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Showing posts with label writers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label writers. Show all posts

Thursday, 5 November 2026

Artlyst: The Art Diary November 2026

Here's my November Art Diary for Artlyst:

'In ‘Women, Art, God’, art historian and priest Ayla Lepine invites us to explore the relationship between faith and imagination. Across centuries, cultures, materials and subjects, women’s stories and works of art provide wisdom about the power of images. In this book, which I am currently reviewing, Lepine, through vibrant conversations about art, life and faith, enables us to glimpse God in the visions of artists including Frida Kahlo, Artemisia Gentileschi and Sonia Boyce. Women’s art and spirituality guide readers across centuries and continents, encouraging us to take religion’s importance in visual culture and creativity seriously. Women, Art, God provides a bold and fresh approach to feminist theology and art history.

For the November diary, I begin by staying with the question that Lepine explores in her book: How can art by women transform our experiences of spirituality and religion? Highlighted exhibitions include works by Edmonia Lewis, Ethelwynne M. Quail, Emma Kunz, Gabrielle Goliath, Cecilia Vicuña, and Yu Hong. This is followed by commissions and exhibitions involving Graeme Mortimer Evelyn, Maurice Denis, Stanley Spencer, Gary Bunt, Charlie Mackesy, and Mark Dunford. We then move through the centuries with exhibitions moving from Constantinople to the Renaissance and the Dutch Golden Age. I end with a series of relational group shows for European Cultural Centre Italy, Focal Point Gallery, NIKA Projects, The Minories, and Foundling Museum.'

My other pieces for Artlyst are:

Interviews -
Monthly diary articles -
Articles/Reviews -

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Michael Kiwanuka - Summer Clothes.
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Saturday, 10 October 2026

International Times: Re-Awoken Stories

My latest book review for International Times is on 'Arthur: A New Life' by Amy Jeffs:

'Tales of King Arthur continue to enthral. Amy Jeffs’ retelling of Arthur’s story emerges in a similar time period to the four-volume epic in ballad form that the poet Malcolm Guite is currently undertaking in Merlin’s Isle: An Arthuriad. It has ever been thus, with troubled times in particular regularly calling out clusters of works about the once and future king.'

My earlier pieces for IT are: an interview with curator Jacquiline Creswell; an interview with the artist Alexander de Cadenet; an interview with artist, poet, priest Spencer Reece, an interview with the poet Chris Emery, an interview with Jago Cooper, Director of the the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, a profile of singer-songwriter Bill Fay, plus reviews of:
Several of my short stories have been published by IT including three about Nicola Ravenscroft's EarthAngel sculptures (then called mudcubs), which we exhibited at St Andrew's Wickford in 2022. The first story in the series is 'The Mudcubs and the O Zone holes'. The second is 'The Mudcubs and the Clean-Up King', and the third is 'The mudcubs and the Wall'. My other short stories to have been published by International Times are 'The Black Rain', a story about the impact of violence in our media, 'The New Dark Ages', a story about principles and understandings that are gradually fading away from our modern societies, and 'The curious glasses', a story based on the butterfly effect.

IT have also published several of my poems, including 'Spencer Reece at Bemerton' which is based on the visit that I made to Bemerton in 2026 with Spencer Reece, 'The ABC of creativity', which covers attention, beginning and creation, and 'The Edge of Chaos', a state of existence poem. Also published have been three poems from my 'Five Trios' series. 'Barking' is about St Margaret’s Barking and Barking Abbey and draws on my time as a curate at St Margaret's. 'Bradwell' is a celebration of the history of the Chapel of St Peter-on-the-Wall, the Othona Community, and of pilgrimage to those places. Broomfield in Essex became a village of artists following the arrival of Revd John Rutherford in 1930. His daughter, the artist Rosemary Rutherford, also moved with them and made the vicarage a base for her artwork including paintings and stained glass. Then, Gwynneth Holt and Thomas Bayliss Huxley-Jones moved to Broomfield in 1949 where they shared a large studio in their garden and both achieved high personal success. 'Broomfield' reviews their stories, work, legacy and motivations.

To read my poems published by Stride, click here, here, here, here, here, and here. My poems published in Amethyst Review are: 'Runwell', 'Are/Are Not', 'Attend, attend' and 'Maritain, Green, Beckett and Anderson in conversation down through the ages'.

