Seeing is Receiving: The art of contemplation (9)

Conclusion - Receiving

This book has sought to us into silence because silence is the place of seeing and seeing is receiving. As Van Morrison sang in ‘Summertime in England’ when we go through the veil or cross the threshold into silence it’s no longer about why’s and wherefore’s, questions and answers, but is simply about being, about what is. In the stillness, in the silence, in contemplation, is where we see God, creation, others and ourselves, receiving their essence and blessing. We enter a place that is no longer about us - our needs, our questions, our intercessions – but instead is about the other, seeing and receiving what is around and outside of us, but offered to us.

That is where the different journeys of this book wish to take us. The 7 S’s are practices shared by art and contemplative prayer which seek to lead us into seeing. My sabbatical art pilgrimage was to churches that sought to find contemporary expressions of spirituality in order to assist worshippers and visitors in either beginning or deepening this journey. As with Betty Spackman’s A Creature Chronicle there is circularity to these journeys which, because they end in the sparking of new creativity through the Holy Spirit, generate new works that can begin the cycle for us and for others all over again.

Rowan Williams' book Silence and Honey Cakes: The Wisdom of the Desert takes its title from a story about two of the Desert Fathers:

‘… two large boats floating on the river were shown to him. In one of them sat Abba Arsenius and the Holy Spirit of God in complete silence. And in the other boat was Abba Moses, with the angels of God; they were all eating honey cakes.’[i]

A man visits the desert fathers and experiences two approaches to spirituality. One involves abstinence, particularly from speech (silence), while the other involves an open welcome, enjoyment of company and the eating of honey cakes. The man expresses a preference for the latter, which leads another to question how such different paths to God can exist. He then receives a vision in which God accepts both.

Rowan Williams explores this story in terms of our different vocations. I would like to think about it in terms of the two different ways to God that the story juxtaposes.

In one we find God in the world around of us - the people, places, creatures and creations. In addition we use these things as visual or lingual images which reveal aspects of God to us. This is an affirmative way based on the understanding that God's creation is good and that something of the creator can be seen in the creation. This is a way of abundance and of the Arts, where multiple images and experiences build up a composite picture of God. This is the way of Abba Moses in the boat together with honey cakes and the angels of God.

The other way is visualised by Abba Arsenius who is silent in his boat with the Holy Spirit of God. This is the way of abstinence which recognises the inadequacy of every image and word and creature and creation to show or tell us about God. God is always more than any way of describing or imaging him and, therefore, the best way to experience God as is, is to dispense with words and images altogether and go by way of silence and darkness. As a result, this way of experiencing God is known as the negative way or also, sometimes, as the dark night of the soul. While the way of abundance is more easily and readily reflected in the Arts, the Arts can and do engage also with the negative way, as is evidenced by the fact that the phrase ‘dark night of the soul’ derives from a poem by St John of the Cross.

Both ways lead to God, but, as they are polar opposites, they approach God by different routes and therefore we may, at times, have to choose between them and, if we were to follow either to their conclusion, we would have to make an ultimate choice, as Abba's Arsenius and Moses seem in the story to have done. However, it is also possible to combine aspects of both approaches or to follow one way rather than the other at different seasons in our lives.

My thinking about these two ways to God has been informed by that of the poet, dramatist and novelist Charles Williams. His views on these two ways have been summarised as follows:

‘The Way of Affirmation consists in recognizing the immanence of God in all things, and says that appreciation of whom and what God has made may lead us to appreciation of Himself. The Way of Rejection concentrates on the transcendence of God, the recognition that God is never fully contained in His creation; it says that we must renounce all lesser images if we would apprehend His. These two Ways have been expressed by the paradox "This also is Thou; neither is this Thou," and tend generally to illustrate, respectively, Catholic or Protestant thought in their attitudes toward the use of images.

