Interview

Art

Attention

Culture

S&U interviews

6 February 2025

5 min read

Interview: Alastair Gordon on the artist’s attention

Why the overlooked and everyday capture the creative gaze.

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

An artist sits in front of a board covered in images, canvases and paper.

The careers of artists rarely progress in a simple linear fashion. That was very much the experience of Alastair Gordon in 2024. Gordon is co-founder of Morphē Arts, a painter, art tutor at Leith School of Art and a contributor to Seen & Unseen. He works from his studio in South London and exhibits with galleries and art fairs across the UK, Europe and the US. His experience in the past year opens up fascinating avenues into guidance, focus and prayer.

He says that: “In many ways, I achieved none of the goals I set for myself last year. I didn’t generate more income in the studio than the previous year, I wasn’t invited to exhibit at the prominent LA gallery I had in my sights, and I didn’t make it into Modern Painters magazine.

Yet, I had an extraordinary year exhibiting that excelled my expectations. Exhibiting at An Lanntair Gallery in the Outer Hebrides marked my first museum show. I completed my first public commission for a church in South London, and my fourth book, Lost Things, co-written with the wonderful poet Ed Mayhew, is ready for release next month.

This past year taught me a valuable lesson about not fixating on goals as defined by the art world. Instead, I learned to focus more on what truly matters: the work that really matters and the people I hope to connect with through my painting.”

One of the surprising opportunities that came to him in 2024 was a commission to paint for a church. He says of this that: “It was a wonderful opportunity to create a painting for All Saints, Wandsworth. It’s unusual to have the chance to make a large work that resonates so deeply with my Christian faith. The painting is centred around the theme of prayer, and I aimed to draw on art historical references to prayer while incorporating the prayers of the current church congregation.

When I was working on the imagery for 'Prayer of the Saints,' I focused on key ideas related to the prayers of the church congregation—past, present, and future. Commissioned to complete the nine vacant panels in the chancel, I faced a unique compositional challenge.

The motifs of olive leaves, lilies, white roses, pebbles, and feathers symbolise quiet petitions to God. The central panel features an open Bible to Philippians 4:6, accompanied by a handwritten journal with a sketch of a stained-glass window and a prayer of Augustine, as well as a broken mobile phone that represents a longing to communicate.

I included images of Wandsworth, Wimbledon, and Battersea to reflect our prayers for the local community, alongside portraits of current missionaries and a world map highlighting our prayers for God’s mission abroad. A portrait of a cherished brother who died young serves as a poignant reminder of our prayers for lament and hope.”

As a result, he says: “The painting features flowers like white roses and lilies, which are often observed in Western art as symbols of prayer, alongside images of the local community, held in reverence by the congregation and the missionaries they support worldwide.”

The philosopher Simone Weil suggested that attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same as prayer. Gordon says that this insight on attention and prayer resonates deeply with his experience as an artist: “When I engage fully in my work, that heightened attention feels like a form of prayer.”

An altar is surrounded behind by a curved wall displaying art work on panels. — Prayer of the Saints, Wandsworth

Looking at the overlooked is central to my artistic practice. I feel a resonance with artists of the past who have focused on the everyday moments.

His latest book project, a collaboration with Ed Mayhew, touches on similar themes: “It started with a glimmer. Two years ago, Ed sent me a poem and asked if I would like to create a painting in response. It was the most beautiful poem and an enticing invitation. I made a painting and sent it back to him. He replied with another poem, and I responded with another painting. This back-and-forth continued, and before we knew it, we had created 25 poems and paintings in collaboration.

The connection between words and images was foremost in our thinking for this project. I didn’t want to illustrate so much as to respond to Ed’s words through paint and drawing. Similarly, when Ed returned my paintings with words, he aimed not so much to describe but also to converse. Our hope was to create an equal exchange between word and image, allowing each to complement and enhance the other.

Lost Things is a precious collaboration. We are very grateful for this partnership and the unique book it has produced. Lost Things explores all the things that go missing in life, the hopes we have for their return, and the love we share for the overlooked. This book explores the oddities that have been misplaced or forgotten—strange objects that wash up on the shore, appear in your sock drawer, or disappear into the loft for decades. It also reflects on the people we have lost or forgotten. In this way, the book takes a playful approach while also pointing toward deeper truths.

Paying attention in this way to what others have overlooked or lost seems very much the task of artists: “Looking at the overlooked is central to my artistic practice. I feel a resonance with artists of the past who have focused on the everyday moments that might otherwise go unobserved. Most often, it’s the mundane objects that have become so familiar that they almost become invisible.

Focusing on details—colours, shapes, emotions, and often overlooked objects—allows me to connect with something greater. It feels like speaking in tongues; the act of creation transcends words and expresses something less tangible. At times, the meaning isn’t clear, and I need to wait for it to be revealed.”

All this would seem to have been very much the case in the past year, where unanticipated opportunities led to wonderful work and exciting new projects.

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Article

Books

Character

Culture

Virtues

3 December 2024

5 min read

In defence of Jane Austen’s unlikeable heroine

Fanny Price: passive and prudish or brave and resilient?

Beatrice Scudeler

Beatrice writes on literature, religion, the arts, and the family. Her published work can be found here.

A 18th century woman sits at a desk, beside a candle and stares out the window.

Frances O'Conner as Fanny in Mansfield Park, 1999.

BBC Films.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that nobody has ever liked Fanny Price. Or is it? Many in Austen’s own family liked the heroine of Mansfield Park. Her sister Cassandra was ‘fond’ of Fanny; her brother Francis called her ‘delightful’. Early critics of Austen’s works, like archbishop Richard Whately, also praised both the novel and its protagonist.

