Religion and art

It was Lent 13 years ago, the 40 days of reflection and self-denial in the Christian calendar, and I was spending each weekday in the medieval church I was using as a temporary studio. I was a fine art student at the time and making a work for my MA graduate show.

The church was cold and dark. On the walls, there were stone tablets recalling parishioners of long ago, and, under the floor, the bones of the dead. I laid canvases down on a carved slab placed over the grave of six siblings who had died in childhood 300 years before.

It was a place too full of personal memories. Some 50 years earlier, it was where I had attended Sunday school and my father had been incumbent.

That Lenten experience was a significant part of a process of rethinking my creative life – moving from words towards the visual arts. I had worked for 25 years as a broadcast journalist and then for 15 as a television producer. In parallel with this career I was a writer and I lived by words. Yet, I had always been aware of the limitations of language and was becoming increasingly aware of this.

Language is what we use to form, shape and then express our ideas, to issue instructions, or to share news, but there come moments when we are lost for words. And not just at times of shock or wonder – but in everyday situations. Try describing a pain to a doctor or a lovely smell to a friend – ‘It’s like a bee sting’ or ‘It smells like a rose’ – but it is impossible to convey what you are truly experiencing.

For most of my broadcast career I had specialized in religion – interpreting the practices and language of those who live by faith so that what they did and what they stood for could be better understood by the population at large. I became fluent in faith-speak. However, the more I was able to follow and even contribute to religious discussion, the more it seemed to me that, when it comes to describing religious experience, language is especially inadequate.

Profound spirituality in all faiths is ineffable, beyond words. What the Christian mystic, the Hindu yogi, the Buddhist master and the Sufi practitioner all have in common is that they can’t describe what it is that they experience.

When it comes to exploring the fundamental questions about the meaning behind human existence, language has so many shortcomings that it is essentially unfit for purpose.

Technical language exists to describe some aspects of the mystical, but the words are labels and not descriptions. They mean as much to the non-mystic as the names of the colours do to the person who has been blind from birth.

Nevertheless, almost all religions insist on using language. They have scriptures that are deemed to be inerrant or even divinely revealed. They have laws and creeds to set one group of believers apart from another. The result is conflict, suspicion, open hostility and even war.

Rather, all religious language needs to be regarded as storytelling or poetry – that art form that through sound, repetition, allegory, liturgy and symbolism can hint at something bigger. And to go to the next step, it is through art forms from which language has been totally extracted that the greater ideas can be expressed and conveyed. Music, painting, sculpture and dance, for instance, can approach the transcendent without being weighed down by words and arguments over their exact meanings.

As I approached the final quarter of my life, I was increasingly fascinated by the essential religious questions about the purpose of life. Perhaps, too, having experienced serious illness and realizing that death was getting ever closer, these questions gathered an extra urgency.

So, approaching the age of 60, I became an art student.

Not being a musician, never having had the body of a dancer, but being able to draw and paint, I opted for the visual arts. I was excited by the possibilities of contemporary art, which had extended the remit of art beyond the traditional craft skills into abstract and conceptual forms. And so I began my personal journey of exploration into the uncharted world of visual theology.

Not that I abandoned language entirely. Stories, poetry and verbal metaphor all have their place in art. What I moved away from was using words in a faith context as having precise, immutable, legalistic authority. I allowed them to be fluid tools of creation. And this applied even to Scripture. I remained inspired by the powerful stories and poetry of the Bible, while not owing allegiance to the words. When standing to declaim the creed at an Anglican Evensong, my rational self does not believe a word of it, but I do know it is all true.

So, my final work as an art student was to be a visual exploration of a theological conundrum. Why, if God is a God of love, are pain and suffering allowed – and indeed inevitable – in the divinely created world?

Alone in the ancient church, I worked on an image painted on 15 canvases placed together. It showed the ongoing chaotic process of creation, based on a beach I often return to in Shetland, where the geology of millions of years is exposed and yet the detritus on the beach – driftwood, a dead bird, a plastic bottle – records the ever-changing activity of the previous tide.

But when the canvases were set out in a line, the 15 images became a version of the stations of the cross – telling the story of Christ’s Passion from betrayal to crucifixion, the ultimate expression of God’s selfless love.