I am among those whose poetry has been included in Thin Places & Sacred Spaces, a recent anthology from Amethyst Press. I also had a poem included in All Shall Be Well: Poems for Julian of Norwich, the first Amethyst Press anthology of new poems.

'Five Trios' is a series of poems on thin places and sacred spaces in the Diocese of Chelmsford. The five poems in the series are:
These poems have been published by Amethyst Review and International Times.

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Daniel Pemberton - Knights Of The Round Table.
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Wednesday, 7 October 2026

STEPS: the Spiritual Journey of Peter Howson









Having already been to the PV for Peter Howson's Salvation exhibition and writing my review for Seen and Unseen, it was great to return this evening for the launch of STEPS: the Spiritual Journey of Peter Howson by John Miller.  

STEPS is a new biography of the artist by Miller, who for thirty-seven years was a parish minister in Glasgow’s Castlemilk housing scheme. In 2001-2, he was the Moderator of the Church of Scotland’s General Assembly. 

They met when Howson was part of a group exploring the 'meaning of life', and they became good friends. Over the next 20 years the two had many conversations and Miller's book contains the story of Peter's life and the deeply felt and electrifying insights revealed in his paintings. Having been, for over thirty years, a minister in a working class community shaped by poverty and violence but redeemed by acts of love, Miller is uniquely placed to understand Howson's conflicts, and to articulate his ambitions, artistic and religious. 

Salvation presents a new series of interconnected oil paintings on gesso panels, these works chronicle the life of Christ as depicted in the Gospels, through a sequence of intensely personal encounters, marking one of the artist’s most sustained examinations of biblical narrative to date.

In my review of  Salvation I wrote:

'these paintings and drawings are deeply relational depictions of the life of Christ. In ‘You must be born again’, Jesus looks at Nicodemus with eyes filled with deep love and infinite longing. He looks at Judas askance and quizzical, as Judas turns to kiss him on the cheek (‘The Kiss of Judas’). The up-close focus on two heads filling the picture frame that is a feature of several scenes emphasises the relationship between Jesus and another, always loving, even when angry, as is the case in ‘Hypocrites!’.'

My interview with Howson can be read here, my review of his retrospective - here, my VCS exhibition including a Howson work - here, and reviews of earlier exhibitions here, and here.

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Deacon Blue - People Come First.
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Thursday, 17 September 2026

Love is ...

Here's the sermon that I shared at St Andrew's Wickford yesterday:

When I preach at weddings I often tell the story of the Love is … cartoons. ‘Love Is...’ began as shy love notes from the artist Kim Casali to her future husband, Roberto. Each of these notes involved a little drawing and a personal sentiment that perfectly captured Kim's thoughts and feelings for the man she loved. She began these drawings when they were dating, and she would leave the cartoons where Roberto would be sure to find them. After they were married, he showed her that he'd kept them all the drawing she had made for him. The cartoons were picked up by the press, were first published in The Los Angeles Times in January 1970, and then their popularity grew globally and they were published daily in 50 countries around the world and translated into 25 languages.

I use this as a way of introducing the original ‘Love is …’ from 1 Corinthians 13: “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.”

The ‘Love is …’ cartoons and 1 Corinthians 13 both agree with another well-known ‘love is’ statement; ‘Love is a many-splendoured thing.’ Love cannot be captured or summed up in one cartoon or phrase or even in a series of cartoons or phrases. Love constantly bursts the bounds of our descriptions or definitions and this is why there is no end to songs, poems, novels, films, dances and plays about love. When I was ministering in the City of London, I would visit the Guildhall Art Gallery where we can see that the subject of romantic love preoccupied Victorian artists who addressed themes of unrequited love, social incompatibility, family disapproval, and separation at war.

Nearer our own time, C.S. Lewis is well known for looking at some of the different loves described in Greek thought - familial or affectionate love (storge); friendship (philia); romantic love (eros); and spiritual love (agape) - in the light of Christian commentary on ordinate loves. Despite his writings on The Four Loves he was himself surprised by love as his own relationship with Joy Davidman developed. The experience of love confounded his earlier more academic perceptions of it.

