a frame but out there in the real world. If a human can reconcile within art, the painting seems to suggest, then reconciliation is possible within life as well.

This, then, is Chagall's art of reconciliation. His origination, the development of which has produced much that is valuable, although under recognised, in modern art. However, because Chagall has never been recognised as an initiator he has never been viewed as having followers. Despite this for a number of practising artists he is viewed as a key figure.

John Lane has written in The Living Tree of how Chagall "set out to give embodiment to a unitive vision as comprehensive, though more personal, as that of the Middle Ages." Ken Kiff said in 1991 that the great paintings which had been on show in London in the recent past - and he included Chagall's Time is a River Without Banks as one of two examples - may be "more forward looking than perhaps any of this recent work." He felt that the new century may value and see the revolutionary aspect of things that some attitudes in the present century tend to suppress. Chagall, himself, expressed similar sentiments when he said in 1943:

"Mankind is looking for something new. It is looking for its own original power of expression, like that of the primitives, of the people who opened their mouths for the first time to utter their unique truths. Will the former vision be replaced by a new vision, by an entirely new way of looking at the world?"

Chagall's unitive vision finds echoes in the work of some of his peers and has been taken up, responded to and developed by other later artists.

Stanley Spencer, by locating biblical stories within his home village linked the divine and the earthly. In doing so he was aiming at a transfiguration of the ordinary, including himself. He spoke of having "noted in all my various desires that they have a relationship to each other and that they or many of them, come together to suggest some clue as to what their final form will be. This final something, the thing that ecstasy is about, God alone can give the order and reveal the design." By this he was suggesting that if, he linked a present emotion to a place that recalled a similar past emotion (this provided the setting for his painting) and to a similar biblical event (this provided the content of his painting), then the final work of art created would be both a release of that emotion in himself and a transfiguration of the emotion. Both would bring a sense of peace and ecstasy through an at-oneness with God and His world.

Cecil Collins, in painting fools and angels found another means of depicting divine and human action and response. Collins viewed art as "an interpenetration between worlds, as a marriage of the known with the unknown". In art, he said, the "imagination searches out and prefigures the mysterious unity of all life." As a result of this metaphysical purpose and exploration "a picture lives on many different levels at once, it is an interpenetration of planes of reality, it cannot be analyzed or anatomised into single levels because one level can only be understood in the light of others. The reality or interior life of the picture can only be realised as a total experience."

That total experience in Collins' work is unitive experience. Whether this is the attempt at reconstituting the world that is Images in Praise of Love or the complex combination of symbol and structure that hymns the marriage union and reconciles masculine and feminine qualities in The Artist and His Wife.

Collins was also preoccupied by our expulsion from the garden of Eden and our longing to return, in itself a reconciliation. This is a theme that was also taken up by Norman Adams. Adams' produced a questioning, probing work, inspired by Gauguin's Where do we come from, Who are we, Where are we going and based on the expulsion. An everyman figure is on a sloping pathway which he could be ascending or descending. Above him is a mass of blooming flowers, below a confused, muddy zone of swirls and scraping. His predicament poses the question to us as viewer, are we returning to Eden reconciled to God or descending into confused self interest.

Margaret Walters has noted how the religious subject matter of Norman Adams' paintings provide him with "a geometry, a structure of lines and circles that allows his complex colours, his masterly and distinctive use of watercolour, to work their magic." For Sister Wendy Beckett this ability of Adams' suggests that a mystical sense of oneness is making itself visible in his work. In The Way of the Cross and the Paradise Garden it is the radiance of joy conveyed by "angels somersaulting through a dazzle of colour bars, crosses of light, that proclaims the marvellous oneness of the Death of Christ and His Rising", the revelation that the two are different sides of the same love.

Adams indicates, in his notes on A New Heaven and Earth the way in which the structure and the disparate content of his work are combined to form a unified work:

"The lower panel depicts The Slough of Despond in which human beings and beasts struggle through the bog. The central panel depicts the great mass of people, displaced like refugees, some of them sheltering in improvised tent-like structures: and in one a nativity is taking place. This painting was partially inspired by recent political happenings, beginning with the plight of the Iraqui Kurds. At the top of this panel, the heavens are seen to be opening, with a glimpse of better things to come. The great display of colourful Angels leads into the upper panel, which is all Angels (rather insect-like and developing from butterflies). The 'open-envelope' shape of the work provides an upward thrust to heaven: the two side panels (depicting the Birth of Adam and Eve, and the Angel of the Resurrection), hold the painting together like two embracing arms."

