Article

Art

Change

Music

16 November 2023

4 min read

Imagine a day in the life of a Beatle

From an era before selfies, Paul McCartney’s cache of photos, even the out of focus ones, prompts Jamie Mulvaney to consider what perspective we need on ourselves.

Jamie Mulvaney

Jamie is Vicar of St Michael's Chester Square, London.

Two gallery vistor stair at four photo portraits of The Beatles.

Viewing Paul McCartney Photographs 1963–64: Eyes of the Storm.

National Portrait Gallery.

Imagine a day in the life of a Beatle. It's easy if you try. Or is it?

Last year, the late Matthew Perry allowed us a searing insight into life with a rollicking read about his very high highs and very low lows. Yet more books have been published recently on the toxicity of fame. Britney Spears is the subject of an autobiography and a biography. Another simply borrows the title, Toxic. John Updike wrote that 'fame is the mask that eats the face'. Baz Luhrmann last year documented Elvis Presley's destruction in his typically kaleidoscopic way. And into this media mix a recent exhibition shows a more innocent, intimate moment in the fame prototype of Beatlemania, intriguingly entitled Eyes of the Storm.

Surely with the Beatles predating the selfie-stick and Snapchat, we'd be reliant on paparazzi. But as Sir Paul McCartney can play pretty much every musical instrument, it's not a surprise he knows how to use a camera. And so, it emerged during lockdown that he had kept 1,000 previously unseen photos from 1961-1963.

To relaunch the beautifully remodelled National Portrait Gallery, McCartney displayed a whole cache of photos. One of the criticisms of present-day photography is that it's too easy, that we retain all sorts of out-of-focus photos on our phone. McCartney had preserved all these, and although it's curated and edited, there's many photos that wouldn't normally be seen.

You get the fab four goofing about, and also in quieter moments. There's young George looking shattered in the back of a car, and John concentrating. McCartney forgot that Lennon pulled this particular face, with his finger to his lip. His song 'Help!' emerged a year later. He told Playboy, 'I was fat and depressed, and I was crying out for 'help'.’ They were indeed in the eye of a storm.

We’ve lived with an orthodoxy that we understand ourselves through self-expression – that we ourselves are the ones to define who we are.

And in the middle of the storm, we see the Beatles finding moments of joy. They land in New York for the Ed Sullivan Show, at the top of the charts and the top of their fame. Fans chasing them down Manhattan streets, fans balancing precariously on an airport roof, and one inexplicably holds a monkey. American optimism had been battered by JFK's assassination and the Beatles' arrival was a welcome respite. This joy became even clearer (and more vivid?) as McCartney switched to colour when they reached Miami. But before the colour, the songwriter in conversation with Stanley Tucci singled out seeing a worker he snapped while they were on the train – perhaps a mirror to his own working-class roots and family.

But then there are also the more explicit self-reflections… A series that struck me were McCartney's self-portraits, looking in mirror, out of focus. McCartney said that his first thought was this was the National Portrait Gallery - at least they could be in focus! But then he realised they had a warmth, and a softness to them.

Those of us who are not Beatles, or famous, also often live our lives out of focus, with blind spots, or a little dizzy from the storms around us and within us. Canadian Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor, before the selfie was invented, wrote about our self-perception in relation to the outside world, and that we are 'self-interpreting animals'.

Since the eighteenth century we’ve lived with an orthodoxy that we understand ourselves through self-expression – that we ourselves are the ones to define who we are and how we relate to the world - even how we relate to ourselves. It’s so much the norm, it might seem confronting to question it, but in an increasingly confusing world, this is an increasingly difficult way to understand ourselves. Whilst many of the Beatles' songs are about perception, King David also wrote in the psalms about our need for an external perspective:

'You have searched me, Lord,

and you know me.

You know when I sit and when I rise;

you perceive my thoughts from afar.'

What we each need is a perspective on ourselves from the outside that is warm, soft, but also in focus. What if there was a perspective on ourselves free from blind spots, a precision lens that fully sees and fully understands the essence of who we are, and who we might be? Someone who sees the deleted photos, and yet is completely gentle and loving in how they see us? The way we truly understand ourselves is in relation to our Creator. God shows us both what is seen and unseen. Like in these photos, God is not fazed by the contrast of light and darkness, and provides a way out of the storm:

'Search me, God, and know my heart;

test me and know my anxious thoughts.

See if there is any offensive way in me,

and lead me in the way everlasting.'

Interview

Art

Culture

Freedom of Belief

Trauma

5 June 2024

9 min read

The women with tears of gold

Artist Hannah Thomas’ visceral and moving portraits offer a glimpse into suffering, and healing, souls.

Jane Cacouris

Jane Cacouris is a writer and consultant working in international development on environment, poverty and livelihood issues.

