Living Wittily

Van Gogh's Sunflowers, Lent, and Restored Trustfulness

Van Gogh painted a series of Sunflowers pictures. Such powerful images of sunlight, yellows and golds, large and exuberant , larger than life, expansive and exaggerated intimations of joy, what happiness might look like if it could be painted. I stood for a while in front of this painting in the National Gallery. Some paintings request our silence, because whatever is said is rendered down into irrelevant chatter, interpretive nonsense, bland commentary on masterpiece.

What was fun about this painting is that people who came to look were keen to talk, to comment, to make noisy pilgrimage to one of the great images of one of the finest artists. And the irony of such enjoyment and conversation with total strangers, some who had no English and I had no Korean!, is that we stood in front of this painting, like pilgrims who had just arrived, knowing it was painted by a man who walked often in the valley of deep darkness, and eventually death's dark vale.

There are moments in our lives when our own hard journey seems somehow not to be just as hard as we thought. How did such exhilaration and creativity survive the bleak inner climate of van Gogh's illness? Where did the confidence and in your face unembarrassment of this painting come from? The answer, or part of it, is in the letters Van Gogh wrote, where he spoke of those flowers expressing gratitude and hope for the future. They are two key words that are essential to human happiness. Gratitude is predominantly backward looking, reflecting positively on the past; hope is primarily forward looking, trusting the future still has gift and grace to be given and received. Dag Hammarskjold's couplet says much the same: "For all that is past thank you; for all that is to come, yes!"

I know Lent is about prayer and fasting, and a penitential demeanour. It's just that I also think there are times when we need to repent of ingratitude and lack of trust, and our inability sometimes to say yes to our future. And by repent I mean the biblical meaning - to change direction, to turn again towards life, conversatio morum, to turn again towards the sunrise, or the sunflowers. That day standing in front of Van Gogh's painting, I understood his need to paint them. Like throwing a grappling hook up into the future, taking hold, and beginning to climb again towards the sunlight. And the constant cluster of people jostling in front of it seems to suggest Van Gogh's defiant yellow sunflowers resonate with a 21st Century longing for that same hopefulness and trust in our shared future.

Raphael, Transfiguration and facing the reality of failure

 

Amongst the aha moments on the recent London trip was a visit to see the Raphael cartoons at the V&A. In our own age of flickering images, CGI's and global publicity our eyes and imagination are overloaded even overwhelmed by visual data. There comes a point when we begin not to notice, when attentiveness is attenuated, and when we are weary of technological cleverness.

So to stand in front of half a dozen very large panels, and gaze on these hand painted images, meticulously detailed, richly woven with biblical allusion and imaginative reconstruction, is a sight for sore eyes.

Raphael is one of the great biblical exegetes. The cartoons are now faded with age, but the mellowing of colour, itself impossible to achieve by mere technique, gives them an aura of old truth still to be told.

One of my favourite Raphael paintings (not in London, but in The Vatican) is "The Transfiguration" in which the whole story is collapsed into one picture. Including the failed exorcism of the disciples. One of Mark's more telling one liners is uttered by the boy's father, "I asked your disciples to cast it out, but they couldn’t." (Mk 9.13) Against the backdrop of glory and Trasfiguration, the failure of the disciples to exorcise the evil spirit is a startling and intended contrast. And failure is an interesting theme in Mark's gospel, and in the lives we all have to live!

Failure, if taken rightly to heart, is an education in humility, in self understanding, an opportunity to grow. But not for the disciples in Mark’s Gospel. Having failed to exorcise an evil spirit themselves, they then become the self-appointed Regional Quality Assurance officers for Exorcisms. Not surprising, that desire to regulate others, control the boundaries,  – they’d just been having an argument about who is the greatest. Reminds you of years ago, a kind of Blair - Brown ambition-fest as to who would be the leader of the disciples. Jesus had just given the kind of answer that only works in the politics of the Kingdom of God, ‘Whoever wants to be first , must be last of all and servant of all.’ And like the self-preoccupied movers and shakers they believed themselves to be, they didn’t, as John Reid another used to be politician would say, ‘get it’.

 So failed exorcists with a lust for leadership, presume to disqualify others from their ministry in Jesus name, and in doing so disqualify themeselves. The same John  Reid would say, ‘Disciples not fit for purpose’. How dare any of us erect boundaries around compassionate ministry exercised in Jesus name. And before we become all self-defensive, ‘Well of course not all services done for people is done in Jesus name’, we do well to listen to Jesus reply, generously inclusive, ministry affirming, and welcoming compassion wherever it rears its beautiful head …"whoever is not against us is for us."