John Reilly is a contemporary artist who has been as strong and explicit as Collins in setting out his intentions:

"My paintings are not concerned with the surface appearance of people or things but try to express something of the fundamental spiritual reality behind this surface appearance. I try to express in visible form the oneness and unity of this invisible power, binding all things into one whole."

Using lessons learnt from Orphism and Rayonism he constructs a pattern of rippling rays emanating from a central source of light. Within this structure he sets objects and figures composed of abstract shapes and colours that are indicative of their spiritual qualities. A painting like No Parting includes natural formations, animals, human figures and plants held together, underpinned, in eternal circulation by the central point, which some may see as a pictorial device structuring a work of beauty and others as symbolic of God. In Universal Power - The Fourth Day of Creation we are shown a snapshot of creation, of the first reconciliation of shape and form. As Reilly's abstract shapes spiral out from the central point they coalesce into those same fundamental, elemental shapes of bird, plant and human life.

For David Jones reconciliation comes through the tangle of associations and allusions triggered by words and images. Caroline Collier, in Under the form of paint, has noted his "fondness for entwinings, for complications, interrelationships, layers and correspondences." We see this most clearly in his use of line but, as Nicolette Gray notes in her comments on Curtained Outlook, the level of unity achieved throughout his work is much greater than simply this alone:

"The artist has woven a complex of components into a new unity. The verticals of the window-frame, the windows and balustrade of the house outside, and of the jug on the table, are counterbalanced by the horizontal of the sill and the balcony, and by the outward-moving diagonals of the table, the toothbrush and box lid, and the downward-moving lines of the house. Movement runs throughout the composition - there is not a single straight line, not a flat wash of colour. The sudden accents of colour/tone/drawing pick up the movement of the composition. The drawing itself is part soft pencil, part brush drawing in colour, here sketchy, there emphatic. All the elements are worked together: form and content have been reconciled, unity combined with movement."

Finally, Albert Herbert was another artist driven by a number of (artistically) unfashionable desires. He had a drive to make images and tell stories, to make accessible art, "paintings that are more public and easier to understand." Coupled with these drives was a concern with revealing the inner world, the 'marvellous', feelings, and through these, the collective mind.

His reconciliation of these disparate drives involved learning to see and paint as children do. "I learned to draw again as if from the beginning, drawing what I felt and knew rather than what it looked like." He also restricted himself to depictions of Biblical events and stories. These he treated as "symbols, metaphors, revealing the 'marvellous'". Religion he saw as revealing not just the inner world but also the collective mind.

His method of creating added a further level of reconciliation to his work. He explained that a painting usually started with some idea that could be put into words but that when he began to paint he became fully involved in "the struggle to harmonise shapes, colours and textures". This could go on for several months with the original idea becoming lost in the paint only to re-emerge as something quite different. In this way he both drew his images from his subconscious and integrated them into the wholeness of the painting.

His approach tallied with that of another of his peers, Ken Kiff. Kiff, too, argued that his subconscious images only achieved meaning through the process of shaping and forming the painting. The painting, as a whole, had to be discovered, by the artist, bit by bit. This had to happen in order "for the thing to really grow together and be significantly all part of the same growing thing". In this growth there could be a sense of peace, completeness and wholeness despite the presence, at times, of disturbing imagery.


Cecil Collins, too, came to use a similar approach to a united development of image and form. He called this process the Matrix. Collins' use of the Matrix involved the following; he would choose two complementary colours, then, with his eyes shut he would paint a number of brush strokes. He would then open his eyes and consider the marks on the paper or canvas. As he looked images would suggest themselves and he would select and paint the one that he wished to impose as the predominate image. The point of the Matrix was to "penetrate deeper into the creative imagination so that it is that which speaks to the artist and not the shallower levels of the mind ... The Matrix ... stands for all the hidden desires of the soul".

As a result of this approach the work of these artists can be understood at a variety of different levels. Herbert has explained this by saying that "when people ask what my paintings mean I find I reply according to who they are. If a christian asks about them I reply using christian words. If I sense they won't understand that, I can speak about the story in psychological terms, Jungian. Or I can speak as if it is an abstract painting."

There is an immediacy about his work that accords with the desire to be accessible and is the result of the combination of recognisable, childlike imagery with a vibrancy and thrusting to the use of colour and construction. Initial reactions draw the viewer into a more complex and creative relationship with the painting where we may read in meanings that make sense to us. Herbert felt that paintings are like mirrors, "they reflect something of what is already in the viewers' mind". In this way we return to the collective mind, universal experiences of the divine to which all people can relate.

