Review
Art
Awe and wonder
Culture
5 min read

Stanley Spencer’s seen and unseen world

The artist’s child-like sense of wonder saw heaven everywhere.

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

A woman dressed in dark Victorian clothes sits on a street among angels.
Detail: Sarah Tubb and the Heavenly Visitors.
Stanley Spencer Gallery

The seen and the unseen are keys to the work of Stanley Spencer but, while imagination is required to bring them together, they are not real and imaginary, rather they are real and real. 

The catalogue for Seeing the Unseen: Reality and Imagination in the Art of Stanley Spencer begins with a quote from Spencer’s writings:

“Everything has a sort of double meaning for me, there’s the ordinary, everyday meaning of things, and the imaginary meaning about it all, and I wanted to bring these things together.” 

Writing as he does, Spencer draws on the thinking of William Blake and Samuel Taylor Coleridge who, as Malcolm Guite has shown, viewed the imagination as not only shaping and putting things together, as Spencer describes, but also removing the dull film of familiarity that we put over everything, to see it with freshness once again. That freshness being primarily, the innocent view of a child.  

This exhibition brings together stunning examples of Spencer’s realistic works – his portraits and landscapes – which he often viewed as “potboilers” that merely paid the rent, and his biblical or symbolic works which had his heart and which, in his mind, formed a vast exhibition in a “church-house”. The curators, through their apt juxtapositions, compellingly demonstrate how Spencer brought together the seen and unseen in his work.  

View from Cookham Bridge (1936) is a realistic work that shows us beautifully a summer’s day in an area of great meaning to Spencer. He set his magnificent but unfinished Christ Preaching at Cookham Regatta, which is permanently on show at the Gallery and towers above everything else in the exhibition, just downstream of Cookham Bridge. Christ Preaching at Cookham Regatta teems with people and incident while, in View from Cookham Bridge, there are no people to be seen. Yet, in this painting, Spencer enables us to feel their presence – hearing the ducks and splash of oars, the chatter of people – thereby leading us to visualise the unseen. 

Spencer’s biblical and symbolic images are primarily set within Cookham, as the village itself suggested settings for specific scenes to him. The Betrayal is set at the end of Spencer’s own garden where the distinctive buildings of the maltings can be seen in the background. The Last Supper is then set in those same maltings, while Sarah Tubb and the Heavenly Visitors is set in the garden of Sarah Tubb’s home on Cookham High Street. Through this means Spencer emphasises both the universality and particularity of the Bible’s stories, in that they can be reimagined or reenacted anywhere and in the humblest of settings.  

Heaven in ordinary is a particular response to the incarnation – God moving into our neighbourhood – and is one that Spencer pushed to particular lengths, as is shown here through images from his Beatitudes of Love series. The Beatitudes are where Jesus turns our expectations of worldly success and achievement upside down by teaching that it is the meek and humble, the persecuted and those grieving who are blessed in God’s eyes and kingdom. In his Beatitudes of Love, Spencer demonstrates God’s acceptance of all by turning our expectations of beauty upside down and deliberately giving us characters who seem grotesque as those we are asked to admire and love. 

In doing so, he is also showing his retention of a child-like vision of the world as, from the perspective of a child, all adults are large, lumpy and disproportioned. Unlike a later great religious artist, Albert Herbert, who escaped from the limitations of adult vision by deliberately painting in a child-like manner, Spencer painted with a child-like vision. This can be seen in Christ Preaching at Cookham Regatta where his child-like Christ is both rotund but wonderfully energetic as he leans forcefully forwards from his wicker chair to engage with a group of children who are responding in the range of ways that children do, from attention and captivation to distraction and disinterest.  

His child-like vision and understanding are perhaps most clearly seen here in one of a series of pen and ink drawings undertaken for an almanack published by Chatto and Windus. These were domestic scenes illustrating the months of the year. The image for July is of his first wife Hilda smelling a flower. This is not an image of refined woman delicately savouring a pleasant odour, instead Hilda’s face is buried in the daisy, nose against pistil, as a child gaining the fullest experience possible.    

