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This is one of the photos I took recently while playing with my new camera. I took it while wandering in Crathes Castle Gardens, in the rain. It's currently on my desktop. To tell the truth, I didn't so much take the photo as the camera - which has features much smarter than the photographer! Still, I am rather chuffed with it.
I posted on Van Gogh's Sunflowers on March 12, you can chase it here if you want. I am now starting a near scale version in tapestry which is both a piece of unhumble cheek and an act of devotion to Van Gogh. I know perfectly well that any attempt to portray, construe, replicate a masterpiece is doomed to failure, and seems an act futile and foolish.
But. And there are several buts. First, I am not seeking to replicate but to contemplate. The scaled drawing on canvas, the choice of coloured thread, the slow building up of stitches, the immersion in the images and colours, the combination of freehand stitching and the constraint of Van Gogh's shapes and colours, all combine in a disposition of attentiveness.
So, second, I know that multi-tasking is the thing, do more than one thing at a time, even do three at a time and each of them well - that's the ideal, I know. But not with tapestry. I can listen to music, but can't watch televison while doing this. So far from showing any disrespect or trivialising these glorious* paintings by trying to copy one of them, I am taking time and trouble to follow the artists hand and eye.
Third, if you look at the previous post you will see that Van Gogh painted Sunflowers to show forth gratitude and hopefulness. They are studies in yellow, because that is the colour that radiates from the sun, the centre of all life and the source for Van Gogh of all positive hopefulness and thankfulness. The miracle is that Van Gogh painted such dazzling exuberance while struggling with inner turmoils that would eventually close in on him in a self-destructive cycle of despair. Add to this recent research that shows Van Gogh used compounds in his paint that means some of the most vivid and brilliant yellows have turned brown with age and, irony of ironies, by exposure to sunlight.
So my tapestry is not an attempted replica of the painting in the National Gallery. It will be an impression of an Impressionist; the vivid yellows and contrasting brilliances of colours which are a study in yellow, I'll show in brightest stranded cotton. I'm not trying to reproduce Van Gogh's painting; I'm trying to capture in colour his courage, his vision of hopefulness, his immense humanity and passion for life, the tenderness and intensity with which he looked on created things and saw to the essence of existence, and believed at the centre of all things goodness could be found.
It's one of the neglected facts about Van Gogh that he was a man of intense Christian faith earlier in his life and career. He moved away from Evangelicalism of a Reformed style to a much less personal form of theism. His loss of religious faith, or at least his move away from certainty and dogmatic convictions, was never a loss of belief in life itself. Whatever else the Sunflower sequence of paintings express, they affirm for Van Gogh the reality of light, the vitality of life, the vibrancy of colour and the radiance of existence - and it is to his credit as a courageous human being, that such affirmation was possible only by the most costly and creative defiance of which he was capable - to paint the opposite of what he felt inside.
So his Sunflowers make real and vivid the human life that is the alternative to death; they announce the hopefulness that argues against despair; they radiate the riotous energy that gives the lie to the lethargy and ennui of his depression, and yet those same flowers caught in a still life, celebrating beauty captured and released in its living essence, contrasts with the inner agitation and mania of a man whose emotional life burned with consuming passion. To read Vincent's letters about these flowers, and sense the joy he took in painting them, is to begin, only begin, to understand the vision that saw within the anatomy of this perfectly named flower of the sun, realities that he might never grasp fully, but which he sensed were sufficient to grasp him, and perhaps save him. Van Gogh's Sunflowers are above all else a spiritual, personal and deeply existential statement, hope made defiant by magnificent art which construes the world as a place where the sun shines on the righteous, and the unrighteous.
One of the most telling and illuminating moments shared in class was when we discovered that we can learn as much from what we don't like as we can from what we do like! It was during the class on Jesus Through the Centuries a year or two ago, when images and paintings of Jesus were shown and we listened to how we reacted to them. I don't mean we listened to what we each thought of them - well we did that, but we didn't only listen to what we each said. We listened to what was going on inside us as we looked at images that were unfamiliar, theologically alien to our tradition, at times disturbing.
