Between: turner

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Tuesday, 7 April 2026

Artlyst: The Art Diary April 2026

The April 2026 Art Diary examines several exhibitions related to spirituality. Kettle’s Yard recently commissioned an essay exploring their collection through the lens of spirituality, while an exhibition at ICA LA is currently examining art as a conduit to the spiritual. Performances and exhibitions involving Maurizio Cattelan, El Greco, William Blake, Henri Matisse and Lillian Delevoryas, among others, explore related themes.

Exhibitions by Mirna Bamieh and Theaster Gates engage with themes of discrimination, while several other exhibitions and a sculpture unveiling explore aspects of our relationship with our environment. These include ‘Gainsborough, Turner and Constable’, a Constable 250 exhibition at Gainsborough’s House that explores the emergence of landscape painting in Britain, led by three of its greatest exponents.

My other pieces for Artlyst are:

Interviews -

Monthly diary articles -

Articles/Reviews -

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Joseph Arthur - The Family.

Thursday, 15 January 2026

Seen and Unseen - Turner and Constable: storms, salvation and the sublime

My latest article for Seen and Unseen is 'Turner and Constable: storms, salvation and the sublime' in which I discuss how Tate Britain reveals how rival visions shaped art and spirit:

'Despite the differences of style, focus and experience, these images – each of which are to be found in ‘Turner & Constable: Rivals & Originals’ - are linked by the story of Noah and the Flood. Turner depicts the flood as judgement and the covenant that followed as more broadly salvific by the inclusion of Moses and the brazen serpent which, by implication, also includes Christ. Constable recalls the same story through the imagery of the rainbow, which reminds us of God’s promise that, whatever storms we face, God will never again flood the earth.

John Ruskin, the great champion of Turner’s work in his own day and time, encouraged viewers to ‘let each exertion of [Turner’s] mighty mind be both hymn and prophecy – adoration to the Deity – revelation to mankind’. The significance of Constable’s faith in his work has only been recognised much more recently through the work of Richard Humphreys, David Thistlethwaite, and Bendor Grosvenor. The latter describes Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows as ‘an emphatic demonstration of the religious sublime’. Constable commended the understanding that we are ‘endowed with minds capable of comprehending the “beauty and sublimity of the material world” only as the means of leading us to religious sentiment’. With these images, that is what Turner and Constable both achieve.'

My first article for Seen and Unseen was 'Life is more important than art' which reviews the themes of recent art exhibitions that tackle life’s big questions and the roles creators take.

My second article 'Corinne Bailey Rae’s energised and anguished creative journey' explores inspirations in Detroit, Leeds and Ethiopia for Corinne Bailey Rae’s latest album, Black Rainbows, which is an atlas of capacious faith.

My third article was an interview with musician and priest Rev Simpkins in which we discussed how music is an expression of humanity and his faith.

My fourth article was a guide to the Christmas season’s art, past and present. Traditionally at this time of year “great art comes tumbling through your letterbox” so, in this article, I explore the historic and contemporary art of Christmas.

My fifth article was 'Finding the human amid the wreckage of migration'. In this article I interviewed Shezad Dawood about his multimedia Leviathan exhibition at Salisbury Cathedral where personal objects recovered from ocean depths tell a story of modern and ancient migrations.

My sixth article was 'The visionary artists finding heaven down here' in which I explored a tradition of visionary artists whose works shed light on the material and spiritual worlds.

My seventh article was 'How the incomer’s eye sees identity' in which I explain how curating an exhibition for Ben Uri Online gave me the chance to highlight synergies between ancient texts and current issues.

My eighth article was 'Infernal rebellion and the questions it asks' in which I interview the author Nicholas Papadopulos about his book The Infernal Word: Notes from a Rebel Angel.

My ninth article was 'A day, night and dawn with Nick Cave’s lyrics' in which I review Adam Steiner’s Darker With The Dawn — Nick Cave’s Songs Of Love And Death and explore whether Steiner's rappel into Cave’s art helps us understand its purpose.

