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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Article
Culture
Film & TV
5 min read

The Oscars celebrate a basic human trait - telling stories

A ‘seemingly absurd ritual’ reveals a little of who we are.
Mikey Madison, wearing a ball gown, clutches a golden Oscar statue.
Mikey Madison, star of Anora.
ABC.

I’m becoming more and more resolute in my belief that nothing is ever trivial.  

Not really.  

Not when you look at it for long enough, not when you offer it the gift of your curiosity, not when you’re convinced that culture is made up of a myriad of restless hearts.  

This resolute belief is the reason I tend to give the Oscars my attention. My full, non-judgmental, attention.  

The Academy Awards may seem trivial, especially this year. Especially this week, even. I mean, are we really going to talk about Timothée Chalamet’s yellow suit or Demi Moore’s gracious-loser-face when pockets of our world are being torn to shreds? I get it. Even the people in the eye of the showbiz-storm (mostly) get it. In his opening monologue, this year’s host, Conan O’Brien, called the ceremony a ‘seemingly absurd ritual’. 

And it is.  

But we are story-telling creatures. We are, to quote Charles Taylor, ‘Storied Selves’. Story is how we wrestle with what has been, what is, and what we think/fear/hope may be. And so, I want to know what stories we’re telling: what stories have we deemed worthy of excavation? What stories are drawing us in and sending us out again with slightly tweaked perspectives? What are we celebrating? What are we lamenting? What are we trying to change? What are we trying to hold on to?  

Plus, I’m religious – who am I to assume there’s no meaning behind ‘seemingly absurd ritual’, aye?  

The Oscars is an event dedicated to just a handful of the stories that have been told over the past year – the ones that are being told the loudest, I guess. That makes it a sample pool of our collective heart-cries, the tip of our meaning-making iceberg, the headline that sits atop our cultural moment.  

Is it somewhat superficial? In part. 

Is it a little sanctimonious? Oh, heck yes.  

Is it opulent to the point of discomfort? Most definitely.  

Is it meaningless? Absolutely not. Storytelling never is.  

So, in that vein – what are the stories that were celebrated at last night’s 97th Academy Awards? And what do they teach us about... well… us? I noticed a couple of interesting themes.  

In so many ways, movies are humans telling humans what it means to be human. 

Firstly, the ceremony opened with a tribute to The City of Angels, herself. The most sparkly city there is, the home of Hollywood – Los Angeles. Terrifyingly large swathes of which were, of course, razed to the ground by historic wildfires earlier this year. Borrowing a line from The Wizard of Oz, ‘there’s no place like home’ was spoken over a montage of the city acting as a backdrop for so many iconic movie scenes.  

It made me think of the role that ‘home’ plays in many of the movies that were platformed last night – and I realised, it plays a leading role. ‘Home’, in itself, is a character. There’s the omnipresence of Brighton Beach, New York, in Anora (by far, the big winner of the night), Mexico in Emilia Perez and, of course, ‘Oz’ in Wicked. These films aren’t just set in these locations, they’re utterly dependant on them.  

Then there’s the more complicated stories of ‘home’ – stories of home being both here and there. The Brutalist, for example (for which Adrien Brody won the ‘best actor in a leading role’ award), tells the story of a Hungarian-Jewish Holocaust survivor trying to make a new home for himself in the United States. Or A Real Pain, in which Jesse Eisenberg (who also wrote and directed the film) and Kieran Culkin (winner of ‘best supporting actor’) travel to Poland to honour their late grandmother, and therefore, their own lineage. In both movies, ‘home’ is a stranger that the characters must introduce themselves to and befriend.   

It's fascinating.  

In art, as in life, home provides identity. It’s the geography that we’re made of, the history that runs through our blood, the place where our circumstances become our meaning. At least, that’s what these movies tell us.  

Another, more obvious, theme I noticed was that so many of the movies on display were telling notably complex stories of a female experience. 

The Substance, one of the most interesting films of this year, tackles the theme of aging. Age-a-phobia, you could say. The experience that countless women have of becoming less valuable as they move through life – the feeling that you’re vanishing from society’s sight with every change of your body. Or there’s the afore-mentioned Anora. I’ll be honest, this one took me by surprise, racking up the most awards of the night, including ‘best picture’. Its story centres upon ‘Ani’, a young Russian American sex worker who weaves in and out of powerful ranks. Wicked, the story of a drastically misunderstood, commonly marginalised and terribly manipulated woman (who just so happens to be a witch). And winner of ‘best international picture’, I’m Still Here, tells the true story of Eunice Paiva. Her husband, Rubens Paiva, is abducted by military operatives in 1971 and never returned. Eunice is left to care for their five children as she seeks justice for her husband as well as indigenous people in the Amazon. 

Female experiences – in all their complexity, nuance, grit, strength, and truth – truly took centre stage.  

Movies are humans telling humans what it means to be human. And I just love that we do that. I’m never not fascinated by how much we all share – how the particular can tap into the universal. We have so much to learn about each other, and movies are a way we seek to do that, but one of the things that we constantly have to learn, re-learn, and learn again is how much we have in common.  

And I know that a sentence like that sounds face-palmingly glib. But if it weren’t true, if we weren’t – at some deep and true level – made by the same stuff and for the same stuff, I’m not sure movies would exist. I’m not sure that they could exist.  

And so, all of this to say that there’s more to the Oscars than meets the eye – even when what meets the eye makes it roll. Give it the gift of your curiosity, it’s worthy of it. I promise.  

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