These universal experiences, Herbert believed, cannot be better expressed than through Biblical imagery:

"The painting of Moses climbing the mountain and speaking to God in a cloud, is about the incomprehensible; God is beyond understanding, it is the revelation coming from outside the tangible world of the senses. It cannot be put better than in this Biblical image of something hidden from you by a cloud; and you going upwards with great difficulty, away from the ordinary world, and looking for something hidden from you."

His last exhibitions introduced a new motif for this experience, that of going through a curtain or veil towards something unseen. Herbert saw human beings as being outside of the temple, outside of the presence of God, but able to perceive and move toward this presence. He increased his depictions of the intersections between ourselves and God. These came through our common origins (Eve gives birth to us all), and the person of Jesus (Baptism) together with his regular imagery of the burning bush, Jonah and the Whale, Elijah and the Raven, and the Nativity. This increase in connections was accompanied by a lightening and brightening of his colour which culminated in the somersault of joy that forms Happiness.

For Herbert, to arrive at this fusion of ideas and form took over thirty years, including years when he resisted his impulses and took his painting in other directions altogether. His fascination with Jonah may have been because he felt he too resisted his calling. If his earlier exhibitions centred on the struggles of obedience then the latter exhibitions celebrated the fruits.

Giles Auty, in writing of Norman Adams, noted that he belongs "to a relatively small tradition of painters whose outlook is positive. An affirmative vision such as his is especially rare in the modern art of the West, artists preferring to shelter more frequently behind masks of disillusionment and cynicism. Indeed, such negative views of life have the additional bonus of being perennially in fashion, the large black-humoured painting sharing something of the timeless chic of the little black dress." The tradition may be small yet it remains significant, if undervalued.

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Pierce Pettis - That Kind Of Love.

Greenbelt diary (3): a coda

I spent a pleasant part of the evening at the Veritasse tent where Veritasse Artisan and commission4mission member Harvey Bradley was helping on the stall and exhibiting his paintings.

While there I also spoke with Aidan Meller, the founder of Veritasse, who told me about the growth of the company in the UK and US. We also spoke about the artist John Reilly who has been seriously ill recently. It was good to hear that he is recovering and to find from the latest Veritasse Newsletter that he has begun painting again. By synchronicity or coincidence, my review of Reilly's book, The Painted Word, appears in the current edition of the Church Times, something I wasn't aware of at the time I spoke to Aidan.

I also met up with Tricia Hillas, with whom I trained at NTMTC, who was exploring ideas for art-related initiatives around the development of their church garden, something that we are also exploring at St John's Seven Kings. Again, there seemed some sychronicity about this and Tricia was pleased to hear a little about commission4mission.

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John Tavener - New Jerusalem (Upanishad Hymn).

Airbrushed from Art History? (6)

Vincent Van Gogh wrote that he wanted “to paint men and women with that something of the eternal which the halo used to symbolise, and which we seek to convey by the actual radiance and vibration of our colouring.”

This introduces a new means by which the spiritual is to be encountered in modern art. Those aspects of emotion, spirit and soul that previously had been conveyed by symbol are now to be found in colour and line alone. Van Gogh continues in this letter to his brother Theo:

“I am always in hope of making a discovery there [in the study of colour], to express the love of two lovers by the wedding of two complementary colours, the mingling and their opposition, the mysterious vibration of kindred tones. To express the thought of a brow by the radiance of a light tone against a sombre background.

To express hope by some star, the eagerness of a soul by a sunset radiance. Certainly there is no delusive realism in that, but isn’t it something that actually exists?”

Alan Bowness sums this up in Post-Impressionism when he writes that:

“... for Van Gogh deeper and more universal meanings emerged from his study of reality, by a process of association. In his colour and brushwork, he harnessed the effects which he found in his subjects to expressive ends, using certain colour relationships and patterns of natural forms as metaphors for emotional and religious experience, as in the Night Café, whose red-green contrasts were meant to express the ‘terrible passions of humanity’, and in his canvasses of the asylum garden and olive orchards of Saint Rémy.”

Robert Rosenblum in Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition sees Van Gogh as being engaged in “a Romantic search for a new kind of religion in the scrutiny of nature” and “perpetuating in his own art many metaphors of divinity that were first invented in the visionary landscapes of [Caspar David] Friedrich, [Philipp Otto] Runge, and [Samuel] Palmer.”