It is possible that the definitive Biblical statement on love is that which is found in 1 John 4. 16 where we read that, ‘God is love’. This is also where Ernesto Cardenal takes us. Our experiences of friendship, familial and romantic love all enable us to know God as love. Therefore, he writes, ‘My former loves have taught me what love is. I know how you love me because I too have loved, and I know what passionate and obsessed love is and what it is to be madly in love with someone. And God is mad about me.’

The strength of God’s love for us was revealed among us through his sending of his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. ‘In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins.’ Christ searches for us like the Good Shepherd searching for the lost sheep. His journey of salvation shows how much we are loved by him as he gives up all he has in order to seek us out and rescue us.

The extremity of God’s expression of love in giving all in self-sacrifice reveals the limitless nature of love which constantly escapes the limits of our experiences, descriptions or definitions. If God is love then, just as God is infinite and cannot ever be fully grasped by our finite minds, so love also must be inexhaustible. As St Paul stated in 1 Corinthians 13, ‘Love never ends’. Love, like God, is an infinite ocean into which we dive and can always swim deeper and further.

In The Last Battle, the final volume of his Narnia stories, C.S. Lewis sums up the reality of God, heaven and love in the phrase, ‘further up and further in.’ The children in his stories discover heaven as the real Narnia which is bigger and better than the shadow Narnia in which they had lived out their finite lives. When they reach the centre of this real Narnia, they find that their journey begins again as there is always a deeper layer to this real Narnia, meaning that there is no end to their exploration of the reality of Narnia. If God is love and love is God then, as T.S. Eliot wrote in Little Gidding, ‘We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.’

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Victoria Williams - Love.
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Saturday, 8 August 2026

International Times: Seizing Control of the Dreamscape

Here's my latest book review for International Times, which is on The Perfect Moment: God, Sex, Art, and the Birth of America’s Culture Wars by Isaac Butler:

'Butler documents the way the culture wars played out in this period within the visual arts predominantly by telling the story of the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities (NEA) and the conflicts that arose firstly from (or from perceptions of) its funding of specific artists and then from grants that were not awarded but which faced legal challenges as a result. These include works or exhibitions by artists such as Andres Serrano, Robert Mapplethorpe, David Wojnarowicz, and Karen Finley, among others. The story takes place in the context of AIDS and its impact on the LGBT community, with its deadly effect informing a significant proportion of the work and the reaction towards it..'

See also my book review for International Times on The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex, and Controversy in the 1980s by Paul Elie:

'Paul Elie’s The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex, and Controversy in the 1980s is a survey of the culture wars that began in the US in the 1980’s viewed from the perspective of the religious aspects of the conflicts.

Many of the most famous confrontations in this period were between those defending a conservative view of their religion and artists utilising more progressive ideas and imagery in relation to that same religion. Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe, Madonna’s Like a Prayer video, Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses and Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ are among the works caught in the crosshairs of the face-off between embattled sides.
 
Elie takes us through the decade highlighting the artists involved – from Andy Warhol through U2 to Toni Morrison – while also documenting the changing response to crypto-religious works.'

For more on: Warhol - see here; Scorsese - see here and here; U2 - see here, here, here, and here - 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. For consideration of what to do when confronted with contentious culture see here, here, and here.

For more of my writing on music, see my article for Seen and Unseen entitled 'Rock ‘n’ roll’s long dance with religion' and my co-authored book with Peter Banks, ‘The Secret Chord’, which has been described as an impassioned study of the role of music in cultural life written through the prism of Christian belief. The book can be purchased from Lulu - https://www.lulu.com/shop/jonathan-evens-and-peter-banks/the-secret-chord/paperback/product-1pey2g67.html?q=peter+banks&page=1&pageSize=4. Covering a range of musical styles and influences, from gospel music to X Factor, The Secret Chord conveys enthusiasm for music and its transformative powers. The book asks is there really a 'Secret Chord' that would both please the Lord and nearly everybody else as described in Leonard Cohen's popular song 'Hallelujah'?