While Williams insists that a complement of both these Ways is necessary to the life of every Christian, and that none of us can walk the Kingdom's narrow road by only affirming or only rejecting ... yet he contends that Christians are usually called primarily to one Way or the other.’ [ii]

While both these ways are ways to God, they are also ways to understanding ourselves; in itself a necessary part of our journey towards God. The greatest commandment is to love God and to love our neighbour as ourselves. Rowan Williams connects these things when he writes that the reason why ‘the desert monks and nuns valued self-awareness’ was that to ‘be a real agent for God to connect with [our] neighbour … each of us needs to know the specific truth about himself or herself.’[iii]

These two different ways to God that we have been considering provide, as you would expect, different ways in which to encounter and understand ourselves. On the Affirmative Way, the pre-eminent metaphor may be that of light. Light enables us to see all that is around us. As a result, we can then also perceive ourselves. When we look around us and see other people, creatures and objects, we can undertake an exercise in comparing and contrasting; thinking to ourselves I’m similar to this and I’m different from that. This can take us right back to the creation stories in Genesis and, in particular, that story of Adam naming the animals. As we have reflected, names in ancient culture were symbols of the essence of the thing named; so, Adam looked at each creature before him seeing its essence and named that characteristic. As he did so, he was himself looking for a helpmate. When he had named all the animals he had still not found his helpmate. The animals were too different to him to fulfil that role but, having encountered difference, he was then immediately able to recognise his similarity to Eve and realise that they were intended to be helpmates for each other.

These thoughts connect with the South African word ‘Ubuntu’, which essentially means ‘I am because you are’, and the phrase ‘I-Thou’ explored by the philosopher Martin Buber, who wrote about ‘the I-Thou relationship, where our human relationships can only be truly authentic when we open ourselves fully to the other and encounter them as whole and unique persons.’ St Anthony the Great spoke about dependency being at the heart of community and our belonging to one another when he said that ‘Our life and our death is with our neighbour’[iv] and, as a result Rowan Williams states that ‘only in the relations we have with one another can the love and mercy of God appear and become effective.’[v]

On the Negative Way, the pre-eminent metaphor for knowing ourselves may be that of silence. In silence, we hear the working of our own minds, we hear our self-justification and unmask our need to defend our territory, establish our position, and defend our ego. As Rowan Williams states, ‘Our words help to strengthen the illusions with which we surround, protect and comfort ourselves; without silence, we shan’t get any closer to knowing who we are before God.’ Our ‘sense of the authentically human, depends and can only depend on the quality of our silence – the need to let go of words in certain ways, that willingness to occupy a space before God which is not a defended territory, defended against God or against anyone else. And because we occupy a space that isn’t a defended territory, it is space both for God and for each other. We are moving beyond our fascination, our hypnosis by the ideas of choice and individuality as conceived in the modern world, moving towards the possibility of a human life characterised by consistent instinctive responsiveness to the truth, acquiring an instinctive taste for truth. A taste for truth, that’s to say an appetite for what is real, so strong that it allows us constantly to keep ourselves in question, under scrutiny, not in an obsessional way but just going on asking, ‘Who is being served here? The ego or the truth?’[vi]

Which boat are we sitting in? In which would we wish to sit? Are our personalities fundamentally compatible with sharing silence or honey cakes? Have we found ways to combine the affirmative and the negative ways or to move between the two at different times and seasons of our lives?

Both are routes to the same place; that place where we encounter God, creation, others and ourselves as each actually is and only for the sake of enjoying each as each is. If we have followed the negative way that will have been achieved by the stripping away of all the instrumental reasons we may have had for encounter. If we have followed the affirmative way that will be because the never-ceasing depth and richness of encounter will have brought us a place of simple and genuine awe and wonder.

Lakwena Maciver’s affirmative artistic practice involves distilling ideas and encapsulating them in a single evocative phrase surrounded by kaleidoscopic patterns and bold colours. Her phrases are painted prayers and meditations, her adornments are signifiers assigning value and glory, her content is future oriented; looking for a future that is ‘higher, deeper, fuller, sweeter, older, newer, bolder, brighter and more glorious.’ This can be clearly seen in the phrases she chooses and uses which include: ‘Looking For A Brighter Day’, ‘Nothing Can Separate Us’, ‘Ever After’, ‘Imagine Eternity’, ‘I Remember Paradise’, ‘Just Passing Through’, ‘The Future’s Gold’, ‘Still I Rise’, ‘Raise Your Hopes’, ‘Your Love Keeps Lifting me Higher’, ‘The Highest Love’, ‘The Best Is Yet To Come’.