He notes, for instance:

“Van Gogh’s recurrent image of the sun as something almost sacred, a connotation that can often become explicit. Even in a thoroughly secular scene like that painted in Arles in June 1888 of a sower in a wheat field, the sun, blazing on the horizon, has an almost supernatural power. Its location, in exact centre and just over a high horizon, is that which, in earlier art, one might have associated with a symbolic representation of an omnipotent deity; and its form and colour, a pure disc of golden yellow from whose clearly incised circular periphery radiate symmetrically ordered spokes of golden light, suggest that this is, in effect, the pantheist’s equivalent of a golden halo.”

Contemporary visionary artist John Reilly frequently bases his works on a central circle (often, the sun) from which facets of colour emanate, like ripples on the surface of a stream. The painting’s imagery is then set within these facets, each figure or object being embedded in the overall patterning of the painting and related to the environmental whole that Reilly creates. By these means fragments of form and colour (the facets of the painting’s patterning) and the images that they contain are united to circle harmoniously around and within God, the central life and intelligence which is the light of the world. Reilly’s use of the sun as a central organising symbol in his work may well reflect the influence of Van Gogh.

Van Gogh wrote of needing something greater in his life, although he is clear that this is not God:

“Oh, my dear brother, sometimes I know so well what I want. I can do very well without God both in my life and in my painting, but I cannot, ill as I am, do without something which is greater than I, which is my life – the power to create.

And if, frustrated in the physical power, a man tries to create thoughts instead of children, he is still part of humanity.”

Such comments reveal a need for transcendence of or in ordinary life, even when standing outside of the framework of institutional Christian faith. So, Rosenblum writes that Van Gogh’s:

“... complaint about Émile Bernard’s Christ in the Garden of Olives – that it would be better simply to paint real olive trees – is a clear avowal not only of Van Gogh’s personal dilemma but of that of so many artists who inherited the problems of those Northern Romantics who tried to create, consciously or unconsciously, a religious sentiment in things observed that would be far more truthful to their personal experience of the supernatural than the perpetuation of traditional Christian iconography.”

James Elkins in On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art suggests five categories for contemporary religious art, one of which is art that sets out to create a new faith. Van Gogh could be an early example of such artists.

Although Van Gogh lost the ardent Christian faith of his youth, he nevertheless retained a love of Christ. To Émile Bernard he wrote:

“But the consolation of that saddening Bible which arouses our despair and our indignation – which distresses us once and for all because we are outraged by its pettiness and contagious folly – the consolation which is contained in it, like a kernel in a hard shell, in a bitter pulp, is Christ ... Christ alone – of all the philosophers, Magi, etc. – has affirmed, as a principal certainty, eternal life, the infinity of time, the nothingness of death, the necessity and the raison d’être of serenity and devotion. He lived serenely, as a greater artist than all artists, despising marble and clay as well as colour, working in living flesh. That is to say, this matchless artist, hardly to be conceived of by the obtuse instrument of our modern, nervous, stupefied brain, made neither statues nor pictures nor books, he loudly proclaimed that he made ... living men, immortals.”

Here Van Gogh connects himself to Christ through the work of creation; he brings thoughts to birth while Christ brings “living men, immortals” to birth. While Christ is so much greater - “a greater artist than all artists” – all artists are, therefore, connected with him through the act of creation.

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Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers - Vincent Van Gogh.

The Painted Word (2)

The Painted Word is a wonderful survey of the Biblical paintings that have been John Reilly's life’s work with the Biblical and other references included revealing both sources of inspiration and the reality that these paintings are explorations of meaning and not illustrations of the passages cited.

The book’s title could suggest illustration but needs, I think, to be understood in the sense that icons are written. Reilly's paintings work as contemporary icons opening windows onto the unity of the material, emotional, intellectual and spiritual that characterises life and our world in their fullest senses.

The most impressive aspect of his paintings is that the unitive vision which characterises his works is revealed through colour and form rather than by content. The imagery of each work is enmeshed in the patterns and harmonies that reveal the way in which all that is depicted is linked in the light emanating from the central source which symbolises God himself.

Examples of Reilly's work can be seen here and here.

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Paweł Łukaszewski - Kolęda Bóg Człowiek.

The Painted Word

The Veritasse Friends Newsletter has information on a new book entitled, The Painted Word - Paintings by John Reilly:

"Many people will be familiar with the paintings of John Reilly through exhibitions in cathedrals and churches, art centres and galleries throughout the south of England.