My 10th article was 'Theresa Lola's poetical hope' about the death-haunted yet lyrical, joyful and moving poet for a new generation.

My 11th article was 'How to look at our world: Aaron Rosen interview', exploring themes from Rosen's book 'What Would Jesus See: Ways of Looking at a Disorienting World'.

My 12th article was 'Blake, imagination and the insight of God', exploring a new exhibition - 'William Blake's Universe at the Fitzwilliam Museum - which focuses on seekers of spiritual regeneration and national revival.

My 13th article 'Matthew Krishanu: painting childhood' was an interview with Matthew Krishanu on his exhibition 'The Bough Breaks' at Camden Art Centre.

My 14th article was entitled 'Art makes life worth living' and explored why society, and churches, need the Arts.

My 15th article was entitled 'The collective effervescence of sport's congregation' and explored some of the ways in which sport and religion have been intimately entwined throughout history

My 16th article was entitled 'Paradise cottage: Milton reimagin’d' and reviewed the ways in which artist Richard Kenton Webb is conversing with the blind poet in his former home (Milton's Cottage, Chalfont St Giles).

My 17th article was entitled 'Controversial art: how can the critic love their neighbour?'. It makes suggestions of what to do when confronted with contentious culture.

My 18th article was an interview entitled 'Art, AI and apocalypse: Michael Takeo Magruder addresses our fears and questions'. In the interview the digital artist talks about the possibilities and challenges of artificial intelligence.

My 19th article was entitled 'Dark, sweet and subtle: recovered music orientates us'. In the article I highlight alt-folk music seeking inspiration from forgotten hymns.

My 20th article was entitled 'Revisiting Amazing Grace inspires new songs'. In the article I highlight folk musicians capturing both the barbaric and the beautiful in the hymn Amazing Grace and Christianity's entanglement with the transatlantic slave trade more generally.

My 21st article was entitled 'James MacMillan’s music of tranquility and discord'. In the article I noted that the composer’s music contends both the secular and sacred.

My 22nd article was a book review on Nobody's Empire by Stuart Murdoch. 'Nobody's Empire: A Novel is the fictionalised account of how ... Murdoch, lead singer of indie band Belle and Sebastian, transfigured his experience of Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME) through faith and music.'

My 23rd article was entitled 'Rock ‘n’ roll’s long dance with religion'. The article explores how popular music conjures sacred space.

My 24th article was an interview with Alastair Gordon on the artist’s attention which explores why the overlooked and everyday capture the creative gaze.

My 25th article was about Stanley Spencer’s seen and unseen world and the artist’s child-like sense of wonder as he saw heaven everywhere.

My 26th article was entitled 'The biblical undercurrent that the Bob Dylan biopics missed' and in it I argue that the best of Dylan’s work is a contemporary Pilgrim, Dante or Rimbaud on a compassionate journey.

My 27th article was entitled 'Heading Home: a pilgrimage that breaks out beauty along the way' and focuses on a film called 'Heading Home' which explores how we can learn a new language together as we travel.

My 28th article was entitled 'Annie Caldwell: “My family is my band”' and showcased a force of nature voice that comes from the soul.

My 29th article was entitled 'Why sculpt the face of Christ?' and explored how, in Nic Fiddian Green’s work, we feel pain, strength, fear and wisdom.

My 30th article was entitled 'How Mumford and friends explore life's instability' and explored how Mumford and Sons, together with similar bands, commune on fallibility, fear, grace, and love.

My 31st article was entitled 'The late Pope Francis was right – Antoni Gaudi truly was God’s architect' and explored how sanctity can indeed be found amongst scaffolding, as Gaudi’s Barcelona beauties amply demonstrate.

My 32nd article was entitled 'This gallery refresh adds drama to the story of art' and explored how rehanging the Sainsbury Wing at the National Gallery revives the emotion of great art.

My 33rd article was an interview with Jonathan A. Anderson about the themes of his latest book 'The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art'.

My 34th article was an interview with 'Emily Young: the sculptor listening as the still stones speak'.

My 35th article was a profile of New York's expressionist devotional artist, 'Genesis Tramaine: the painter whose faces catch the spirit'.