The story of her art began with an invitation to paint a mural for a church in Brazil. She chose a verse from the Bible - 'You've turned my wailing into dancing, You’ve taken away my clothes of sadness and clothed me with joy' – painted it on a wall in Portuguese and created patterns around it. It was all very instinctive, but the style and content of her work were essentially formed through that project. The Bible is key for her; she reads it regularly, describes it as her food, and meditates on its words of truth and encouragement. Her creativity begins with prayer, music, meditation, writing, and she then paints from that place.

She says that all her work ‘is really one whole body of work that leads on from one piece to another.’ It began with the book ‘Echoes of Eden’, which talks about the ‘idea of paradise’ and ‘how it pops up in a lot of cultures’. All of her work has flowed, therefore, from the idea of heaven; it’s about the future and our yearning and longing for paradise.

‘Ever After’, a mural in downtown Las Vegas created for the street art festival scene opening up there, has that eternity describing phrase in block letters and rainbow colours set on a future-oriented tyre track vector graphic surrounded by connecting curves of colour. ‘Imagine Eternity’ is a work from the ‘I Remember Paradise’ exhibition at the Papillion Gallery which followed the creation of murals in Miami and Las Vegas. ‘Imagine Eternity’ floats the dream of Paradise over a kaleidoscope which is surrounded again by colour curves topped and tailed with a graphic of a long and winding road. The kaleidoscope draws the eye to a central eternal entry point.

She sees God in the colours of heaven – ‘fluorescent pink and gold and glitter and all of those neon textures’ – making her work a very contemporary expression of worship and thanks and praise. She quotes Calvin Seerveld who said it’s important to ‘fire your art until it emits sparks that warm, or burn, those it reaches.’ The challenge and comfort of her work is in its positivity with rainbow colours of hope and the energy of its patterns and textures.

Lakwena says she sees her work and responsibility as an artist in the terms articulated by Seerveld. As such, the future orientation of her work is a lot deeper than just positivity; just saying things are good or are going to get better. Ultimately, this is work that is rooted both in an Afro-futuristic aesthetic and a Messianic ideology, the idea that there is a Saviour and a kingdom yet to come. As a result, there is a future that’s bigger than the past, the vision of which enables us to live God’s future now.

So, we remind ourselves that in heaven there will be nothing to fix, nothing to solve, and therefore no work to be done. In heaven there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things will have passed away. In heaven there will be nothing we can do for others, because God will have done everything for us. So, what will there be to do? Heaven is all about our relationships; being with God, with ourselves, with others, and with creation. Heaven is all about receiving from those relationships and enjoying those relationships to the full for what they are.

In Philippians 3 we are told to imitate those who set their minds on heavenly things because our citizenship is in heaven. Citizenship is all about belonging to a particular community together with all the other members of that community. In relation to heaven, it is about being in relationship with God’s people. So, if heaven is about anything at all, it is about enjoying, exploring and receiving through relationships.

Jesus wants us to prepare for heaven. The writer to the Philippians wants us to set our minds on our citizenship in heaven. They call us to live God’s future now, to anticipate what heaven will be like in the here and now, in the present. We do that by prioritising relationships – prioritising our being with God, being with ourselves, being with others and being with creation now. We prioritise relationship by being with, by entering a space in which we can receive what others are.

Contemplative prayer based on the art of looking and seeing puts us in that place where we can receive and enjoy God in a state of not having, not seeing, not knowing, not grasping; God given to us for God’s sake alone, the fullness of God’s being, the abundance of life, the secret of the world’s power of meaning.

Simone Weil wrote that in order ‘to receive in its naked truth’ the object which is to penetrate our mind, ‘our thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything’ and that such ‘absolute unmixed attention is prayer.’[vii] When we are in that state, seeing is receiving and to see is this way ‘is poetry, prophecy, and religion – all in one.’[viii]

Look, look, see. Look, look, see.
Be still, still, see. Look long,
look longingly, look lovingly, look deep.
Look slow, look silently, attending.
Stay, sustained, steady, steadfast.
Look, look, see. Surrender. Share.
Prayer. Poetry. Art. Life. Reveal.
Revelation. Sight. Insight. See.


