Review

Art

Culture

13 January 2024

7 min read

The visionary artists finding heaven down here

Jonathan Evens explores a tradition of visionary artists whose works shed light on the material and spiritual worlds.

Jonathan Evens

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

An angelic figure meets a human above a cornfield beyond which is a power station.

Roger Wagner, Abraham and the Angels, 1986.

Everywhere is Heaven is an art exhibition of work by Stanley Spencer and Roger Wagner at the Stanley Spencer Gallery in Cookham. It’s the English village where Spencer lived most of his life and which he described as a “village in heaven”. ‘Everywhere is heaven’ is also a description of sacramental theology and a theme for British Visionary artists from William Blake to the present day.

Everywhere is Heaven is the gallery’s first collaboration with a living artist. Wagner has been deeply inspired by Spencer’s paintings, viewing Spencer as being “an artist who seemed to be doing exactly what I wanted to do”.

The work of these two artists has been brought together, in part, because both work in the tradition initiated by the visionary poet and artist, William Blake.

Both artists have been described as “visionary geniuses”, each seeking to evoke the mystical in everyday experience. Spencer depicted Cookham as ‘heaven on earth’ writing that “After steeping myself in the Bible I began to realise certain things equally inspiring to love, outside the Bible”.

This was the point when the holiness of things began to strike him meaning that he “became extremely busy, first at the front door and then at the side and back entrance of the Kingdom of Heaven, a place long familiar to me, but not in this new and significant way”. This was because “art seemed the only thing which revealed Heaven”. Similarly, Wagner, in paintings such as Abraham and the Angels or Walking on Water III, also evokes biblical happenings in contemporary settings. Exhibition curator Amanda Bradley Petitgas writes that “Wagner’s very human, sympathetic, biblical figures … inhabit our own modern world; we find Peter walking on the water in front of Battersea Power station, or Abraham quietly contemplative in front of Sizewell A nuclear power station”.

Stanley Spencer: John Donne arriving in Heaven 1911.

A painting of a group of figures in long vestments.

Oil on canvas, 37 x 40.5 cm. Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge.

Both are united by a love of “metaphysicals”, as Spencer described the metaphysical poets, with John Donne and Thomas Traherne, a theologian who wrote with a visionary innocence and found mysticism in the natural world, being particular influences. The title of the exhibition references Spencer’s own words about his painting, John Donne arriving in Heaven, and his description of the four figures facing in all directions because “everywhere is heaven so to speak”. Bradley Petitgas writes “that both Spencer and Wagner’s visionary innocence and the ability to find mysticism in the natural world” echo that found in the work of Traherne. While also noting that Wagner’s “deeply Christian paintings are founded on iconographical orthodoxy, each one a balanced expression of quiet beauty and accessible humanity – ‘heaven in ordinary’, to cite George Herbert”, another metaphysical poet who is key to Wagner’s vision.

Figures hover on a river foreshore against the background of a dock and power station chimneys

Roger Wagner, Walking on Water III 2005, oil on board, 76.2 x 101.5 cm. Private collection.

Roger Wagner, The Harvest is the end of the World and the Reapers are Angels, 1989, oil on canvas, 154.9 x 188 cm. Private collection.

Three angels figures converse wiithin an open furnace of a factory.

Roger Wagner, The Burning Fiery Furnace, 1989, mixed media on blue paper, 53.4 x 38 cm. Private collection.

The visionary tradition

The work of these two artists has been brought together, in part, because both work in the tradition initiated by the visionary poet and artist, William Blake. As Anthony Mould writes, “These are two painters that combine a type of Englishness to be found in William Blake’s ‘ancient time’ within a ‘landscape’ of their own familiarity”. The artist Betty Swanwick once described being part of "a small tradition of English painting that is a bit eccentric, a little odd and a little visionary". This is a tradition that begins with Blake and continues through Spencer to contemporary artists like Wagner. In briefly exploring this tradition further I shall introduce some of the other artists who also engage with their ideas and approaches.

A recent exhibition William Blake: Prophet Against Empire argued that Blake “responded to the tumultuous times he was living through as he witnessed the expansion of the British Empire, American Independence and the French Revolution” with “imaginative images and texts that resonated with this changing world” and which took a “critical stance against the Age of the Enlightenment with its emphasis on science and reason”. “Drawing on his deeply felt religious beliefs, Blake criticised empire, slavery and social inequality through his work” in order to create “an alternative universe that celebrates the imagination and communal kindness, where we can also rekindle our connection with the world around us”.

Blake’s visions were of spiritual reality breaking into the material world, so Christopher Rowland writes that the turbulent years of Blake’s life informed “his prophetic understanding of history”. His prophetic images and texts “were ‘prophetic’ not because Blake sought to predict what was going on—indeed they were written following these events”, rather, “he sought to plumb the depths of the historical and social dynamics which were at work in them”. Blake was “part of a tradition of radical non-conformity in English religion, with different ways of reading the Bible” which linked “the personal and the political”. Blake’s vision ultimately was one of building Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land.

