You may have looked at the paintings in the Chapel and wanted to know more about them. We persuaded the artist, Raphael Zimmerman to write this for us:
Dear Congregation of St. John-at-Hampstead
Yours is a most beautiful church and I feel greatly honoured finding my art placed in it for a time.
I have been asked to give a brief explanation about the diptych (oil on canvas) and its title \”Immateriality\”.For the title may I refer you to David Hume\’s (1711 –1776) interpretation of Spinoza\’s (1632 – 1677) self-realisation of Simplicity:
\”The fundamental principle of Spinoza is the doctrine of the simplicity of the universe, and the unity of that substance, in which he supposes both thought and matter to inhere. There is only one substance, says he, in the world; and that substance is perfectly simple and indivisible, and exists everywhere, without any local presence. Whatever we discover externally by sensation; whatever we feel internally by reflection; all these are nothing but modifications of that one, simple, and necessarily existent being, and are not possest of any separate or distinct existence. Every passion of the soul; every configuration of matter, however different and various, inhere in the same substance, and preserve in themselves their characters of distinction, without communicating them to that subject, in which they inhere. The same substratum, if I may so speak, supports the most different modifications, without any difference in itself; and varies them, without any variation.
Neither time, nor place, nor all the diversity of nature are able to produce any composition or change in its perfect simplicity and identity.\”Excerpt taken from \”A Treatise of Human Nature\”, by David HumeSect. v. \’Of the Immateriality of the Soul\’.
(The artist Raphael Zimmerman lives and works in Melbourne, Australia.He is known for his atmospheric abstract paintings as well as for his large mono print etchings. Raphael has written a PhD thesis titled \”Immateriality\”)
Immateriality
Raphael Zimmerman