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


[i] R. Williams, Silence and Honey Cakes: The Wisdom of the Desert, Lion Books, 2004, p.42

[ii] ‘The Nature of the City: Visions of the Kingdom and its Saints in Charles Williams All Hallows' Eve’, A.S. Anderson, in Mythlore, Vol. 15, No. 3 (57) (Spring 1989), p.19

[iii] R. Williams, Silence and Honey Cakes: The Wisdom of the Desert, Lion Books, 2004

[iv] https://sayingsoftheorthodoxfathers.com/2017/09/12/our-life-and-death-is-with-our-neighbour-abba-anthony-the-great/ 

[v] R. Williams, Silence and Honey Cakes: The Wisdom of the Desert, Lion Books, 2004

[vi] R. Williams, Silence and Honey Cakes: The Wisdom of the Desert, Lion Books, 2004

[vii] S. Weil, Gravity and Grace, Routledge, 2004, p. 117

[viii] J. Ruskin, Modern Painters, III, pt. 4, ch. 16 (Knopf, 1794)


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Hildegard von Bingen - Canticles Of Ecstasy.

Seeing us all as bearers of the divine image

In speaking about his Head over Heels series Gerald Folkerts writes; “The homeless, the poor, the sick, the young, the age – the very ones whom we often tend to ignore, or at least overlook – their stories seemed worth telling. Such stories are often difficult to hear … Yet these are often the stories that need to be heard most desperately. … why not focus on the face and the feet? They might reveal a great deal about the journey of one’s life, the road on which one has travelled.”

In Imago's E Magazine we read: 'The people found in these paintings are people that the artist took time to get to know. The subjects are burdened in one way or another but the artist depicts them possessing grace and dignity. These important human traits also characterized the artist. He has carried out his artistic calling, deeply shaped by his faith. His work is that of a truth-teller and in the midst of the difficulties of life his faith-ful artist’s eye discerns threads of hope. His work nurtures the human spirit and calls us to view the world and others in it through a lens of justice and compassion, seeing us all as bearers of the divine image.'

Calvin Seerveld said, “Folkerts has the wisdom to let his Christian faith subtly percolate in the spirit of his painterly art by showing compassion for the problematic figures he treats.”

Similarly, on her website Helen Morley quotes the Dutch priest and author Henri J.M. Nouwen who observed: ‘In this crazy world, there’s an enormous distinction between good times and bad, between sorrow and joy. But in the eyes of God, they’re never separated. Where there is pain, there is healing. Where there is mourning, there is dancing. Where there is poverty, there is the kingdom.’

Morley explains that her work is informed by police mugshot images of addicts but they become at the end, autobiographical: 'I see in them our brokenness and need, which invites in either death or Grace. My practice involves developing the right ‘feel’ which is created with action and attitude. Through drawing, music, dance and seeking the intuitive signals of truth, I paint with joy and gesture: whole glooping armfuls of it. In this way I achieve a surrender, and make things I did not know I could do.'

She writes: 'My proposal is that when an artist makes work using their intuition throughout, then they achieve a kind of loving and tender detachment from the piece, a suspension of expectation of a fixed outcome. As this process unfolds, there is opportunity and room for Grace to become evident or operational and this is generational, evolutionary. The end result is a painting that has the potential to be far more than decorative: it can be transcendent.'

Morley is part of the Creative Recovery group, a charitable organisation set up by four people in recovery from alcoholism, drug addiction and eating disorders. Their belief is that 'creativity challenges us to try new things, brings wellbeing, and helps us be open to change.' They provide a rolling programme of different things to try and encourage members to share their creative skills. They state, 'We do not believe that arts and crafts or ‘wellbeing’ activities alone can get us clean, but being with other people trying to get well, sharing in a positive community and making something practical is beneficial as we grow in recovery together.'

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King Crimson - Peace - An Ending.