That is an ecumenicity of the heart, and it is only possible when being first is an irrelevance, and being servant of all is a priority; whoever is not against us is for us, gives not only the benefit of the doubt, but the benefit of trust; to live with such an attitude of openness to goodness, to see each act of kindness as Christ serving, to believe each costly casting out of evil wherever it lurks collaborates with God’s Kingdom, to recognise, acknowledge and celebrate compassion wherever it radiates into human lives, is to take on the generous inclusiveness of Jesus who welcomes all the help the world needs for no one who does a deed of power in Jesus name will be able soon afterward to speak evil of him.

And one closing thought – identify that part in each of our hearts, that leads us to say, without thinking clearly what we mean, ‘we tried to stop him because he was not following us’.

Happy Birthday to me - and thank God we never stop learning and seeing new things in new ways

Regular readers of Living Wittily will know that there aren't usually such long spaces between posts unless there is a good reason. How about a 60th birthday? And 4 days in London? A visit to see The Lion King, the National Gallery, the V&A, a Vivaldi concert by candlelight in St Martin in the Fields, the London Eye, the usual iconic buildings from the Palace to Parliament, and several expensive but indulgent patisseries!!

Where to start describing such a crowded temporal canvas. The highlights can't be chosen between - The Lion King was a stunning show - imaginative, African, colourful, funny, moving, musically throbbing and rhythmic - wouldn't have missed it and have seldom spent loadsa money to better prupose. The Sainsbury Wing of the National was for me an overwhelming encounter with beauty, religious devotion, history and some of the finest art of Europe gathered in one location. I've decided over Lent to do a series of posts on paintings in the National Gallery (two or three a week), as a way of distilling high points of experience into more permanently appropriated insight, appreciation, and that elusive golden strand that runs through all transformative aesthetic experience - joy in beauty. Ruskin wasn't wrong - a thing of beauty is a joy forever. I saw, and enjoyed so much - with time and a refusal to rush into gushing newsiness about it all, perhaps the impact of such lavishly displayed genius will have time to dissipate, leaving behind those wounds of knowledge that give permanence to those touches that change the way we are, and the way we view the world.

 
But as one example, and because I can't forbear - and don't want to anyway! Here is one of the works that made me go in the first place. I have a postcard of this, The Virgin on the Rocks, which is a more faithful representation of the depth and texture of the colours than any web page. But nothing prepares for the moment you stand in front of this and know yourself addressed by beauty, truth and goodness. You go all the way to London to appraise a painting, and find yourself judged and wanting in the everyday skills of perception and understanding, and not because such ability is inadequate - more fundamentally, I found they were not appropriate.

There are ways of knowing, levels of comprehension, modes of apprehension, that do not survive intact the authoritative demand of a work of art which threatens to revise the assuredness of all our previous knowledge, to ransack fruitlessly our existent vocabulary, and reduces to incidentals the absoluteness of much of our personal experience. To stand before this painting is to be relativised, to re-calibrate our criteria of judgement, to acknowledge yet again, as a necessary and necessarily recurring process of correction, that what we know, really and deeply know, is always and ever provisional, partial, limited, and therefore has to be open to the possibility of expansion, enrichment and newness in those places of encounter where previous experience leaves us unprepared, and thus vulnerable to wonder.

Viewing this painting was for me a religious experience in its own right. I've now read up on it and learned some important facts about context, technique and the artist's likely purposes. But these are secondary, the painting is primary; I am, and hope to remain vulnerable to its wonder.

Vincent Van Gogh - painting fragility

Been looking again at this painting by Vincent. I have a magnetic bookmark that I use all the time that has the butterflies detail. One of Van Gogh's final paintings, it shows two beautiful life forms which are transient, fragile and lovely. But I guess it's a sad painting, or at least one that hints at the sadness and poignancy of an artist who could paint life and death, joy and sadness, sunlight and shadow with immense power and humane sympathy. Amongst my life ambitions is a visit to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

Someone asked me recently my favourite song - too hard a question, too many songs, and my own knowledge is limited by the usual prejudices, opportunities and interests. But somewhere amongst the ones I've listened to most is Don Maclean's version of Starry Night. The tragedy and the triumph of Vincent are captured in simple lyrics, sung with minimal accompaniment, and a resonant sympathy with this most emotionally complex artist. Oh, and the best episode of Dr Who I've ever watched was the one about Vincent being brought to the present to hear the admiration of the greatest art critics and see the public queue to see his work.