Samuel Palmer knew Blake and was part of a group of artists known as ‘The Ancients’ who were his followers. Simon Court writes that as “deeply religious man, Palmer understood himself to be using his heightened perceptions to reveal (at least partially) a divine reality in nature” so that the Kent landscape of Shoreham, where ‘The Ancients’ were based for ten years, “becomes a little heaven on Earth”. David Jones, a contemporary of Spencer, spent his life creating poems and paintings that re-call before God events in the past so that they become here and now in their effect on us. He wrote of the Mass or Eucharist as being to do with the re-calling, re-presentation and re-membering of an original act and objects in a form that is different from but connected to the original act or object that is being recalled. His poems and paintings mirror the action of the Mass and so create a world that is a Eucharist. Fiona MacCarthy suggests that Jones combined the visual and verbal with a “creative intensity not seen in Britain since the time of William Blake”.

Among contemporary artists working within this tradition is Greg Tricker whose profound and simple style of paintings follows in the mystical and sacred tradition of art akin to the work of Georges Rouault and Cecil Collins. Qualities of myth, echoes of the Folk Art Spirit and elements of the circus feature in his work, which he often presents in themes; notably Paintings for Anne Frank, The Catacombs, and Francis of Assisi.

In understanding the ideas and approaches of artists in this tradition, including Spencer and Wagner, we need to turn to sacramental theology. Sacraments are things of the Church which are set apart and made holy. A sacrament is a pledge of God's love and a gift of God's life. Jesus took earthly things, water, bread and wine, and invested them with grace. A sacrament is therefore an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace. As a result, each day can be a sacrament if we practice a way to live life by recognising that God is present in each and every moment and with a selfless abandonment to God as a means of achieving grace and conquering pride and ego.

The Celtic Christians had this sense of the heavenly being found in the earthly, particularly in the ordinary events and tasks of home and work. They also sensed that every event or task can be blessed if we see God in it. As a result, they crafted prayers and blessings for many everyday tasks in daily life. The French Jesuit priest and writer Jean Pierre de Caussade spoke about 'The Sacrament of the Present Moment' which, as Elizabeth Ruth Obbard writes: “refers to God's coming to us at each moment, as really and truly as God is present in the Sacraments of the Church ... In other words, in each moment of our lives God is present under the signs of what is ordinary and mundane.” The philosopher, Simone Weil, stated that this kind of looking, which is the way in which artists such as Spencer and Wagner look, is prayer: “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love.” “Absolutely unmixed attention”, she claimed, “is prayer”.

When we pay attention to life in this way, we are, like Spencer, Wagner and other Visionary artists, looking with expectancy for a revelation of the divine in the ordinary sights, events, tasks and people that surround us. We are, in essence, praying the Lord’s Prayer, “your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as in heaven”. Indeed, not just praying it but living and being the Lord’s Prayer. That is sacramental theology, and it is what characterises the vision of Spencer, Wagner and other Visionary artists; as a result, in their eyes, everywhere is heaven.

Everywhere is Heaven: Stanley Spencer & Roger Wagner, until 24th March 2024, Stanley Spencer Gallery, Cookham.

Review

Culture

Film & TV

Language

Music

14 November 2025

6 min read

The Phoenician Scheme - opening the mind to wider horizons

Wes Anderson's new film widens our vision to a bigger world

Oliver Wright

Oliver is a Junior Research Fellow at Pembroke College, Oxford, writing and speaking about theology and AI.

Characters from a Wes Anderson film sit in a stylish plane interior.

Benicio del Toro and Mia Threapleton star.

Wes Anderson’s latest film – The Phoenician Scheme – has caused as much confusion amongst critics and viewers as it has the usual delight. It tells the story of Anatole – Zsa-Zsa – Korda, his mad-cap business scheme across an imagined near-Eastern world, and his growing relationship with his daughter (apparently), Liesl, a novitiate nun. There are the usual Anderson-ian tropes and characters, with superb cameos by Tom Hanks, Richard Ayoade, and Benedict Cumberbatch (worth watching in itself), and a real star turn for the young Liesl, Mia Threapleton.

I first watched it on a transatlantic flight (viewer advisory: there are several scenes in rickety planes). I was hooked from the first moment. Why? Not just the usual Anderson style and panache and dead-pan weird story and acting. It was the music. Anderson himself first trained as a musician. It shouldn’t be a surprise that amidst the rest of Anderson’s meticulously designed and curated world the music should carry so much meaning.

The opening scene (no spoiler, it’s in the trailer), involves the burning wreckage of a plane (viewer advisory). There are birds – crows, hovering. And from the wreckage, bloodied but unbowed, emerges Korda. We hear from a voiceover that this is by no means the first assassination attempt he has survived. It won’t be his last. But the music at this precise point? It is a dark and brooding short melodic fragment. Does this portray a dark and brooding – evil, even – presence in the main character? Indeed, this dark melodic fragment follows Korda around the whole film, a leitmotif.