Speaking in a relevant way about an authentic Christian framework

Michael Gough 'believes the language used in the Christian context is inherent to the subculture, but doesn't translate well in the mainstream: "Our challenge always to our faith-based clients is to make them think about what the mainstream culture is. We think about how we can lift that from the assumptions of a Christian subculture, turning that into something meaningful, engaging and relevant to the mainstream culture."

For Sparks, it's all about helping clients see that opportunity to speak in a relevant way about an authentic Christian framework, but in a language that is engaging to a wider audience.

And they've had a lot of experience, working with organisations such as Christian Aid and OMF, as well as singer Duke Special. But their work is diverse, stretching to financial companies, the legal sector and entertainment.'

In an interview published in the Evangelical Alliance's Idea magazine, he says:

"The problem is the Church has an assumption about its culture, which sometimes gets in the way about people engaging and meeting with the true biblical expression of who Christ is. Lots of language we use in a church context is tied exclusively to this culture – it has little meaning outside."

I think the more we can do to help people outside of the Church to engage with the biblical text, the more we move away from this subcultural context and engage with the truth of the gospel."

Gough says that the early days of Sparks Studio were heavily influenced by the writings of Calvin Seerveld with his essay, 'The Freedom and the Responsibility of the Artist', acting as Sparks' manifesto.

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Duke Special - Stargazers Of The World Unite.

Airbrushed from Art History: Henk Krijger

Henk Krijger was part of two significant art networks:

"Krijger was not alone in his criticisms of the Reformed tradition. During the summer of 1935 he met the christian poet Hein de Bruin. This man, too, felt a burden on his heart for the christian community of which he was a member. This community choked the life out its artistic members with theological debate and with demands for dogmatic orthodoxy. These two men were not alone as christian artists. They in turn were part of a larger group, a group of christian writers, W.G. van der Hulst, Anne de Vries, and Jan H. de Groot. Since the early nineteen hundreds there had been a christian writers association. Within this group there was much debate about the nature of christian art, the possibility of a christian artistic style, and the relationship between the christian artist, the church, and the world. Those who maintained the antithesis [that Christians were to cultivate a lifestyle of their own] said there should be a christian style and, of course, those who disagreed claimed otherwise ...

Following the war Krijger joined the christian writers association. As member of the association he wrote short stories, reviews of art exhibitions and essays for their journal, Ontmoeting. He also published a novel entitled De Witte Duiven. in the visual arts he worked freelance and as a bookdesigner. As bookdesigner he won several prizes for his outstanding work."

"September 1969 the Institute for Christian Art opened in Chicago, Illinois not as an art school but as an organisation that brought trained or accomplished artists together under a master-artist to work christianly in the arts. This arrangement was modelled along the lines of a medieval guild. It was thought that a workshop would facilitate a communal effort in the arts which was considered vital if a christian artistic presence was to be attained in a predominantly secular culture ...

When Henk Krijger was approached by Calvin Seerveld and Mary Steenland, he ... wanted to do 'free art,' unencumbered by patrons and the limits of commissions. The Institute of Christian Art offered [this] opportunity ...

Speaking out of his Dutch Calvinist upbringing, Henk Krijger believed that art was done in the service of God and His Kingdom, but he was not dogmatic about its content. It certainly was not limited to scenes from the Bible nor was it to be primarily dogmatically correct. It was to be good art; art that was informed by the formal elements and principles that govern the production of art. Therefore, according to Krijger, the christian artist was to be a competent craftsman; a craftsman who did not just copy the natural world (for that was plagiarizing God's work) but who created works of imagination."

"In the summer 1971 the Institute of Christian Art moved ... to downtown Toronto, Canada. A core of young artists moved with Henk to studios set up in a basement on Richmond Street, and with the indefatigable efforts of Willem Hart they became Patmos Workshop and Gallery ... [Krijger] followed up the major painting of The Annunciation (1971) with other works truly worthy of the name "Patmos" - visionary, troubled, complicatedly in the world but not of it."