Starry, starry night.
Paint your palette blue and grey,
Look out on a summer's day,
With eyes that know the darkness in my soul.
Shadows on the hills,
Sketch the trees and the daffodils,
Catch the breeze and the winter chills,
In colors on the snowy linen land.

Now I understand what you tried to say to me,
How you suffered for your sanity,
How you tried to set them free.
They would not listen, they did not know how.
Perhaps they'll listen now.

Starry, starry night.
Flaming flowers that brightly blaze,
Swirling clouds in violet haze,
Reflect in Vincent's eyes of china blue.
Colors changing hue, morning field of amber grain,
Weathered faces lined in pain,
Are soothed beneath the artist's loving hand.

Now I understand what you tried to say to me,
How you suffered for your sanity,
How you tried to set them free.
They would not listen, they did not know how.
Perhaps they'll listen now.

For they could not love you,
But still your love was true.
And when no hope was left in sight
On that starry, starry night,
You took your life, as lovers often do.
But I could have told you, Vincent,
This world was never meant for one
As beautiful as you.

Starry, starry night.
Portraits hung in empty halls,
Frameless head on nameless walls,
With eyes that watch the world and can't forget.
Like the strangers that you've met,
The ragged men in the ragged clothes,
The silver thorn of bloody rose,
Lie crushed and broken on the virgin snow.

Now I think I know what you tried to say to me,
How you suffered for your sanity,
How you tried to set them free.
They would not listen, they're not listening still.
Perhaps they never will...

Holman Hunt and that picture of Jesus at the Door.

Strange, the things you discover when you're not looking for them. A year or two ago I went to see Holman Hunt's The Light of the World in Manchester Art Gallery. It isn't one on my favourite pictures, and I can understand why it was panned by the reviews and notices on its first appearance. It took a John Ruskin to commend and praise it, and Simmons and Ridgway to engrave it, print it and market it, before it became one of the most popular of all Victorian religious paintings. I suspect my own muted enthusiasm is because it has become a shallow cliche, represents an exegetical misdirection of Revelation  3.20, and tries too hard - using the word the way Jamie Oliver and other TV chefs do, Hunt "literally" tries to portray a metaphor too literally!

That said, Hunt was a remarkable artist for reasons other than his painting. Pursuing the same literalism, he spent a lot of time in the Holy Land observing and painting people, dress and customs, works in which he tried to capture what he saw, literally. Sometimes he was in hostile territory and painted with a shotgun in one hand and a brush in the other! Now here's an interesting observation by Helen De Borchgrave, A Joiurney into Christian Art: "Holman Hunt thought that by painting literally what he read in the Bible, he would be transmitting the message faithfully in paint. But truth is not literal; we see through a glass darkly. If you forget fancy, you fence in freedom and everything frays. Even Jesus, who is truth, was not wholly understood by his closest friends."

Now there's a thought for biblical literalists; and also for those interested in exegesis through artistic representation. It may be that by striving for realism, we miss the Real; that by dictating to truth how truth should represent itself, we falsify that which we most seek to verify; that by devaluing imagination and overvaluing factual observation, we miss the Spirit who leads into all truth, who takes of the things of Jesus and reveals them to the heart, and to the mind, and yes, to the imagination. Interesting that Hunt's imagination became servant to a mind grown secure in realism - Hunt's earlier work was wonderfully imaginative, conceiving fantastic images and beautiful depictions such as his Lady of Shallot. Little of that vibrancy is visible in much of his biblical work. If ever a man was captured by his one popular painting, and that still not judged to be his best, it was Hunt, who painted three versions of the Light of the World. There's probably a Phd written, or waiting to be written on what it was in that painting that touched the late 19th Century so powerfully.

 

Vermeer in the House of Martha and Mary

This Vermeer painting of Jesus in the House of Martha and Mary is on show at the National Galleries of Scotland.

I'm going to see it one of these days when I can find time to look, and appreciate that detailed visual exegesis through canvas, pigment and brush.

And when I've seen it and thought about it, I'll write about it.