My earlier pieces for IT are: an interview with curator Jacquiline Creswell; an interview with the artist Alexander de Cadenet; an interview with artist, poet, priest Spencer Reece, an interview with the poet Chris Emery, an interview with Jago Cooper, Director of the the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, a profile of singer-songwriter Bill Fay, plus reviews of:
Several of my short stories have been published by IT including three about Nicola Ravenscroft's EarthAngel sculptures (then called mudcubs), which we exhibited at St Andrew's Wickford in 2022. The first story in the series is 'The Mudcubs and the O Zone holes'. The second is 'The Mudcubs and the Clean-Up King', and the third is 'The mudcubs and the Wall'. My other short stories to have been published by International Times are 'The Black Rain', a story about the impact of violence in our media, 'The New Dark Ages', a story about principles and understandings that are gradually fading away from our modern societies, and 'The curious glasses', a story based on the butterfly effect.

IT have also published several of my poems, including 'Spencer Reece at Bemerton' which is based on the visit that I made to Bemerton in 2026 with Spencer Reece, 'The ABC of creativity', which covers attention, beginning and creation, and 'The Edge of Chaos', a state of existence poem. Also published have been three poems from my 'Five Trios' series. 'Barking' is about St Margaret’s Barking and Barking Abbey and draws on my time as a curate at St Margaret's. 'Bradwell' is a celebration of the history of the Chapel of St Peter-on-the-Wall, the Othona Community, and of pilgrimage to those places. Broomfield in Essex became a village of artists following the arrival of Revd John Rutherford in 1930. His daughter, the artist Rosemary Rutherford, also moved with them and made the vicarage a base for her artwork including paintings and stained glass. Then, Gwynneth Holt and Thomas Bayliss Huxley-Jones moved to Broomfield in 1949 where they shared a large studio in their garden and both achieved high personal success. 'Broomfield' reviews their stories, work, legacy and motivations.

To read my poems published by Stride, click here, here, here, here, here, and here. My poems published in Amethyst Review are: 'Runwell', 'Are/Are Not', 'Attend, attend' and 'Maritain, Green, Beckett and Anderson in conversation down through the ages'.

I am among those whose poetry has been included in Thin Places & Sacred Spaces, a recent anthology from Amethyst Press. I also had a poem included in All Shall Be Well: Poems for Julian of Norwich, the first Amethyst Press anthology of new poems.

'Five Trios' is a series of poems on thin places and sacred spaces in the Diocese of Chelmsford. The five poems in the series are:
These poems have been published by Amethyst Review and International Times.

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Glen Hansard - Down On Our Knees.
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Sunday, 2 August 2026

The Big Picture - A Return to Soul: Review of Aaron Rosen’s Spiritual Traces

The seventeenth issue of The Big Picture, from The Kirby Laing Centre, broaches the difficult topic of evangelicalism. Without sweeping aside the problems and weaknesses of the movement over its history, it has had an important role in revitalising world Christianity, and our world needs a healthy evangelicalism now more than ever. The contributors look at what has characterised the movement since its earliest days, what might be missing and what might have gone wrong. Several articles explore the role of evangelicalism in politics, others in intellectual pursuits such as education or research, and still others in ethics and mission. The editors hope that this issue offers some avenues for its renewal.

As usual, the content of the magazine is diverse, also featuring a conversation with Theophilus about the book of Acts, a study of an intriguing post-war sculpture from Charles Wheeler, a reflection on Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and more.

Paid subscribers can read all the articles on release and make comments; free subscribers will receive access to a handful of new articles each week. You can also get the beautifully designed print edition of TBP 17 (and several back issues) on Amazon.

This edition includes: ArtWay: A Return to Soul: Review of Aaron Rosen’s Spiritual Traces - Jonathan Evens. I review Aaron Rosen’s exploration of spirituality in contemporary art, especially in conversation with artists working at the intersection of creativity and faith. The review offers a thoughtful introduction to current conversations in art and religion while suggesting why beauty, contemplation and artistic practice remain important sources of meaning in a fragmented age. The review is available for free on 14 August.

The Big Picture 16 explored third places - the social spaces between home and work that are so influential in community life but increasingly under threat in our fragmented, digitised world - and included my interview with Francis Hoyland: 'ArtWay: Meeting Christ in Sundry Places. I interviewed painter Francis Hoyland about his decades of depicting Christ’s life, and the role that his Catholic faith plays in his art.