Blake was eight years old when he first saw angels in trees on Peckham Rye. Similarly, Spencer developed his sense of Cookham as a village in heaven in childhood. He never lost that child-like vision, although at times he questioned whether it had been successfully retained. Despite many poor choices and challenging life experiences, the works shown here reveal that Spencer carried a child-like sense of wonder through his life and work and, as a result, left as his legacy the deepest and broadest vision of heaven in ordinary that any artist has been able to gift to us.  

While his dream of a literal church-house in which to house his complete oeuvre was never a realisable aim, his works, taken as a whole, provide a key with which open a door allowing us to see what church and home, heaven and village, are together. Although small in size and therefore able to only show a minimal percentage of Spencer’s work at any one time, the Stanley Spencer Gallery, housed as it is in a former Wesleyan Chapel, creatively operates as a diminutive church-house for Stanley’s works, taking us deeper into his unique achievement one exhibition at a time. 

 

SEEING THE UNSEEN: Reality and Imagination in the Art of Stanley Spencer, Stanley Spencer Gallery, Cookham, 7 November 2024 – 30 March 2025 

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Review
Art
Community
Culture
5 min read

Ceremony's superpower is on show at Berwick Parade

Reinventing historic touchpoints between faith and community.

Susan is a writer specialising in visual arts and contributes to Art Quarterly, The Tablet, Church Times and Discover Britain.

A projected image of a person dressed as a mermaid being pushed on a trolley falls on the wall and windows of an old barracks.
The Maltings (Berwick) Trust, Jennifer Charlton Photography.

Watch the parade

Ceremony is beating a retreat. Although wheeled out for major life events: naming newborns, marriage and bidding last goodbyes, and for grand state and civic occasions, standing on ceremony is frowned upon in day-to-day life. Ritual is treated warily, in case it creates an ‘us and them’ chasm between participants, seen as elite, and spectators, presumed to be condemned to disempowering passivity. 

But what if, far from alienating people, the power of ritual, ceremony and spectacle could be a force for engagement? The church and military both have a history of creating, reinventing and refreshing rituals to meet changing social needs. The army chaplaincy is an invention of the late eighteeneeth century, responding to the move towards more settled communities of soldiers, requiring spiritual support. Drumhead altars, a centrepiece of November’s Festival of Remembrance, have origins going back into the mists of time, but quite how far back it is hard to say with certainty.  

Processions and festivities for holy days are more apparent in Catholic countries, with Seville’s Semana Santa parades springing to mind, but well -dressing, May Queens, harvest festivals and Remembrance Sunday reveal a continued desire for entwining of church and community rituals, across faith traditions. 

Art’s ability to step into the ceremonial space and create moments of communion, as well as giving voice to underrepresented groups, has been evident since Surrealism. British Surrealist Eileen Agar’s crustacean strewn ‘Ceremonial Hat for Eating Bouillabaisse’, 1936, attracted collective gasps when she wore it in London. In Sao Paolo in 1931, Brazilian modernist Flavio de Carvalho had to be rescued by police when he walked, hatless, in the opposite direction of a Corpus Christi procession, and the crowd wanted to beat him up. 

Artists can also create spectacles of togetherness and joy. 

Berwick Barracks is a challenging site for community arts. The massive walls and monumental stone-grey interior of Britian’s first purpose-built barracks is reminiscent of eighteenth century experiments in prison design. Even the windows on the living quarters, confirming it is not a prison, are tiny-paned and meanly spaced, like an afterthought dotted reluctantly on the overbearing grey expanse. 