His subtle and jewel-like colours and his use of geometric patterning are immediately recognisable and captivating. Figures appear to be part of the pattern of the painting, yet stand out from it with grace and eloquence. His works, painted in oils, depict a modern take on the timeless stories of the Old and New Testaments. The paintings give the Bible themes a new relevance for today's world.

The works reproduced in the book are A4 size and in full colour. They are accompanied by the Bible passages that inspired them.

The book is published by Cross Publishing at £19.95 and is available in most Isle of Wight book shops or directly from John Reilly. Those wishing to have the book sent to them will pay an additional £2 in postage, for UK addresses. For further details, email:
jilljohnreilly@uwclub.net."


I first came across Reilly's work many years ago while on holiday in the Isle of Wight when I saw some prints of his paintings and a book of his wife Jill's poetry in a local shop. I was so impressed with his work that I found where he lived and went to visit on spec. He was kind enough to welcome me and show me some of his works from that period.

What I loved about his work then and still love now is his unitive vision. Using lessons, it seems to me, learnt from Orphism and Rayonism he constructs patterns of rippling rays emanating from a central source of light. Within this structure he sets objects and figures composed of abstract shapes and colours that are indicative of their spiritual qualities. So, for example, a rock-like formation, an animal, a human figure and a plant shape can all be held together, underpinned, in eternal circulation by the central point, which may be seen both as a pictorial device structuring a work of beauty and as symbolic of God.

In Universal Power - The Fourth Day of Creation (one of the prints I initially purchased) he shows us a snapshot of creation, of the first reconciliation of shape and form. As abstract shapes spiral out from the central point they again coalesce into those same fundamental, elemental shapes of bird, plant and human life.

Reilly has written of his work:

"My paintings are not concerned with the surface appearance of people or things but try to express something of the fundamental spiritual reality behind this surface appearance. I try to express in visible form the oneness and unity of this invisible power, binding all things into one whole."

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Evan Dando - Frying Pan.

Greenbelt diary (2) & Windows on the world (14)

Greenbelt, 2008

Day 2 for me began with an interlude in the form of a search for works by the artist Greg Tricker. I first came across Tricker's work in Images of Earth and Spirit: A "Resurgence" Art Anthology and knew that he has been involved with the Ruskin Mill College at Nailsworth. Through the kindness of Diana and Peter Crook during Greenbelt we were staying in the picturesque village of Uley which is just down the road from Nailsworth. So I headed off early in the morning to see what I could find of Tricker's work.

My quick detour to Ruskin Mill failed to uncover any definitive examplesof Tricker's work, although I saw a carving of an angel that looked as though it could well have been his work and did establish that he lives in the town. On one occasion in the past I have cold called an artist - the very wonderful John Reilly on the Isle of Wight - but on this occasion didn't have the time to do so as I wanted to arrive at Greenbelt in time to hear Chris Dingle's talk on the faith and spirituality of Olivier Messiaen.

Dingle is the author of The Life of Messiaen and gave a worthwhile summary of Messiaen's life that highlighted pieces to listen to beyond the well known Quartet for the End of Time. Another thing that Greenbelt is great for is broadening knowledge of the large number of artists expressing spirituality in their work and, in the case of a massive body of work like that of Messiaen's, highlighting some accessible ways in.

My daughters arrived and we listened to a great set by Ed Sheeran; so good that Emma bought his cd. Following Ed's set we mooched around the site catching up with other familiar faces as we did so. Michelle Gillam-Hull's stall was one place where we stopped, shopped and caught up. I also introduced myself to Aidan Mellor, the impresario responsible for Veritasse. I am a Veritasse artisan and my artwork can be found on their website, so it was good to meet the man responsible and to hear about their expansion with a new gallery opening in Maidenhead and increasing use being made of the download facility on their website.

At the Artist's Forum I listened to Phill Hopkins speak about his onsite installation Seven Drunken Nights and performance piece Wine & Beer/Oak & Bread. The evening saw more shuttling between mainstage and the Performance Cafe to take in the likes of Julie Lee, Helen J. Hicks and Cathy Burton. I made a detour to Underground to catch the electro-rock of This Morning Call before settling down to hear the whole of Edwina Hayes' set at the Performance Cafe. With her engaging personality and beautiful voice, this was a real treat. Having enjoyed the Hummingbird album on which she sings with Cathy Burton and Amy Wadge I was anticipating something special and wasn't disappointed. A great conclusion to a full day.

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Edwina Hayes - Pour Me A Drink.