Where does our current dislike towards Fanny Price come from, then? The major literary critics of the last century certainly didn’t help. Lionel Trilling paved the way, announcing confidently in the 1960s that ‘Nobody, I believe, has ever found it possible to like the heroine of Mansfield Park’; Kingsley Amis even called Fanny a ‘monster of complacency and pride’. Two decades later, Tony Tanner agreed: ‘Even sympathetic readers have often found [Fanny] something of a prig…nobody falls in love with [her]’. The list goes on.

But we can’t blame academia alone. Sometime in the twentieth century, we simply stopped liking Fanny. Most Austen readers I know rank her as the worst of her heroines. We don’t like her moralising, her priggishness, and her insistence that she must follow her conscience along with the religious precepts which she holds so dear. To make her appealing to contemporary viewers, both major recent adaptations of the novel (Patricia Rozema’s 1999 film adaptation and Iain B. MacDonald’s 2007 TV adaptation) completely butchered her, turning a quiet, timid character into an outspoken Elizabeth Bennet type. The problem is not that we think Fanny is evil, it’s that we find her boring.

Enter Whit Stillman’s brilliant 1990 film Metropolitan, itself a loose adaptation of Austen’s novel. Tom Townsend, one of the film’s young protagonists, recommends the very essay by Lionel Trilling that I’ve cited above to Audrey Rouget, the main character and moral compass of the film. When they later discuss the essay, Audrey is puzzled by Trilling’s dislike of Fanny:

I think [Trilling] is very strange. He says that nobody could like the heroine of Mansfield Park? I like her. Then he goes on and on about how we modern people today with our modern attitudes bitterly resent Mansfield Park because…its heroine is virtuous? What’s wrong with a novel having a virtuous heroine?

Trilling is at least partly right. Fanny, with her religious principles, offends our modern sensibilities. Our reading culture is one deeply embarrassed by goodness, and Fanny’s piety makes us deeply uncomfortable. But Audrey is right, too. There shouldn’t be anything wrong with ‘a novel having a virtuous heroine’. What if the fault is not with Fanny Price, but with us, the readers? What if we’ve simply lost our taste for goodness?

Fanny is often compared unfavourably to Pride and Prejudice’s Elizabeth Bennet. Mary Crawford, the argument goes, is the Elizabeth Bennet character in Mansfield Park: blunt, stubborn, self-assured. Fanny, on the other hand, is a kind of Charlotte Lucas, quiet, introspective, and concerned with social mores. But following her conscience doesn’t squash Fanny’s individuality, and neither does it make her ‘conventional’. This is only true on a surface level.

Presentism, the insistence to project current sensibilities onto the past, is the poison of good literature.

In fact, these four characters (Elizabeth, Charlotte, Mary, and Fanny) represent examples of real versus false virtues – what philosopher Alasdair Macintyre would call ‘simulacra’ of virtue. While both Elizabeth Bennet and Mary Crawford are opinionated, only Elizabeth is truly brave. Mary, though she acts like she doesn’t care about social norms, is all too eager to marry Fanny off to her brother Henry – after he has committed adultery with a married woman – for the sake of keeping appearances. Similarly, although both Charlotte Lucas and Fanny Price are reserved, Fanny’s reserve comes from humility, Charlotte’s from the kind of timidity that is a failure of courage.

I think that’s precisely the challenge that Austen sets for us in Mansfield Park: to discern true from simulated virtue, even when true virtue might be less immediately attractive, less noticeable. When we look below the surface, Fanny emerges not as a passive, prudish character, but rather as brave and resilient. She may not be witty, but she is not a pushover. She rejects Henry Crawford’s proposal of marriage even as her uncle Sir Thomas pressures her to accept, on the grounds that he’s not good enough for her.

By going against the will of her uncle Sir Thomas, Fanny finds herself banished from Mansfield Park, the only place she knows as her home. She’s sent off to visit her parents in Portsmouth, not knowing when she’ll be allowed back. What’s more, she is rejecting the prospect of financial security through marriage with a rich man for the sake of her principles. She neither respects nor loves Crawford enough for the commitment of marriage: ‘I—I cannot like him, sir, well enough to marry him’, she confesses to her uncle despite her own shyness. In her confidence about a decision that will affect her future happiness, she can be as headstrong as Elizabeth Bennet is when she turns down Mr. Collins.

Once we acknowledge how brave and resilient Fanny can truly be, we can begin to cherish her other qualities, too. Still, someone might ask, why do we need to force ourselves to appreciate characters like Fanny in the first place? Why can’t we just leave people to have their own taste in literature? To that I answer: if we have come to dislike a character for being virtuous, as Trilling claims, isn’t that in itself pretty compelling evidence that something has gone amiss in our literary taste? Don’t we need to rediscover our lost enjoyment of goodness, if we want our culture to be a flourishing one?

Fortunately, the line connecting Austen to our culture today has not been entirely cut off. ‘Somewhere between us and [Jane Austen], the chasm runs’, wrote C. S. Lewis around the same time that Trilling pronounced Fanny Price to be unlikeable. Perhaps they were both wrong. If literary critics won’t value characters like Fanny, then it’s the common reader’s job to do so. Metropolitan’s Audrey is the fictionalised appreciator of Fanny Price par excellence, a custodian of good taste. But I remain hopeful that there are Audreys in real life, too: readers who are perceptive enough to appreciate Fanny; readers who, instead of judging a character written 200 years ago for not being ‘modern’ enough, choose to let past literature challenge their current assumptions. Presentism, the insistence to project current sensibilities onto the past, is the poison of good literature. Fanny Price, with all of her goodness, is the perfect cure.