The Theological Possibilities in a Damaged Painting of the Nativity

From countless depictions of the Nativity I have chosen this one by Fra Filippo Lippi (mid 1400's), because paradoxically it says something the artist intended but not in the way it now appears.

What do I mean? Mary's robe was originally painted in blue, a tradition of honouring Mary by sparing no expense in portraying her purity, beauty and sanctity. On this painting the blue was a thin coat on dry plaster, rather than blue pigment mixed into the plaster in a true fresco. Over the centuries the colour has degraded into grey. This cost-cutting device has the unintentional irony of portraying Mary as she saw herself, a poor handmaiden unworthy of honour. Thus an upmarket depiction of the Nativity now shows Mary in a flaked and entirely faded cloak. "He was rich yet became poor, that we through his poverty might become rich". So many Renaissance paintings of the Nativity are all but perfect; their codes and symbols, narrative drive and cultural context, theology and piety, their execution and technique - the finest art the world has ever seen.

Perhaps especially at Christmas, we are helped to see the scandal and the loss, the cost and the consequence, the trust and the terror, the extraordinary ordinariness of the Word made flesh, and the frightened courage of the Mother of the Son of God sharing that poverty as an act of self impoverishing faith in a God who somtimes asks the impossible, and then by divine grace enables and embraces human trust, so winning the response of the human heart.

Perhaps. A happy and thoughtful Christmas to all who come by here regularly. Because for Christians Christmas is a time when joy should be unconfined, and thought too!

Keats, Van Gogh and Autumn

No need to post the whole poem.  Keats'  Ode to Autumn is accessible on countless sites. But the first verse has to be the most lyrical description of autumn in English literature, and the first line has such precision and evocative power it serves as the classic definition of the season, a six word essay on the ecstasy of nature fulfilled.

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness!
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o'erbrimmed their clammy cells.

No need to say more. But here's a picture by one of the most nature sensitive human beings ever to put paint on canvas

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

”… in all nature, for instance in trees, I see expression and soul… ”
Letter to Theo van Gogh, 5 November 1882

Art as an alternative grammar and vocabulary for theology

Over the summer I've been gradually updating some of the material of a module I'm teaching in Spring 2011. "Jesus Through the Centuries" is one of those modules that cries out for creative experiences of learning, encourages new approaches to reflection, explores radically different media for making theological statements, and allows each student to think more widely and deeply about who Jesus is. Film, painting, sculpture, music, poetry, and iconography provide rich and profound challenges to a theology that is often embedded, maybe at times imprisoned, by words.

Part of the course I am developing relates to the incarnation. What I find remarkable is the concentration in the tradition on questions of how. How Jesus could be both God and human, and the sophisticated complexity of various formulations of words in an attempt to capture, contain and convey truth. It isn't that the how question is unimportant - just that it isn't the only question. And it isn't that I have a quarrel with words, I use them as fragments of attempted precision myself. But there are alternatives to words in the human impulse to portray and celebrate the great Johannine vision, 'the Word became flesh and dwelt among us'. So I've been looking rather closely at paintings of the incarnation, almost always centred on the image of Mary and the infant Jesus.

And while the infant is usually and naturally central in the painting, the mother is an equally crucial and essential image, expressed with reverent care, portrayed in intimate detail, flowing as a dominant presence around the infant. And what has surprised me, in my admittedly limited reading and study of a number of these paintings, is the extraordinary availability in painted art, of a different theological grammar and vocabulary.

Now this is a thought I am developing, but as one example of what I am after - I have been studying the body language of the mother and what that might imply about the child. Especially the facial expression. Sad, serene, joyful, composed, in prayer eyes closed, in wonder eyes wide open, head bowed in adoration - or resignation...and so on.

I came across the ink drawing of Rogier Van Der Weyden, now held at the Louvre. It is exquisite, a softly lined and shaded sketch that says more than any finished oil, a most beautiful theological statement of purity and feminine beauty, and while the head is bowed, the eyes are open, the face is strong, and her attention is focused off stage, contemplative yet concentrated. What is going on? Just as in film the look off-stage is towards that which the viewer cannot see, but must imagine through the facial expression of the actor, so in this sketch we have to imagine what it is she gazes at in that way. Artists know very well that facial expression and the focus of the eyes is deeply suggestive to the viewer's imagination. "The Head of the Virgin" is inclined towards ...what? Depends whether this is before the annunciation, after it but before the birth, or after the child is born. Before the annunciation, a young woman thoughtful and composed; after the annunciation resigned to a future to which she willingly surrendered; after the birth, wonder, even adoration but qualified by an expression of sadness?