My 36th article was a concert review of Natalie Bergman at Union Chapel - a soul-soaked set turned personal tragedy into communal celebration.

My 37th article was based on the exhibition series 'Can We Stop Killing Each Other?' at the Sainsbury Centre. In it I explore how art, theology, and moral imagination confront our oldest instinct.

My 38th article article was 'The dot and the dash: modern art’s quiet search for deeper meaning' in which I argue that Neo-Impressionism meets mysticism in a quietly radical exhibition at the National Gallery.

My 39th article was 'From Klee to Klein, Wenders to Botticelli: angels unveiled' in which I explore how, across war, wonder and nativity, artists show angels bridging earth and heaven.

My 40th article was 'When Henry Moore’s Madonna shocked Northampton' in which I explore how a modernist mother and child stirred outrage, then lasting wonder.

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This Picture - The Great Escape.

Wednesday, 10 May 2023

Steven Turner: One Beautiful World dance performance

Saturday 13 May, 4.00 pm, Miracle House: One Beautiful World performance by Steven Turner (Next Step Creative)

The premiere of a new dance, exploring the creation of the world and the science that holds it together.

Steven Turner has trained in a variety of dance styles, including contemporary, street, mime and moving with props. He founded Next Step Creative to promote collaboration between dance and other creative arts. Choreographing and teaching for Dance 21 (a dance company for children/young adults with Down’s syndrome), he has taught in Rotterdam and performed in UK and Europe.

Tickets available on the door.

One Beautiful World is an Arts Festival exploring aspects of our one beautiful world from the creativity of human beings to the beauty of the natural world, while remembering the challenges that human activity poses to the planet. The Festival is a mix of art, dance, music, photography, poetry and spoken word. Churches are providing venues for the Festival events and the Festival has received funding from Essex County Council’s Locality Fund. For more information about the Festival see https://onebeautifulworldfestival.blogspot.com/.

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Steven Turner.

Sunday, 6 November 2022

The Encounter

The Encounter is a show that explores the story of Christmas in a fresh way using dance and mime. Throughout the show you will experience a variety of Christmas stories in contemporary and engaging ways for the whole family.

The performance is a creative mix of multi media and physical theatre appealing to a variety of ages. This is a great community event with a range of dynamic and engaging pieces, including Mime, Contemporary, Ribbons, Ballet, and Banners combined with bespoke video graphics.

Friday 2 December, 7.00 pm
St Andrew’s Church, 11 London Road, Wickford SS12 0AN

Books tickets (£6.50) at www.nextstepcreative.co.uk/events.

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The Encounter.

Thursday, 10 August 2017

John Ruskin: Brantwood and the Ruskin Cross

Today's place of pilgrimage was to Brantwood, home of John Ruskin, and to the Ruskin Cross at St Andrew's Coniston.

Brantwood offers a fascinating insight into the world of John Ruskin and the last 28 years of his life spent at Coniston. Filled with many fine paintings, beautiful furniture and Ruskin’s personal treasures, the house retains the character of its famous resident. Displays and activities in the house, gardens and estate reflect the wealth of cultural associations with Ruskin’s legacy – from the Pre Raphaelites and the Arts and Crafts Movement to the founding of the National Trust and the Welfare State.
"Ruskin was one of the most important art critics and social thinkers of the nineteenth century. He championed the art of J. M. W. Turner and exercised a profound influence on the Pre-Raphaelites. When he came to write his famous architectural history of Venice entitled The Stones of Venice, he began to contrast mediaeval craftsmanship with modern industrial manufacturing."

"Ruskin believed that, to achieve the highest artistic ideals, the artist must understand the God given laws of nature by paying attention to minute details as well as spectacular effects."

"His ideas inspired William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement but also had profound political implications. When the first Labour Party MPs were elected in 1906, the book that they said had most influenced them was Ruskin’s Unto This Last. Much of the second half of his life was spent defending his ideas that industrialisation and free markets were doing terrible damage to the ability of people to live fulfilling and meaningful lives. Gandhi and Tolstoy are amongst those who found his writing deeply compelling."