But over the weekend of Berwick Parade, the barracks’ forbidding walls turned into a living portrait of the border town. Under a piercingly brilliant starlit sky – it was the night of the six planet alignment – an audience gathered in the middle of the parade ground to watch themselves, neighbours, friends and family members move across the barrack walls. Artist Matthew Rosier’s projection at x10 magnification transformed the townspeople into giants, and the forbidding military structure of Berwick Barracks into a canvas for joy and creativity. 

Berwick Parade shows you can draw community from a stone, forbidding, large grey stones at that. Paraders and audience were dazzled and dignified, seeing themselves anew. 

The dancing, riding and processing images were soundscaped by music from the repertoire of the Kings Own Scottish Borderers, who have their ceremonial base, and museum, at the barracks, accompanied by the Melrose and District Pipes and Drums. Positioned by the main gate, the musicians set the expectation of spectacle with the rousing music associated with marching bands, as Scotland the Brave gave way to Mairi’s Wedding, and then a medley of upbeat, om-papa outdoors tunes.  

Over 30 minutes, topped by veterans of the Kings Own Scottish Borderers and tailed by hi -vis vest wearing Berwick Parade production staff carrying metal barriers, a parade including processing clergy and the Bishop of Berwick, conga-ing medics in scrubs from Berwick Hospital, brownies, boys’ and girls' football teams, civic leaders in mayoral regalia, Morris, Highland and flamenco dancers, and midlife wild swimmers, shimmied across the walls. Berwick Riders Association were filmed on small ponies, so the magnified projection would not crop the riders into headless torsos. A wheelchair user crossed the expanse of barracks wall wearing a mermaid’s tail. Everybody involved was simultaneously true to life and larger than life. 

Consisting of 850 characters, some of Berwick’s residents played more than one role. “Ooh there’s Cheryl again” commented a spectator next to me, as another pageant of figures travelled across barracks’ perimeter. 

Speaking to Rossier the following morning, he revealed Parade participants had been filmed in the barracks, travelling across a10 metre stage. Magnification made these sequences large enough to cover one wall of the rectangular parade ground. Editing and projection created the appearance of participants entering at one corner and disappearing around the next.  

Movement filmed across short distances opened up participation in the Parade to people with mobility and health issues, in a way that physically journeying around the whole parade ground, repeated over three nights, never could. 

Filmed over six bitterly cold days, choreographer Chloe Sayers had to keep participants’ spirits and energy up as they devised ways of travelling across 10 metres that represented their personality, role and creativity. Sayers specialises with creating events with the public rather than professional dancers, and says that enabling people to express themselves through movement in spaces not always thought of as welcoming, breaks down barriers and creates a sense of ownership. 

Some of the funniest moments in Berwick Parade were rare breeds sheep hogging the limelight like divas, and children clowning around with policemen’s helmets and clipboards. Rosier says primary school years are a sweet spot for performance. ”I love the energy kids bring. We had all age groups, but the six- to 10-year-olds bring so much energy. They just bounce. They have no inhibitions but are good at following instructions. At 12 or 13 heads start to drop and they become more self-aware.” 

Rosier drew on his Irish Catholic mother’s tradition of ceremony and celebration with food and drinking, whether for a wedding or a funeral, to make Berwick Parade a fun place to hang out - food stalls included - beyond the performance. “I want people to have a nice time and not be subservient to the thing they have come to watch.” 

Berwick Parade shows you can draw community from a stone, forbidding, large grey stones at that. Paraders and audience were dazzled and dignified, seeing themselves anew. 

At King Charles’ coronation, the church’s ceremonial superpower was on display to the world. And as artists demonstrate, ceremony does not have to be confined to great occasions. Churches in all traditions can draw on their legacy of historic touchpoints between faith and community, to reinvent, reinstate and refresh rituals to engage with people’s contemporary concerns and hope. 

Join with us - Behind the Seen

Seen & Unseen is free for everyone and is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you’re enjoying Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Alongside other benefits (book discounts etc.), you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing what I’m reading and my reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin

Editor-in-Chief