Another Grantchester painting. Not always around to see the dawn, but the start of each day is always something special.
All posts by Alan Storkey
Grantchester, Winter Morning
Hello, says God, Good Morning, Grantchester.
Two paintings by the Cam. Another six to follow. One Sonnet.
GOOD MORNING, GRANTCHESTER.
Hello, says God, Good Morning, Grantchester.
Today we have a rose and yellow dawn.
No need to hurry. Toast and coffee time.
It took me something like a billion years
To slow the Cam, long sedimentary work,
That none of you have seen, beneath the grass.
So start the day with joy and breathe in deep.
Make this day good, whatever work you do.
Keep selfishness at bay and look around
At all this glory, meadow, willow green.
Remember I like children more than you
And greet your Coton neighbours with a nod.
Accept this day from me. Let it proceed
In mill-pond peace and kindness to the eve.
Alan.
A BIT OF THE BIG PICTURE
So, first, the experience. Away at a meeting of Movement for Christian Democracy at Scargill House deep in the middle of the Yorkshire Dales perhaps two decades ago. Winterish, but with a wind and rain cleaned sky. Good meetings during the day and a walk along the valley about a mile to the small hamlet of Kettlewell to the pub. I was delayed and set out after the main party, or tried to. It was so dark, no moon, it was impossible to see your feet. So that was why they made a fuss about a torch. It was a step at a time, a sober drunk. But you could not look down. Overhead was the Milky Way a totally new view to my light polluted eyes, the biggest spectacle of our lives. You could see a trillion km of stars and gas clouds stretched out. It was unforgettable.
I tried a painting of a galaxy, black with a very little indigo. Checked colours with Derek our church astronomer, but it failed, not enough patience, too crude. Will bin it in the big clearout. So the sonnet is there, and no painting. But, I thought, if a photo is better than a painting, include a photo. But most of the photos, to get the remote light in, pick up a lot of light pollution. They are quite disappointing, hundreds of them. So no photo. Just remember what you have seen, but not in London
BIG UNIVERSE.
So cold, beneath the wide star studded black
This God created universe, this one,
With Catherine milky wheel diagonal,
Here in its edge, one little galaxy,
All smudges in this vast immensity,
Expanding from the first great divine “Yes”,
When everything was sorted as is now,
We live and look at twinkles in the sky.
This is not ours. We have a little share,
No rent, but clouds and rain and moon rich sleep.
To you-ward only can our lives make sense,
To come and go like charmed particles,
Good as you warm our souls to look beyond
And know ourselves eternal stayed in you.
Local glory.
We return to Durer’s clump of weeds, and local glory in our gardens and elsewhere. The sonnet is about a privet hedge and spiders and the painting about berry time in the garden.
PRIVET TIME.
The moment of each day awaits its time.
Today, the small leaved privet hedge,
Ignored again by every passer-by,
Is clothed in frost, minutely round each leaf.
Not overdone, white on a tailored coat;
The leaves themselves, cold darkened, have repose.
But now in grandeur small they hold their place
In God’s creation on this frosty morn.
But that is not enough. Now gone we know
Not where, the spiders, have abstracted out
Their great expressions, on the canvas hedge,
Amazing space, in diamonds, no flies,
with frost. I notice, as I walk, and stop,
the non-anthropic glory of God’s world.
SEEING CLEARLY
The way we see is not as unproblematic as it seems. The Christian faith is quite clear about that. We can see with motives of greed, lust, arrogance, in ways which are distorted. We can look at things which do us no good. We can focus on the wrong thing, like the trivial, be visually deceived and much more. The depth of this problem is conveyed by Christ’s words, “If your eye offends you, pluck it out…” Change what you see before it issues in something worse.. This sonnet tackles this issue. The painting is on the hill further up the Stour Valley and partly echoes the First Psalm. “His delight is in God’s law and on God’s law he meditates day and night. He is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither.” Not sure whether the water is, but this is sure a healthy tree.
SEEING CLEARLY
To see with holy sight each gift of God
can happen only when my ego’s gone.
A shallow self is grafted to my eye;
I see the world through mirrors which reflect
Back vanity, out angled stereotypes,
A hall of mirrors, pride distorting all.
The shaving image holds me in its grasp.
No smashing free, but to be seen through God,
Creature of millions, yet with numbered hairs,
No outward view, but loved with visage marred.
So, darkened, face each detail of the world
crafted by God, not other than it is,
and gasp in awe creation is so good,
so blind my normal use of human sight.