And my question is - knowing the Christian story, and being familiar with the nativity  and birth narratives, and belonging to a Christian community of faith, what theological conclusions are drawn from that face, that attentiveness, that focus off-stage? And how important is our imagination as a nourishment of what we already believe, and an enrichment of how we think of Jesus? 

R S Thomas, the Crucified God and the virtue of metaphysical humility

Chris McIntosh is a fellow enthusiast for the poetry of R S Thomas. Indeed she is an RST pilgrim who recently went looking again for the haunts of the finest religious poet of the second half of the 20th Century (see her post for 17 July). She asked in her recent comment if I'd come upon Thomas's 1990 collection, Counterpoint, and confesses reluctance to write about them. And when you read them you can understand why the hesitation. Yet they are a remarkably important contribution to Christian thought, representing a voice too often muted in Christian spirituality. So at least some thoughts and initial reflections.

Some of the poems in Counterpoint assert faith at its most interrogative, that is, to read them is to be interrogated, asked questions we'd rather not answer, but that won't go away. And for those who need certainty and not only assurance but chronic reassurance, some of them contain carpet pulling assertions that leave comfortable faith discomfited on the floor. And some of them contain that pastoral tenderness that was seldom sentimental, but understood and respected human fragility, shared that wistful longing to know, to really know, who God is and what God is about, in a world with so many hard and dangerous places, so many dark corners, so much that causes hurt.

Much of Thomas's poetry is therefore in the minor key, and much that would be called negative emotion is drawn into a vision of human existence where the negative has its positive counterpoint, and the minor anticipates the major, even when the major is indicated rather than intimated. To change the metaphor, Thomas's poetry, like Van Gogh's painting, acknowledged, even celebrated light, but against cobalt blue, implied menacing shadow, even in some paintings, impressions of unrelieved dullness or darkness. The contrast of dark and light, minor and major, despair and hope, doubt and faith, carefree joy and recurring sorrow, mirrors for Thomas the poet the task of Christian theology, which is not to explain away the negative, or deny it, or make such experience occasion for guilt. For Thomas any escapist or triumphalist theology lacks a sufficient metaphysical humility, claims more than is warranted by human experience, and simply leaves unaddressed by Christian theology those experiences inevitable in mortal existence, of ambiguity, of desolation, of existential ache for meaning, belonging and hope. You can't have Van Gogh without the cobalt blue - the starry night is glorious because as well as the swirling spheres of coarse brushed gold, there is the background of contrasting space, distance, darkness.

  At times in the Counterpoint collection, there is a sense of a Christian holding on to faith by fingertips and precarious toe-holds. But taken as a whole they are poems of astonishing grasp, a profound Christian theology in which God is neither trivialised nor analysed, but acknowledged as the overwhelming Reality that permeates and penetrates a universe in which all human existence would otherwise be fleeting accident registering for nanoseconds in a story bleakly eternal. Thomas's poetry has as its theological sub-structure the Christian story. And the four suites of poems in Counterpoint demonstrate a soul that has learned metaphysical humility, not docility, not resignation, Thomas is not God's 'yes-man'; but in his questioning he will accept neither trite answers nor final negations. Because at the heart of Thomas's poetry, as the glowing core from which his creative energy was drawn, is the cross, the crucified Christ, the God who scandalises all theology by being born human, suffering, dying, and thus through love defiant in resurrection, contradicting the tendency of the universe to atrophy and die. Wherever else the universe is going, according to Thomas it will not outrun the grasping arms of the crucified God. Here is just one poem, whose last clause captures in six words, the eternally patient movement of God, outwards in Love, towards a recalcitrant but cherished creation.

They set up their decoy

in the Hebrew sunlight. What

for? Did they expect

death to come sooner

to disprove his claim

to be God's son? Who

can shoot down God?

Darkness arrived at midday, the shadow

of whose wing? The blood

ticked from the cross, but it was not

their time it kept. It was no

time at all, but the accompaniment

to a face staring,

as over the centuries

it has stared, from unfathomable

darkness into unfathomable light.

R S Thomas, Collected Later Poems, (Bloodaxe, 2004), page 108.

Four question marks in one poem. And those last six words. Van Gogh's starry night again?