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Steve Scott - Not A Pretty Picture.
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Saturday, 4 July 2026

International Times: Crypto-Religious Culture Wars

My latest book review for International Times is on The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex, and Controversy in the 1980s by Paul Elie:

'taken together, Elie’s The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage (a group portrait of Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, Flannery O’Connor, and Walker Percy), Reinventing Bach: Music, Technology, and the Search for Transcendence (a meditation on how sound recording allowed Bach’s music to survive and be reimagined by the likes of Albert Schweitzer, Glenn Gould, and Yo-Yo Ma), and The Last Supper can be viewed as a loosely connected trilogy of twentieth century cultural and spiritual history. In them, Elie undertakes a wide-ranging inquiry into the ways in which religion and faith have shaped human creativity, memory, and community in the modern era by means of the ‘spiritualized encounter’. As Nora Futtner has written, ‘Elie’s work is an invitation—to engage, to reflect, and to explore how faith and culture continually shape one another in unexpected ways.’'

For more of my writing on music, see my article for Seen and Unseen entitled 'Rock ‘n’ roll’s long dance with religion' and my co-authored book with Peter Banks, ‘The Secret Chord’, which has been described as an impassioned study of the role of music in cultural life written through the prism of Christian belief.

The book can be purchased from Lulu - https://www.lulu.com/shop/jonathan-evens-and-peter-banks/the-secret-chord/paperback/product-1pey2g67.html?q=peter+banks&page=1&pageSize=4

Covering a range of musical styles and influences, from gospel music to X Factor, The Secret Chord conveys enthusiasm for music and its transformative powers. The book asks is there really a 'Secret Chord' that would both please the Lord and nearly everybody else as described in Leonard Cohen's popular song 'Hallelujah'?

My earlier pieces for IT are: an interview with the artist Alexander de Cadenet; an interview with artist, poet, priest Spencer Reece, an interview with the poet Chris Emery, an interview with Jago Cooper, Director of the the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, a profile of singer-songwriter Bill Fay, plus reviews of:
Several of my short stories have been published by IT including three about Nicola Ravenscroft's EarthAngel sculptures (then called mudcubs), which we exhibited at St Andrew's Wickford in 2022. The first story in the series is 'The Mudcubs and the O Zone holes'. The second is 'The Mudcubs and the Clean-Up King', and the third is 'The mudcubs and the Wall'. My other short stories to have been published by International Times are 'The Black Rain', a story about the impact of violence in our media, 'The New Dark Ages', a story about principles and understandings that are gradually fading away from our modern societies, and 'The curious glasses', a story based on the butterfly effect.

IT have also published several of my poems, including 'Spencer Reece at Bemerton' which is based on the visit that I made to Bemerton in 2026 with Spencer Reece, 'The ABC of creativity', which covers attention, beginning and creation, and 'The Edge of Chaos', a state of existence poem. Also published have been three poems from my 'Five Trios' series. 'Barking' is about St Margaret’s Barking and Barking Abbey and draws on my time as a curate at St Margaret's. 'Bradwell' is a celebration of the history of the Chapel of St Peter-on-the-Wall, the Othona Community, and of pilgrimage to those places. Broomfield in Essex became a village of artists following the arrival of Revd John Rutherford in 1930. His daughter, the artist Rosemary Rutherford, also moved with them and made the vicarage a base for her artwork including paintings and stained glass. Then, Gwynneth Holt and Thomas Bayliss Huxley-Jones moved to Broomfield in 1949 where they shared a large studio in their garden and both achieved high personal success. 'Broomfield' reviews their stories, work, legacy and motivations.

To read my poems published by Stride, click here, here, here, here, here, and here. My poems published in Amethyst Review are: 'Runwell', 'Are/Are Not', 'Attend, attend' and 'Maritain, Green, Beckett and Anderson in conversation down through the ages'.

I am among those whose poetry has been included in Thin Places & Sacred Spaces, a recent anthology from Amethyst Press. I also had a poem included in All Shall Be Well: Poems for Julian of Norwich, the first Amethyst Press anthology of new poems.

'Five Trios' is a series of poems on thin places and sacred spaces in the Diocese of Chelmsford. The five poems in the series are:
These poems have been published by Amethyst Review and International Times.

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