Tolstoy said that, ‘Ruskin was one of the most remarkable men, not only of England and our time, but of all countries and all times. He was one of those rare men who think with their hearts, and so he thought and said not only what he himself had seen and felt,but what everyone will think and say in the future.’

"After his death Ruskin’s ideas found expression in the welfare state, the National Health Service, and widening access to education. His analysis of gothic buildings made a direct contribution to the development of modernist architecture."

"Standing by his grave," as W. G. Collingwood wrote, "one cannot but think what we owe him. He was not a mere successful man, but a great pioneer of thought. He led the way to many new fields, which he left for others to cultivate. It is from him chiefly that we, or our teachers, have learnt the
feelings with which we look nowadays at pictures or architecture or scenery, entering more intelligently into their beauty and significance, and providing more consciously for their safe keeping. Nobody for many generations understood so clearly and taught so fearlessly the laws of social justice and brotherly kindness; no one preached councils of perfection so eloquently and so effectively. There are few of us whose lives are not the better, one way or another, for his work."

My appreciation of Ruskin's significance came as a result of the writing of the art critic Peter Fuller. Fuller wrote that:

"When, in the early 1980s, I wrote the essays, later gathered together in Images of God, I felt that I was being tremendously daring and even perverse in reviving the idea that aesthetic experience was greatly diminished if it became divorced from the idea of the spiritual. What I responded to in Ruskin, above all else, was the distinction he made between ‘aesthesis’ and ‘theoria’, the former being a merely sensuous response to beauty, the latter what he described as a response to beauty with ‘our whole moral being’. My book, Theoria, was an attempt to rehabilitate ‘theoria’ over and above mere ‘aesthesis’; I also tried to communicate my feeling that the spiritual dimensions of art had been preserved, in a very special way, within the British traditions."

"I became interested in the links between ‘natural theology’ and the triumphs of British landscape painting. I am still convinced that there is a close correlation between British ‘higher landscape’ and those beliefs about nature as divine handiwork which were held with a peculiar vividness and immediacy in Britain."

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

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Creed - With Arms Wide Open.

Saturday, 18 April 2015

Cotton to Gold

Cotton to Gold, which ends tomorrow, is the fourth exhibition in the hugely successful Winter Exhibition Programme at Two Temple Place.

The magnificent and eccentric mansion has been transformed into a casket for the exquisite treasures of an extraordinary group of Lancashire magnates. As the cotton mills boomed, bringing development and deprivation hand in hand, this group of prominent industrialists privately, and sometimes secretively, poured their wealth into some of the finest and most astonishing collections in the country. Exceedingly rare Roman coins, priceless medieval manuscripts, Turner watercolours, Tiffany glass, Japanese prints, Byzantine icons, ivory sculptures and even preserved beetles and a Peruvian mummy.

For me, the highlights were the Books of Hours, the collection of icons, works by Blake, Hokusai, Millais and Turner.

As Claudia Pritchard notes in her review in The Independent:

'Religion was as much a driving force as mechanisation for some collectors, who engaged in posthumous philanthropy, perhaps storing up treasures in heaven by dispersing their treasures on earth. [Robert Edward] Hart, however, valued printed and handwritten books important to many faiths, demonstrating a perhaps unexpected religious inclusiveness and tolerance. So, as well as his Christian Book of Hours, with its jewel-like illuminations, the exhibition will include his precious copies of the Koran, a Jewish Torah scroll and other sacred texts. Hart’s own religious convictions were put into practice with the establishment of an orphanage in Blackburn that was the foundation of today’s Child Action Northwest, a charity caring for vulnerable children in the Blackburn area.'
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Emmylou Harris & Rodney Crowell - Dreaming My Dreams.

Friday, 4 April 2008

A great Catholic, writer and man

G. K. Chesterton was a Renaissance Man. A well established journalist and reviewer by the age of twenty one, he went on to publish biographies, literary and art criticism, essays, history, nonsense verse, novels, poetry, and to illustrate his verse.