A triptych of three portraits depicting of white shawled women agains a gold background

Hannah Thomas

“We may understand the statistics of violence against women, and the catastrophic effects such violence has on the fabric of society, but we don’t comprehend it until it is associated with a face, a voice, a story.”

Christopher Bailey, World Health Organization

In March of this year on International Women’s Day, I was invited to attend the art exhibition and book launch of Tears of Gold by artist, Hannah Rose Thomas. Visceral and moving, the exhibition included both Hannah’s paintings and the self portraits of women survivors of ethnic and religious persecution, forced displacement and sexual violence; Yazidi women who escaped ISIS captivity in Iraq, Rohingya women who fled violence in Myanmar and Nigerian women who are survivors of Boko Haram and Fulani violence.

As I walked around the exhibition looking at the faces of thirty-three girls and women ranging in age from twelve to fifty years old, I saw faces that radiated dignity and resilience but also pain and grief that is beyond words. Most are looking away, but a few look straight ahead, their eyes locking with the eyes of the onlooker.

One was of Charity. As a woman myself, I felt an unexplained connection with this woman looking straight at me from the painting. She asked without words that I try to understand something of her suffering. Charity was held captive by Boko Haram in Northern Nigeria for three years and forced to “marry” one of her captors and convert from Christianity to Islam. She was raped and gave birth in captivity to a baby girl named Rahila. When Charity was eventually rescued from her ordeal and reunited with her husband in a camp for internally displaced people, her husband beat her and rejected her baby. Now on a daily basis, she faces abuse and isolation in the camp. Although she is no longer harmed by her perpetrators, she is still paying for their crimes.

A painting of a black woman crying golden tears

Aisha's painting her self portrait.

A portrait of a white-shawled woman against a golden background.

Portrait of Basse.

Portrait of Charity.

Portrait of a Yazidi woman.

A group of Nigerian women hold up self-portraits they have painted.

Nigerian art project participants.

Another, Basse. The raw pain in her eyes strikes me. At the time Hannah painted her in 2017, it was three years since Basse’s daughter (age six) had been taken by Daesh (ISIS) after their Yazedi community was attacked and displaced in Sinjar in Iraq. She had since found her daughter’s photo on a “marketplace” website of girls for sale. As a mother myself I can only just begin to comprehend her anguish as one mother to another we gaze at each other through the painting.

As works of art, the portraits are extraordinarily skillful and beautiful, but they are so much more than that. They offer a glimpse into the soul of women who have experienced the most unspeakable suffering. In the words of Prince Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, the former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, they are Hannah’s “witness statement” for and on behalf of thirty-three brave women survivors, as well as shining a spotlight on the issue of gender-based violence that affects millions of women (a staggering one in three according to UN Women) across the world today.

From refugee camps to Whitehall

When I caught up with Hannah recently, she spoke about the privilege of meeting these women during the trauma-healing art workshops she organised with support of local partners and the sponsorship of charities (including BRAC, Open Doors, World Vision and Bellwether International).

Starting out as an Arabic student in Jordan, she had her first opportunity to work with Syrian refugees for the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) in 2014. She began to paint the portraits of some of the refugees to show the real people behind the statistics of the global refugee crisis. This first gave her a glimpse of the healing potential of the arts and how it can be used as a tool for advocacy. Since Jordan, she’s been able to organise art projects with Yazidi women who escaped ISIS captivity in Iraqi Kurdistan in 2017; Rohingya refugees in Bangladeshi camps and Christian women survivors of sexual violence at the hands of Boko Haram and Fulani militants in Northern Nigeria, both in 2018, and most recently with women from the asylum-seeking community in Glasgow and Ukrainian refugees in Romania.

Warm and immensely articulate, Hannah seems impossibly young, grounded and humble to have been on such a remarkable life journey already, from working with the women in the camps to exhibiting her paintings in numerous places of influence including the European Parliament, the British Houses of Parliament and Buckingham Palace, even meeting HRH King Charles and showing him her portraits of the Yazedi women.

She describes King Charles, who went on to write the foreword for her book, as “genuinely interested in the stories of the women and really touched by them.”

Easing the burden

Creativity and an interest in the power of the story has always fascinated Hannah since she was a child. And as she writes in the introduction to Tears of Gold, all her work has a common thread of intention, “the restoration of these women’s voices”. She longs to give them a unique platform to tell their stories and refers to Holocaust survivor Primo Levi who describes the “unlistened-to story” as the enduring burden of the survivor.

This desire to give a voice to the voiceless has dove-tailed in a surprising and powerful way with her love of creativity. She says,

“Ever since I was young I have…had this desire to be a voice for the voiceless somehow but never imagined this could be through art. For many years there has been this tension between these two aspects of myself – this longing to express something of the beauty of God through my paintings and yet another aspect compelled to work in the sphere of social justice and human rights. God has woven together these two separate strands in the most beautiful and unexpected way.”

