Over Christmas, as we have been saying morning and evening prayer in the side chapel, I have been pondering the latest image which Alf Löhr has hung there for us and which is reproduced on the covers of our Christmas and Epiphany season service books. This kind of abstract art is hard to describe; I like De Kooning’s phrase about keeping ‘the impressionist manner of looking at a scene but leaving out the scene,’ because our current painting does present us with a kind of left-out-scene which could be said to have a fore- middle- and back- ground. The fore ground is painted in bright yellow and orange with a curving red line; the middle ground contains a group of pale vertical shapes and the back ground is a jumble of dark lines which solidify at various points. The only other colour in the picture is pink more prominently on the right hand side.
What are we to make of this? Something in us always wants to turn such abstraction into recognisable shapes which tell a story. We want somehow to personalise it and to detect a meaning. We resist the idea of spending time looking at something which has no meaning we can express in words. And that perhaps is the first challenge of abstract art; can we allow ourselves time to suspend the quest for meaning and let our minds have a holiday whilst our senses respond to the colours and shapes before us? Sometimes I suspect abstract art makes people angry simply because it seems to challenge and attack our intelligence. Is the artist playing a game with me? Does he know something I don’t? Am I being made to look a fool by not knowing how to respond to what I see? It’s interesting how often people dismiss abstract art by implying either that anyone could do that sort of thing or that somehow it’s childish – ‘a child could do that.’ However, the more you allow yourself to follow the pattern of line and colour in a great work of abstract art, the more you begin to see some kind of deep level organisation in those lines and colours – an organisation necessitated by the fact that it is framed. And if there is something childlike about the painting it resides in the fact that the imagination at play has been able to let go of our grown up need for organised, meaningful and useful information. And, I would want to suggest, unless we can allow abstract art to begin to dismantle this need in us we will have closed off one way into the meaning of prayer. And here I am reminded of what Rowan Williams in his interview with Diana Athill on the Today programme yesterday referred to as the process whereby ‘you open up in silence to what is there and so discover that there is something there which is not yourself – an infinite hinterland which you struggle to find words or images for.’
We might still, however, want to ask if our desire to provide some narrative to the picture is misguided? The artist says that ‘any form of narration is restricting and narrowing down the possibilities that are open to a form of thinking that is not based on exclusion.’ And yet at a simple level the existence of a frame is a form of exclusion. The frame invites us to make something of what lies within it – even if what we make of an abstract painting says more about us than it does about the picture and so perhaps the picture thereby enables us to discover something more about ourselves. ‘The painting designates us more than we designate it’ (Mark Bartlett) and whatever we discover in it by no means limits its possibilities. A comment which might also be made of the stories in Scripture.
The fact that we have this painting in church at Christmas inevitably suggests that we should try to make something of it in terms of the season itself. And so it may be that the season begins to say something to the painting; it might say that though we need this challenge to let go of the reasoning, narrating, excluding mind, we also need to attend to the processes whereby we create meaning, the stories which enable us to make sense of our lives and lead them in a good way. So in the case of this particular picture, certain things spring to mind. The colour in the foreground might remind us of the refining fire, and the baptism with the Holy Spirit and with fire which are associated with the Messiah. The thin red line might recall the blood of the martyred Stephen and the Holy Innocents who are remembered in the church’s calendar immediately after Christmas. The vertical figures might seem somehow like the angelic presences which haunt the Christmas story and through whom the characters find their way out of the murky chaos of the everyday world which perhaps forms the back ground of the painting into the stream of light which is coming into the world.
Alf Löhr entitled this painting ‘Without the burden of memory’. This might suggest a narrative in which we are healed of those memories (hidden in the dark and tangled background of the painting?) which constrain, and haunt us, causing us to act in ways which are prompted not so much by the circumstances in which we find ourselves now but by those submerged and painful memories which have been triggered by such circumstances. The submerged memory causes emotional behaviour which is inappropriate to the present but which we seem unable to avoid. Only by a process of healing and redemption can the burden of memory be lifted; and it is the comforting presences – the announcing angels – which bring us to the place where the refining fire can heal. And that is a narrative which resonates with the new birth at Christmas which has power to bring rebirth and renewal in us. That might be one way of ‘reading’ this painting but it is not of course ‘the’ meaning. It only brings us back to that point where we have to let go of all our meanings in order for God’s renewing spirit to work its way in us now and in the year ahead.
With my love and prayers,
The Vicar Writes
Stephen Tucker