Skip to main content

Three paintings in a gallery

Between meetings yesterday in Manchester,  I dropped into the Manchester Art Gallery.

A collection representative of its solid, commercial nineteenth century roots with a commendable collection of Pre-Raphaelites including versions of both the iconic 'Scapegoat' and 'The Light of the World'.

For me there were three finds. The first was a Gwen John: The Convalescent:


In her trademark still interior a pallid girl reads with an abiding sense of effort underlying her quietness. The colours are drained and muted but the girl is now sitting upright, able to read at least. It was an image painted and re-painted so both had value for John, as image and materially. It has been suggested that it is symbolic of France (as John began to consider this image in the immediate post First World War world when France itself was convalescent).

I love her work for its still, contemplative quality but shot through with a robust, encompassing realism (especially around and in the portraits). John was by no means a simple, retiring figure: an introvert poised in contrast to her wildly extrovert brother, Augustus. She was, after all, both Rodin's model and his mistress (one of them). A situation requiring a certain robustness and common sense in expectation if one was to emerge whole (as she did).

The second was two unusual paintings by William Blake as they were designed to be decorative for his patron's, William Hayley's, library. A relationship that was difficult and lacked any robust navigating realism! One was of Shakespeare and the second (shown here) of Edmund Spenser (one of Blake's own favourite poets):


There is a subtle play on the image of Queen as both Faerie and monarch; and, I simply loved the idea of a library paneled by Blake. Sitting reading with eyes of variegated inspiration looking on with serious demanding glances.

Third was a painting by Winifred Nicholson - a perfect exemplar of flowers resting on window sill:



The delicate colour of the flowers set off by the white wrapping paper still attached to the pot. Flowers as islands of light in a human scale landscape. Nicholson said that flowers always evoked for her a 'key to the cosmos'. They are undoubtedly at one level functional: part of the process of reproduction yet they retain a sense of surplus gift, of simply being themselves in beauty. Nicholson had a deep sense of the graced, gifted nature of life to which the only meaningful response was celebration.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age

Searching for paradise in the hidden Himalayas

At moments of dislocation and intense social uncertainty people will appear offering the possibility of another land where people will be blessed, liberated and genuinely at home. In this case, it was not 'Brexit' but a hidden land of actual immortality, enfolded within the mountain ranges around Mt Kanchenjunga on the Nepalese/Sikkim border. Unlike Shangri-la, Beyul Demoshong was not simply a physical space, carefully hidden (as imagined in Hilton's Lost Horizon) but an occulted place spiritually hidden. The person offering this journey and opening the way to it was the 'crazy lama', Tulshuk Lingpa. Lingpa was a 'terton' a finder of 'terma' which were texts magically hidden until discovered at the right moment for them to be of maximum usefulness to people's spiritual development. They were often hidden by Padmasambhava, the robust wonder-working bringer of Buddhism to Tibet; and, Tibetan Buddhism is alive with such discoveries (though und

Parzival and the neutral angels

Fresh from contemplating 'Lost Christianity', I read Lindsay Clarke's fabulous re-telling of Wolfram von Eschenbach's poem, 'Parzival and the Stone from Heaven' from which 'Christendom' is lost! Von Eschenbach was a sacred poet but one of ecumenical sympathies where not only is Parzival's final battle (unknowingly) with his brother, the piebald Saracen, Feirefiz, essential to his self-discovery but the two of them enter the Grail castle together and are granted together a vision of the 'stone' that is the Grail. When Feirefiz asks whether it is permitted to see this Christian  mystery, Parzival answers (in Clarke's version) yes for, "all Nature's increase is there, so I think that this stone from Heaven must be a living emblem of the earth itself, which is mother and father to us all." There are knights, ladies, sorcerers, hermits and wise old hags abounding in Eschenbach's world but interestingly for a mediev