Drawing on the writings of the French Philosopher Simone Weil, Hannah asks in her book:

“can the creative arts create a space to pay attention to the unspeakable suffering of another? Can this help restore her?”

She tells me about the privilege of seeing the transformative impact on some of the women in her workshops as she taught them to put brush to paper to paint their self-portraits as a way of telling their stories. Many of the women painted themselves with tears. What is striking is that the stories behind the art reveal survivors not victims. One young Nigerian women Aisha, who had suffered rape at the hands of Fulani militants, painted gold tears she said symbolised God bestowing on her a crown of beauty instead of ashes; the oil of joy instead of mourning. Her story is about being precious in God’s eyes and his restorative healing in the face of unimaginable human-induced suffering.

One girl who took part in the Nigerian art project, Florence, had been raped by Fulani militants when she was ten years old. On her last day at Hannah’s art project she said, “Here I have found peace of mind.” God using his healing hand through art.

Connecting through vulnerability

“I had been on my own journey through post-traumatic stress disorder and depression. Painting has been an important part of my recovery journey and how I learned to find my voice again. This was one of the key motivations behind these art projects as I wanted to be able to bring this gift to others.”

The stigma that survivors of sexual violence face in their own communities when they return home is particularly painful. During the art project in Northern Nigeria, Hannah publicly shared about her own struggles, following a traumatic experience as a young woman, with survivors of rape by Boko Haram and Fulani militants. The women later reflected together that this vulnerability connected them as women and helped them realise that they were not to blame and need not be ashamed. It began to break the stigma and silence and to create a safe space of mutual trust so they could begin to share their experiences.

Hannah writes, “Sharing our stories enables us to connect, and reminds us that we have more in common than divides us”.

Most precious and in the image of God

Coming face to face with the portraits painted by Hannah, as the daughter of a Portuguese Catholic father, I recognised the likeness of the style, colour and reverence to the icon painting of Jesus that my parents have on their wall at home.

Drawing on Mother Theresa who talked about “seeking the face of God in everything, everyone, everywhere, all the time . . . especially in the distressing disguise of the poor,” Hannah’s portraits seek to revere each woman, to paint them with the love and devotion that God might. They remind us that they are all of exquisite value in God’s eyes.

Hannah’s expression lifts as she explains the methods of iconography that she studied and practiced in order to paint the women’s portraits and the palette she used. Gold leaf as a symbol of their sacredness to God regardless of what they have suffered, and lapis lazuli, the most expensive and illustrious blue pigment sourced from the mountains of Afghanistan and used by artists such as Michelangelo in the Renaissance period, unparalleled for its depth and richness and purity.

Each painting takes a long time to complete, around nine days, due to a layering process required to build up the colour in the natural pigments that are used, Hannah says:

“I'm interested in the quality of attention. And the contemplative prayerful aspect of the paintings. For me they're a form of prayer. Praying for each of the women I've met.”

She explains that the process of Byzantine painting is like a prayer. Starting with the under painting with all the dark colours, the background tone, and then slowly progressing on a journey, adding in highlights, from darkness to light. It’s “symbolic of the journey of the soul” she says.

And how are they received in the political corridors of power? Hannah pauses.

“The fact that it takes so much time. It’s different from a photograph. It invites people to contemplate in a way that's quite unique. In a place with such high pressure where there isn't much time to pause. It’s about creating space for contemplation. Where mentalities can shift. When you slow down and attend to the story.”

Impossible to measure the impact of such a shift, but when Hannah tells me about the number of politicians moved to tears by both the paintings and the women’s stories, it is clear the impact is there, measurable or not.

The art of attention

Tears of Gold opens with Hannah’s reflection on the art of attention. The word “attention” comes from the Latin ad tendere, meaning to reach towards. She writes:

“Only by reaching out in love and understanding can we overcome the agendas of violence and polarisation that seek to divide us.”

According to Rabbi Jonathan Sachs, this “reaching out” requires a commitment “to see in the human other a trace of the divine Other... to see the divine presence in the face of the stranger.”

When we reach out and allow ourselves to connect with the suffering of another whose pain is unimaginable – in Hannah’s words, to reach across the abyss of difference between us - we take a step towards understanding that suffering. Art can be a way of bridging that abyss, of opening a passage between us and the other. By taking a step towards the other and understanding just a fraction of their pain, we can be stirred.

Does the arts have the ability to stir us beyond the self-centred voyeurism that an overload of media imagery may have reduced human suffering to? By the way Hannah’s portraits have been received in the corridors of power in the Global North, we can only hope that the answer is yes.

Perhaps the arts are the answer to stirring humanity’s compassion to move beyond complacency.

And to demand a different way.

Tears of Gold by Hannah Rose Thomas can be purchased from Plough. All publisher profits from this book will be donated to relevant charities.