In one sense, entering the world of contemporary art was a major career move, yet in another sense, the career change seemed not all that great. I moved from one insulated and self-absorbed world into another. All I had to do was learn new customs and a different set of jargon.

Or so I thought …

The course wasn’t all hands-on studio work. We were presented with a reading list; we were expected to have a research methodology and write about our art and contextualize it. The school of philosophy promoted, the critical theory, was a branch of the social sciences. It was not only secular but militantly so.

It was overwhelmingly European, late twentieth-century and male and written in excruciatingly contorted prose. No wonder so much writing about contemporary art is similarly dire.

Eventually, I discovered a quote that gave me much reassurance. I have no idea who wrote it, but it goes: ‘An artist needs philosophy like a bat needs spectacles.’

And the more I became absorbed in my art, it seemed less a branch of sociology and more a branch of theology.

Sadly, by the beginning of the twenty-first century, religion and fine art had gone their separate ways. The American academic James Elkins wrote of ‘a strange fact … there is almost no modern religious art in museums. It is … at once obvious and odd, known to everyone and yet hardly whispered about.’ ¹

And the American writer Dan Fox noted in the art magazine Frieze: ‘If you can remember an explicitly religious work of contemporary art, it’s because it will have stood out like the Pope in a brothel.’ ²

Academic contemporary art theory, by trying to understand art through language, was missing the point.

Appreciating a work of art is, for the observer, a discourse between the senses and the spirit. To be moved by a work is akin to a religious experience – not necessarily a dramatic moment, but in that it involves something of and within the person that is not solely of the material world. It is transcendence. And creating a work of art can be like prayer.

It is this crucial ingredient of art, its dialogue with the possibility of transcendence, that is missing from recent art theory.

An art work, to be effective, does not have to be a product of traditional techniques and materials. It can be permanent, temporary or just exist in the moment of its creation. It may be simply an idea, a concept. Art is what is capable of touching the spirit of the observer. Art can unleash hidden emotions. It can be beautiful, it can be disturbing; art can be funny, sad, evocative of hope or nostalgia. The artist might attempt to manipulate the emotions of the viewer, but in reality he or she has no control once the work is handed over to others. Artists are like shamans. They manipulate the material world, using tricks of the eyes and senses to create links with a world beyond.

Sadly, the dominant secularism of contemporary art theory has done art a disservice. It has created a bleak, purposeless, cul-de-sac of human thought devoid of the spiritual.

No wonder so many students produce banal work about their own obsessions with identity. They look at Blake’s grain of sand and see not the whole world but a speck of silicon.

If art is described only in terms of its social or political context, it will always be self-limiting. If, however, the context is broadened out to include the spiritual, then art takes on a whole new range of possible interpretations. Yet those new ways of looking at art may ultimately be beyond words to describe. A famous dancer once said: ‘If I could explain my dance in words, do you think I would go to the enormous trouble of dancing it?’

In recent years, I have noticed with pleasure how increasing numbers of established contemporary artists are beginning to acknowledge the spirituality of art. Sadly, I have seen little evidence from recent graduate shows that art theory has moved on. But I am hopeful, as I have noticed how, when many artists mature, they forget the theory and allow themselves to open up to the ineffable and sublime.

For the last 14 years I have worked as an artist. My wall sculptures, such as the one at Guy’s Hospital honouring organ donors, are in cut metal. My installation on the subject of child soldiers under the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral used Remembrance poppies. I have used slate, plaster and found objects as well as charcoal and paint on canvas.

To me, it is the act of creation that is most important. As I discovered working alone in the cold medieval church 13 years ago, it is the wrestling with ideas and stubborn materials that is the spiritual journey for the artist. It is that moment of knowing that ‘it is finished’ and ‘all is good and all is well’ that is the transcendent experience.

Once the piece is complete, it is handed over to others to make of it what they will.

The artist Maggi Hambling once said: ‘Great art inhabits a mysterious place between life and death, simultaneously composed of both.’

So, becoming an artist approaching the age of 60, and since then attempting to create the best I am capable of, is perhaps a good way to prepare for death – the silence of the grave, beyond the chatter of this world.