But far from it. And this is what delighted me and hooked me. Because this isn’t just any old dark and brooding melodic fragment. It is the opening notes of Stravinsky’s magnificent ballet score, his first hit for the Russian impresario in Paris, Diaghilev and his ‘Ballets Russes’, The Firebird. Now here’s the fun thing. If you know the ballet, you know that it is the magic of the firebird’s feather which brings new life out of death in the ballet’s wonderful conclusion. And that is because the Firebird story itself is based on another mythical bird-creature – the phoenix (remember the title of the movie). The mythical phoenix is a bird which cyclically dies in flames, only to be reborn from the ashes to new life. So immediately, even though all we can see is the burnt-out wreckage of a plane, what we might think to ourselves if we know our Stravinsky, is that perhaps what this melodic fragment signifies, far from a brooding menacing presence, is someone who is constantly going to reemerge from the ashes to new life. In fact, I immediately felt I would be surprised if that wouldn’t happen. Korda himself says at a certain point ‘I won’t die, I never do’. Just from a musical fragment, the whole story can be seen in one glimpse.

There are two other Stravinsky ballets which Anderson skilfully deploys (although less intrusively than the Firebird theme): the joyous whirligig of the opening of Petrushka, and the searing epilogue of the ballet Apollo. Now the Petrushka music does seem to be associated with another character, just like Firebird is associated with Korda. In the movie, Petrushka appears in two moments of significance for Liesl, (apparently) Korda’s daughter, the novitiate nun (and therefore herself already intimately associated with music – The Sound of Music). But the telling thing here is that, unlike Firebird, Petrushka (the ballet) doesn’t end well for its eponymous puppet-hero. Petrushka is killed by another puppet, with only a fleeting appearance at the end as a ghost. So the music of the ballet of Petrushka, despite the excerpt we hear being full of joyousness and innocent youthful energy, and its association with Liesl, suggests that her journey in the film is going to go in a very different direction to the convent of her initial intentions. Once again, knowing the music and the whole pattern of it can foretell an entire history that will unfold, even just from a mere fragment.

Now the next thing that is so fascinating here is the combination of Stravinsky and Wes Anderson. Stravinsky wrote several ballet scores for the ‘Ballet Russes’ and Diaghilev in the glamour of Paris of the 1920s and 1930s (amongst other famous ones are The Rite of Spring (which caused a riot), Orpheus, and Pulcinella). They are highly stylised pieces, often returning to Classical ideas and tropes (musically, as well as in theme), presenting stylised and formal dances, tableaux. And whilst all these descriptions could be applied to Anderson’s films, The Phoenician Scheme itself presents a series of quirkily introduced tableaux, with their own distinctive characters and settings. And, in the concluding scene, set in a theatre, all the characters are present all at once. A miniature mechanical device representing all of Korda’s business interests appears on a stage. And the music at that point? The opening movement of Pictures at an Exhibition (by Mussorgsky, a Russian composer from the generation before Stravinsky), music which presents its own series of musical tableaux. Artistic tableau, musical tableau, ballet, and now film presented as a series of tableaux all coming together in Anderson’s fertile imagination.

But there is one last thing that is fascinating for us in this presentation of music and art and film and plot. There is a much earlier precursor for the technique I referred to above, of one musical fragment potentially carrying with it the implication and meaning of the whole work. That earlier precursor for this technique is found in the New Testament. The authors of the New Testament, especially Paul, were saturated in the texts which we now call the Old Testament, or what they thought of as their Scriptures (just as, we might say, Anderson is clearly saturated in Stravinsky). Scholars think the New Testament writers assumed a familiarity with those Scriptures in the hearers and readers of their new writings, or, alternatively, they were helping their hearers and readers newly think and imagine along the lines set out in the Scriptures. Time and again, as Richard Hays masterfully showed (in Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul, and Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels), the authors resort to a technique called metalepsis. That is, in quoting or near quoting a few words or a phrase from their Scriptures, not only are the hearers/readers meant to understand that it is a quotation, but to import the sense of the entire passage or even book from which that miniature quotation emerges. It was Richard Hays’s groundbreaking work on this literary hermeneutical aspect which caused a sensation in New Testament studies in the 1980s and 1990s when it first emerged, because it opened up whole new lines of interpretation, without any question remaining about their veracity. What it means is that, as we read the New Testament, we have constantly to be aware of what Scriptures the writer had in mind, either consciously or semi-consciously, in order to allow that thought-world to permeate our reading. It is a reminder, whatever we are reading or watching or listening to, never to be too reductive about our own cultural horizons when we approach such a text, but to be listening and open and willing to be enlarged by the life-world of the text before us, as the great philosopher Paul Ricoeur used to say.

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