An artist has done her job brilliantly if in portraying suffering, evil, cruelty, or anguish, the viewer recoils, is disturbed, is affected by sympathy for the sufferer and moved from bewilderment through to outrage at the perpetrators. This is particularly true of religious art, and in Christian art the portrayal of the Passion of Jesus. I had another of those moments of illumination while reading Justin Lewis-Anthony, Circles of Thorns. The book is subtitled Hieronymous Bosch and Being Human, ande the whole book is a series of reflections on one painting, Christ Mocked.
Paintings emerge from a context, and are best understood within that context, whether as reflecting or reacting to the cultural, political, social and religious realities. Lewis-Anthony has lived with this painting for years, reflected and read around the historical context, and now offers an exposition that explores what it means to be human against the background of what it meant for God in human form to be the victim of mockery, abuse and violence leading to death. Along the way he explores politics, psychology, science, religious devotion as these developed in the early Modern period. This means at times having to be patient while the context is constructed and we are given the information needed to know what Bosch was about, and why, and how. But each chapter brings rewards and by the end of the book the reader has been educated in context and enabled to look at the painting as the politically subversive and theologically potent statement it is. And on the way Thomas a Kempis, Terry Pratchett, Bob Dylan, Etty Hilesum, Rowan Williams and Brian Eno are all co-opted into the conversation.
Not everyone is likely to admire Bosch's art - some of his paintings are frankly weird, a kind of proto-surrealism that depicts the nightmares of an age that saw the ravages of war, plague, and political and religious revolution. What this book does is pay attention to one painting, and patiently unfold the mind of the artist, teaching us in the process not only how to read a painting, but in doing so teach us also that great art reads also the human heart.
Got caught up in lots of other stuff to be done, so didn't get the chance to post the second excerpt from Archbishop Rowan Williams lecture on theological education. here it is
"I think that we have suffered a great deal from visions and models of education that have not sufficiently directed us to the centrality of the body of Christ, as the theological theme, as that which more than anything else holds for us the newness of the new creation, the difference of where we are and how we relate. We have a very long way to go in making our Anglican church a coherent, communal, obedient, renewed family of congregations. And yet we share the reality given in Christ by our baptism, the reality of Christ's body. The theological education we need, I believe, in the Communion is something which will make that come alive for us, which will make us literate in reading scripture and doctrine and church history, which will deepen in us those skills of discernment that we need in respect of our own calling and the calling of others, which will set us free from being simply an ecclesiastical organisation preoccupied with policing itself in various ways which will perhaps make us a more effective servant of the world into which God calls us. The world in which God invites us to recognise him, respond to him, praise, be glad in him, a world which is on the way to becoming that new creation which is really the context, the locus of any theology worth the name."
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And not only in the Anglican communion. This entire lecture is a contemplative commendation of theological education as articulated doxology, thinking in the context of worship, wonder finding words to praise, and an obedience of the heart and mind to the mystery that calls us to attentiveness, attempted articulacy and when necessary to unembarrased silence as study stills itself into prayer.
(The painting is by Chagall, the visitors to Abraham and Sarah with the promise of a child, and the same story of course underlies Rublev's icon of the Trinity. Chagall of course was more interested in this foundational story of Jewish faith and identity.)Not suggesting for a moment that what we have in the Tolstoy story quoted below is a comprehensively orthodox account of the Triune relations of Father, Son and Spirit. What we do have is a story that cuts through our speculative hesitations about God and with gentle humour reminds us of the rich relationality that is the life of God and the life of God in communion with created beings like us.
Three Russian monks lived on a faraway island. The bishop visits them, and is disturbed they don't know how to pray the Lord's Prayer. He devotes all his time to instructing them on the Our Father. When he is leaving in his boat he sees the monks running across the water towards the boat, "Father", they say, "we can't remember the Our Father". Amazed he asked, "Well how do you normally pray". "Well they say, "Dear God, there are three of You and there are three of us, have mercy on us"! The Bishop is struck by the simplicity of their holiness and tells them to go and be at peace.
As I said, not the last or most sophisticated word on Trinitarian realities - but the simplicity of holiness is the way in which we know God as the subject of theology, so that theology becomes doxology, and theologising becomes worship, and theological reflection blends and merges with contemplative prayer and loving discovery.
Recent absence from here has been because I have been on a work related visit to Austria on behalf of the University. But there was time for some sightseeing, and my kind hosts arranged for me to visit the Kunsthistorisches in Vienna.
