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Some Words
by the artist
extracted
from an interview with
Herbert Glenn
I remember
that at Nursery School, one punishment was to be ‘sent to the corner’.
There you stood, in cramped shame, your back to the continuing class,
with just the corner of the plain walls to look at. Aged 5, I suppose,
I loved it: on the grubby wall as I gazed at it, I invented landscapes
mapped in the cracking tatty paint, where the river was, the railway,
the post office and the coppice, whatever. Shame and discomfort
evaporated as I watched. Often in distress, such as bereavement, people
find their greatest capacity for gentility and generosity. But I can
never have expected that I would imagine Jesus noting the fact that the
carpenter who hands me my cross has a work-worn broken finger-nail.
Stations
of the Cross
forms a project inspired by conversations with Father Martin Eastwood of
the Church of St Andrew's Fulham Fields in London W14. The Church has a
set of bas-reliefs of the stations, dating from perhaps the
1920s, and Father Martin's idea has been to continue this theme in new
work that may bring fresh thought to the sequence.
Oddly it is not a sequence that has received such distinguished
treatment in the art of our civilisation — as has, for instance, the
full Life of Christ seen for us by Duccio or Fra Angelico or the Passion
brought to us by Donatello or Bach. In the recent century, however,
thin enough in terms of religious art, one singular highlight comes with
the Stations of the Cross at the Chapel designed and embellished by
Matisse, in Vence, not an hour from my home. The idea had something
going for it.
We strolled and we talked.
I was surprised but also troubled by my
immediate enthusiasm for the project. Yet I knew immediately the only
way in which I could envisage this story; timidly, the day after our
long and varied discussion and debate, I asked Father Martin what he
thought of the idea — that the Stations be 'seen' in the pictures as
if through the eyes of Jesus, rather than being presented as a
sequence of views of Him. If I achieve anything in these
pictures it will be no little thanks to Father Martin's instinctive,
immediate enthusiasm for this idea, mingled as it may well have been
with a sense of 'surprised but also troubled' on his part too.
Possibly my worry had been that few have the right, so to speak, to see
through the eyes of another, let alone through those of one they have
not met, let alone those of Jesus. Yet the theoretical antidote to that
worry came simply enough, in that if suffering is not somehow
immediate, its message is diluted. And somewhere an image of
Jesus as a bearded chap over there with his timber, fixes things in a
possibly unhelpful manner, both too remote and too specific, while I
hope an image that places us in his perspective may unearth useful
thoughts and empathy from our regimented visions as ‘third party’.
When you think about it, most pictures of something are ‘from the seer’s
eyes’; of course they are. But we don’t think about it. We
seldom notice how much of ourselves we see when we see out upon the
world. If there’s a finger across the lens we think the photograph is
spoilt and we take another. Yet Rodin’s Thinker would be seeing
his fist too, however much he may also contemplate the seething
awfulness of Hell below him or — as wags have it — wonder where he lost
the house keys. Much of my inspiration always comes from music and it
may or may not be helpful to mention here that Wagner’s Parsifal,
curiously often associated with Christian celebration of Easter, is for
me one of the most telling meditations on the crisis between merely
observing something and fully experiencing it.
The idea of incorporating parts of the seer’s self in an image, as it
were, is not new in my work. My so-called RoadMovie pictures of
landscape seen as if on the move, in a car, often include the rear-view
mirror, part of the dashboard or steering wheel, for instance, to place
you more firmly as the driver. (My love of music is a love of an art of
passage and time.) And it is familiar by implication to those who have
an acquaintance with Chinese scroll painting.
Indeed, after completing these pictures and finally deciding to keep to
the supposedly monochrome medium of charcoal, I realised in retrospect
how secretly important had been my memory of a Qing dynasty scroll I saw
in Paris in June 2004, Pines and Thuyas in Spring, by Zhu Da
(1624-1705), itself a copy of a piece by Shen Zhou done perhaps fifty
years earlier. This scroll is about 14 yards long, all in black ink and
washes on paper. Crassly called a ‘panorama’ in the catalogue, it tells
of an uphill walk past some trees on a rocky outcrop, towards a shaded
and restful view out to a further mountain ridge or pass; the gnarled
brushstrokes tell of the trees but feet away, and stabbing strokes of
the pricklesome pines in your hair. There at the summit you too rest,
to pick needles from your head and enjoy the sun through the softer
leaves that reward your climb. All in washes of gray.
These visual or technical ancestries are one thing. Many other themes
started to take on new life, however, once the idea had taken hold of
me.
For instance, I realise how distant we are from so many depictions; we
aren’t really quite there. When Jesus takes the Cross I want us to know
He takes in His hands, inches from His eyes, a raw, splintery
rifle-sight of railway sleepers few of us could even carry to the car,
let alone uphill to our death. The wood is against His cheek an inch or
two away and I want it inches from yours. His falls bring him to earth
(as we say, meaning something similar) where there is dust and pebbles,
some grass in the dirt and, to bless our fixed and tiny attention, some
flowers, small, glorious, cruciform tragedies of fragility and
magnificence — and some creepy-crawlies too, of course, trudging their
quotidian quotas unawares, like the immortal ploughman in the Breughel
painting of The Fall of Icarus...
Then come the faces, Pilate in his exasperation, the Carpenter in his
trade, His Mother's in — in agonised wonder? in some version of pride
and terror? Then Simon, Veronica, and so on. And as I worked the
pictures out in preliminary sketches I found that the more we are with
Him, or as Him, in a marvellous way we are also all the more with us, as
we look at the others who join Him. By some strange chemistry, we see
ourselves better in the onlookers and perpetrators than we would, I
feel, in a conventional view of the chap over there with his cross. We
become unavoidable, as does the plight of Jesus. This story is, as I
started to think, a story ever more resonant in seeing, in sight,
in close sight and drastic perspectives, how we see and how we
are seen.
And
conceits of sight are useless, unless — we see them...
extracted from an interview with Herbert Glenn;
26th January 2007
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