Chesterton was a major influence on the shape of Christian writing in the twentieth century. He provided a model for the engaged and engaging journalist (to be followed by the likes of Malcolm Muggeridge and Tom Davies). Engaged because of the breadth of topics to which he jointly applied his pen and his faith. Engaging because of the good-humoured wit that characterised his satire and sugared the tough arguments that he doled out.

It was this combination that first caught the attention of C. S. Lewis. In Surprised by Joy Lewis makes it clear how much Chesterton's writings and, in particular The Everlasting Man (a history of mankind's spiritual progress - "[I] saw the whole Christian outline of history set out in a form that seemed to me to make sense", said Lewis), helped him become a Christian. He then took Chesterton for a model in many of his own attitudes to his faith, particularly in his combative approach to apologetics.

Another Inkling, Charles Williams, was influenced by Chesterton in his early poetry while an early novel War in Heaven draws on both The Man Who Was Thursday in its treatment of the supernatural and on Chesterton's detective priest Father Brown in the character of the Archdeacon. W. H. Auden wrote that Chesterton's Greybeards at Play "contains some of the best pure nonsense verse in English, and the author's illustrations are equally good". A whole string of topical versifying satirists - Nigel Forde, Stewart Henderson, Adrian Plass, Steve Turner - have followed in Chesterton's train down through the century.

He was criticised of course for his use of humour in explaining and defending orthodox Christianity. His defence was that fun and seriousness were not opposites and that whether "a man preaches his gospel grotesquely or gravely is merely like the question of whether he preaches it in prose or verse. Chesterton's humour and invention was not, as Lewis noted, gratuitous but integral to his argument - "humour which is not in any way separable from the argument but is rather (as Aristotle would say) the 'bloom' on dialectic itself". He particularly valued the way in which use of the grotesque tends “to touch the nerve of surprise and thus to draw attention to the intrinsically miraculous character of the object itself”. As an example he gave the impact of seeing St Paul’s Cathedral upside down. The effect would be that we should “look at it more than we have done all the centuries during which it has rested on its foundations”. It is, he thought, the “supreme function of the philosopher of the grotesque to make the world stand on its head that people may look at it”.

Chesterton's imagination enabled him to understand and explain aspects of Christianity which for many had seemed impossible or naive or impossibly naive. In his biography of Saint Francis of Assisi he memorably characterised Francis as the Court Fool of the King of Paradise, who sees the world upside down and cannot see the wood for the trees. As he explores these phrases we begin to understand the way in which conversion turns our life and life itself upside down (or, as we now see from God's perspective not man's, the right way up) so that a nobleman becomes a fool (for Christ), the son of a prosperous merchant who is provided for in every way become dependent on God, and sees every part of God's creation as an individual character and brother, even the trees. In understanding Francis and his actions Chesterton inadvertently explains the inversions, metamorphoses, defiance’s of gravity and fabulous zoo of Marc Chagall's art which, like Chesterton, is imaginatively revealing the spiritual reality experienced by the likes of Francis of Assisi.

For all these qualities Chesterton fully deserves the praise awarded him by Lewis - "A great Roman Catholic, a great writer, and a great man."

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Kathleen Battle & Branford Marsalis - Come Sunday.

Friday, 29 February 2008

Larry Norman RIP

From the Greenbelt website I learnt the sad news of the death of Larry Norman. These paragraphs from Steve Turner's Guardian obituary indicates the significance of Larry's life and music which, as both teenager and adult, has been a challenge and inspiration to my life and faith:

"Larry Norman, who has died at the age of 61, was a pioneer of what became known as Jesus Rock, which combined the rhythms of rock'n'roll with the social and spiritual observations of Christianity. Norman, who was instinctively an outsider, was resigned to the fact that his music would cause offence to the church and the music industry, and once summed his position up as "too secular for the Christians and too Christian for the secularists".

Yet it was his hybrid that provided the template for the development of the multimillion dollar contemporary Christian music industry, a genre that now outsells jazz, classical and new age combined in America."

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Larry Norman - Let The Tape Keep Rolling.