"Krijger's art making demonstrates specific directives helpful for developing young artists. First, as a pre-war modern man, Krijger understood and worked within his location in history. His choice of a modern expressionistic form provided the format for his visual discussion of creation. Second, a play of the imagination permeates Krijger's artistry. His emphasis upon the intuitive and the emotive allowed his imagination to inventively conceive imagery as we observe, for example, in the works That night the moon was completely different (1970) and the Apocalyptic fluteplayer (1971). And third, he understood well the struggle of the Christian who saw his calling to be that of artist. He served God in his art making. Tragically, he enjoyed neither the strong support of his christian community nor the support of those in his contemporary artistic environment."

(Jan De Bree, Calvin Seervald and Mary Leigh Morbey in Hommage á Senggih: A Retrospective of Henk Krijger in North America)

Artists exhibiting at the Patmos Gallery have included: Larry Ackerman, David Alexander, Nancy de Boni, Anne Boyle, Klaas Hart, Willem Hart, Janis Pozzi-Johnson, Edward Kellogg, Edward Knippers, Jake Mol, Chris Stoffel Overvoorde, Wayne Peterson, Theodore Prescott, Jack S. Vander Wal.

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Bill Fay - Be Not So Fearful.

Artists valued by theologians

I've recently been reading and re-reading several theologians who write about theological aesthetics. It's interesting to note those artists that they view as having synergies with their own work. I've posted previously about Paul Tillich and Expressionism and John Dillenberger and Abstract Expressionism but these theologians - Hans Urs von Balthasar, Calvin Seerveld and Cecilia González-Andrieu - are rather more eclectic, often valuing the work of artists without significant mainstream reputations.

Aidan Nichols writes that "Balthasar's beau idéal of a Church artist was the Swiss Hans Stocker" who he claimed "as representative of a 'new Catholic art in German Switzerland'." For Balthasar, "Stocker represented a pleasing contrast to the many artists claiming to serve the Church yet producing 'kitsch' ... Stocker would do full justice to the Kingdom of the Son in its redemptive economy; to the communion of saints; to the Church, her sacraments, her functions. Balthasar sees as paradigmatic Stocker's Sankt Gallen fresco of the open Heart of Christ with, arranged around it, scenes of the Old and New Covenants, the Angels, and the 'weeping Key-bearer, Peter'. This extended image testifies to an experience of the Heilskosmos, the 'world of salvation', that is central, not peripheral, and the will and capacity to represent it in an original way."

Calvin Seerveld has said of Gerald Folkerts that he "has the wisdom to let his Christian faith subtly percolate in the spirit of his painterly art by showing compassion for the problematic figures he treats": "Self-portrait shows Folkerts himself startled by the viewer's gaze, pounding a nail into the wrist of Christ on the cross lying on the ground. Curled lip, furtive eyes, aggressive hammer, tensed body, all under churning nest of vipers - it is a well-drawn almost melodramatic drawing of the guilt that lodges in the best of us."

"The engravings and paintings of Georges Rouault reinvest the Byzantine tradition with a sombre, stained-glass seriousness that is definitely biblical in its horror of modern dehumanising atrocities, and is truly compassionate in composition, colour, and gritty style that bespeaks Christian art, whether the topic be kings, prostitutes, or Jesus Christ's passion. The Nobel Prize winner for poetry in 1945, Gabriela Mistral of Chile, updates a Franciscan holiness and gives it a poignant, singing voice that casts haloes of comfort around girlish hopes, forgotten prisoners, and even the nest of birds. Canadian painter William Kurelek weds a love for the Bruegel world of low life with a Roman Catholic slant on the poverty of success gained without the presence of the cross; his mark of pristine folk happiness is normally touched by an existential sense of nuclear war apocalypse, so the careful observer can never rest easy. Significant about such varied Christian art born out of Catholic sensitivities today is its unchurchy, world-wide, sorrow-sensitive aura.