Some of the finest paintings in Europe are held there, and one of them I have wanted to see for a long time. The Madonna of the Meadows is widely recognised as one of the finest paintings by Raphael, and one of the most influential images of Mary for subsequent artists. I've written about it here before, but seeing it is an altogether different experience. John's Gospel uses several different words for seeing, because he recognised there are several different ways of looking, gazing, contemplating - and when he means to see and recognise the truth and reality and beauty of what he says he uses the word we translate into English as "Behold"! And the mood is both imperative and an invitation. Indeed in chapter One of John's Gospel John the Baptist says "Behold the Lamb of God" and Jesus says to Andrew and Peter "Come and see".
This painting does the same, because the two children represent these same two imperatives, Behold, and come and see. But actually it is Raphael who commands attention here. To stand before this painting is to encounter some of the deepest religious truth in Christian tradition, mediated by beauty and depicted as goodness. The three late medieval transcendentals of beauty, truth and goodness are here distilled into a painting of profound and persuasive theological image. The incarnation as infinity diminished to infancy, the red of the flowers complementing the red robe and both reminding of the passion and atonement, in the background the human world of city, land and sea. And dominating yet conjoining sky and earth, the face of Mary, her smile wistful, the face pensive, her eyes looking down the trajectory of the cross to her child, and the face subtle and emotionally ambiguous - there is tenderness, and determination, acceptance and sadness, the surrender and resistance of love shown in two hands that hold her child, while the infant Jesus has one hand on her and one gripping the cross.
But I am not offering analysis - merely finding inadequate words for the fifteen minutes I spent being drawn into a theological world made real by image and symbol, the genius and gift of the artist illustrating a quite different and soul searchingly persuasive articulation of Christian truth that needs no such analysis. The above is not me daring to say what the painting means, but what the painting said as it addressed me and commanded attentiveness and stillness and obedient looking. A painting like this has its own way of announcing great truth with the imperative word, "Behold". So I did.
The Museum allows non flash photography, but it isn't always possible to get the angle right for a photo - maybe the imperfect photo is a recognition that you don't take with you anything other than the photo- the real experience is standing there, beholding, wondering, and praying.
This close-up shows a Renaissance artist's portrait of the Three Transcendentals, Beauty, Truth and Goodness, expressed in the complex miracle of a human face. In the long tradition of honouring Mary as the mother of the Saviour of the World, few approached the vision of Raphael. I'm no authority, but I doubt if anyone surpassed it.
One of the higlights of the visit to London for my big birthday was half an hour spent in the V&A, gazing at the Raphael Tapestries and Cartoons, particularly the two that show Jesus post-resurrection appearances. They are the most beautiful portrayals of biblical narrative and for me represent one of the high watermarks of imaginative exegesis of the stories of Jesus during the Renaissance.
To read the story of the miraculous catch of fish in John's Gospel, and then to look carefully at Raphael's painting, is to be transported from the slick glitz and technological tyrranny and cultural malaise and economic anxiety and intellectual aridity and spiritual confusion of the world we inhabit, to another world - every bit as challenging. And I suppose it's a nonsense comparison to ask which shows the greatest genius of human achievement - a Rapahel Cartoon or an Ipad, a Sistine Ceiling or a Hubble Telescope. And I do recognise the gross exaggerations in the comparisons I made in the first sentence of this paragraph. But there are times when it just seems right to contemplate beauty and provide an aesthetic critique of what the contemporary mind finds beautiful, humanising, and to be wondered at. Gazing on beauty as a visual form of vespers, evensong and benediction all in the one act of contemplative attentiveness.
This is Rowan Williams at his reflective, discursive and penetrating best. This lecture on theological education is a startling and refreshing apologia for wisdom, holiness and loving God with heart and mind
"...a person who is educated in reading the Bible is a person who, you can say theologically, by the Grace of the Holy Spirit, has been brought into that relationship with the God of the Bible which allows them to recognise in the language of the Bible their own faith and their own narrative. And that is something rather different from quarrying the Bible for little bits that happily remind you of how you feel. That is not biblical theology. It may be a useful form of apologetical psychology but it is not particularly theological. But to find in that language, that narrative, that register of exploration, something of the faith that transforms your own life; that I think is to see what biblical understanding is. And it is not a million miles away from what Martin Luther said when claiming that the Christian response to reading the Bible always had to be, if you heard the words, this is about you, datae loquitor, this is about you."
The whole lecture text is here
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