A more hidden, 'autonomous', or even tangential expression of biblical faith in art of the twentieth century deserves mention: the sculpture of German Ernst Barlach articulates with rough austerity a forceful cry in wood and metal for reconciliation with God and neighbour that so incurred the anger of the Nazi government it destroyed much of the work. The New York Jew Abraham Rattner not only conceived an enormous stained-glass wall of apocalyptic emblems for a major Chicago synagogue but also grappled time and again in painting with the crucifixion of Christ, trying to exorcise both Golgotha and Auschwitz, as it were, from Jewish experience. Gabriel García Márquez of Colombia, 1982 Nobel prize winner for fiction, exposes small-town political corruption in South America with fantastic horizons that juxtapose real angels, supernatural forces, and the comic foibles of weak people.

The black spiritual song of American Civil War days takes on new evangelical fervour in the melodies and lyrics of Mahalia Jackson, whose simple Baptist roots act prophetically through the cascades of rhythmic beat and glorious sound. The paintings, prints and constructions of Henk Krijger body forth reminiscences of both Bauhaus and German expressionism muted and melded into strong, restfully honed shapes and expertly chosen colours that reveal artistry integrated by the Reformation perspective that ordinary life is a vocation to be lived directly before God and to be redeemed while sharing sadness, humour, and hope." (In The Fields of the Lord)

In Bridge to Wonder Cecilia González-Andrieu holds up as exemplars of the approaches she articulates the founder of modern Chicano theatre and film Luiz Valdés, the poet-playwright Federico García Lorca and the artists John August Swanson and Sergio Gomez.

La Pastorela, which González-Andrieu describes in the book, is performed biannually by El Teatro Campesino during the Christmas holidays, alternating with La Virgen del Tepeyac, in the historic Mission of San Juan Bautista, established in 1797. Pastorelas, or Shepherds Plays, originated in medieval Europe as religious dramas and were later brought to the new world and Alta California by the Spanish missionaries. La Pastorela recreates the long trek of those first pastores to the holy site of the Nativity.

González-Andrieu argues in Bridge to Wonder that the: "possibility of a religious reading of Mariana Pineda has been generally disallowed by Lorca scholars precisely because of political ideologies bent on bifurcating her self-sacrifice from her religious faith. Such an evasion of the complexity of Lorca's work continues even in the face of the playwright's own emphasis of the heroine's Christian identity."

"Even though his works are part of art collections from the Vatican to the Smithsonian, John August Swanson (American, b. 1938) routinely admits to feeling like an amateur, even after four decades as an artist. In one of his early works, the beautifully rendered visual story Inventor, he summarizes the work of the artist and the humility he feels every time he works. The eight panels present an artist, as the newspaper headline announces, who claims to have invented a machine that transforms junk into beauty. Juxtaposed between this claim and the last panel, Swanson presents the young inventor working and draws the beauty that emerges as swirling colors, spheres, concentric circles, and stars. The last panel reports, this time through an old radio, that “an amateur is someone who doesn’t know something can’t be done, so he does it.” ... In Inventor ... Swanson calls into question the image of artists as geniuses and of art as an elite pursuit." (Bridge to Wonder)


González-Andrieu has written that "Gomez's works also act like modern icons opening windows and doors into the depths of Spirit, where death never has the last word and the sacred beckons. In his passionate and passion-making art Sergio Gomez tells a community's story, raises a cry of pain, mediates a vision of hope, and points with care and reverence toward that eternal Other whose love the very beauty of these works brings into relationship with a thankful world."


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Mahalia Jackson - How I Got Over.

Print exhibition

Peter S Smith has an exhibition of prints at the Bridewell Theatre Bar Gallery which includes prints by students from the wood engraving print workshop that Peter teaches at St Bride.
Peter exhibits his paintings and prints in the UK and overseas with work in public and private collections, including Tate Britain and the Ashmolean Oxford, as well as teaching workshops in the visual arts. He is a Member of the Society of Wood Engravers and an Associate Member of the Royal Society of Painter/Printmakers.

In September 2006, Piquant Editions published a book about his printmaking called “The way I see it….” with an introductory essay by Calvin Seerveld.

Last year Peter was commissioned by St John's Leytonstone for a print to celebrate the completed restoration of the church. This print now features on the Art Trail for the Barking Episcopal Area and Peter held a small exhibition of prints and gave an art talk at the church as part of the Barking Episcopal Area Art Festival.

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Jim White - Chase The Dark Away.