Cambridge Analytica/Facebook/Russia
Today there is a vast system persuading us to buy things. It is already corrupt in the sense that it uses psychological techniques, forms of bribery, convinces people to buy things they do not need or harm them and push them into debt. Consumption is the great god, albeit a pathetic one, of our age. It deals in fakes – promises, glamour, excitement, flattery – because you deserve it- and manipulation. Some industries like perfume, betting, cosmetics, alcohol, cars, drugs and food prey on people’s weaknesses and spoil their lives. The system is so big we do not notice it. And it has moved into social media. So now I only have to look for an item, and I am bombarded with pressure to buy. Let us look briefly at why this is usually unethical.
Open relationships are ones which give freedom to a person. Christ practised open relationships; even Judas going to betray Jesus was not prevented or made the subject of pressure. You can’t get more open than that. Our relationship with God is both the source and the centre of our freedom, and good relationships have the same character. Control, manipulation, social judgement and a whole load of other techniques for getting people to do what we want are wrong and multiple examples of the way these are destructive are emerging daily in public life.
For decades politics has moved from a personal engagement based on values which was reflected in a party commitment to a trawl for voters based on largely selfish appeals. “You have never had it so good” said Macmillan at the start of this process in the 1950s. Now consumerist politics is normal, ubiquitous. The parties largely tell people want they want to hear and are voted in. Manipulation is normal. Voting should be a free process, but has been engineered for a long while. Lord Ashcroft, Saachi and Saachi and other media companies have run the elections and the referenda for a long time.
More than this, the electorate has had targeted negative campaigning for a long while. Often, it has been personal. Thatcher, slit-eyed Blair, something of the night Howard, Brown with hidden microphone to catch a damning private remark, the hounding of Liberal leaders to keep them marginal, and the long attempt to murder Corbyn’s reputation by the rich who stand to lose.
In addition, fake news has frequently been used especially by the right to discredit those who might attack wealth. It happened in 1924 with the fake Communist scare Zinoviev telegram, and has happened ever since in the tabloid journalism of the Mail, Sun and other rags. There is the threat of economic collapse and the search for the news which will blacken. The work of Cambridge Analytica in support of Goodluck Jonathan in Nigeria in the 12015 election was not new, but just normal western commercialism, money for spreading muck. And big donors helped swing the referendum vote on Brexit.
So, the present fuss about Cambridge Analytica and Facebook is not new. Zuckerberg is not a great social benefactor but the normal selfish US capitalist exploiting consumers and he has been caught out. Cambridge Analytica have some software which might target voters and sway them more effectively, though the Nigerian voters said, “Badluck Jonathan”. But what is interesting is that this whole system of using voters as consumers to buy your goods is essentially the product of western consumerist pseudo-democratic elections. Russian elections are so cooked that this kind of manipulation is not needed.
Perhaps, therefore, when we come to the Trump election and Russia a big question remains. Putin’s Russia probably tried to blacken Clinton, for reasons we could examine. But who carried out the main large scale manipulations of the vote in the Trump election? Was it Russia or the normal western financial interests backing Trump who set up the social media systems aimed at swaying gullible, consumer swamped voters. Which was the case should emerge as evidence over the coming months, but at present Russia gets the blame while the election manipulation of the rich operating through tried consumerist and advertising processes are ignored. Some blame will probably accrue to Russia, but the elephant in the room is western capitalism, cooking our votes in ever more sophisticated ways for decades, so that the rich can stay in charge. It’s time to see the elephant.
Constable or Turner?
For perhaps a hundred and fifty years most English people made a choice, conscious or otherwise, between Constable and Turner. You liked one and didn’t like the other, because they were different in their approach to landscape. Turner, as he developed moved towards greater abstraction. There may be other reasons why people would like “the Burning of the Houses of Parliament” in 1834, but Turner partly liked the subject because of its licence for red and orange and the swirling of flame. In his time and later, he was rightly seen as the creative artist. The subject matter tended to be bent to his artistic sense to create, as we say, a work of art. Perhaps the mountains went a little more vertical and the storm swirled more in Turner’s paintings. Many people liked his work and they fill the galleries of the land.
Rightly, he is seen as one of the main precursors of modernism. It is not a great jump from the works of Turner to those of the impressionists. Indeed, the influence was directly there, though the Impressionists were also critical of Turner. But they are on the same side, developing the creativity of the artist in their landscapes, using colour in all kinds of new ways, and beginning the transition into the modernist schools of the twentieth century.
So, what is wrong with Turner? Well, sometimes his trees are a bit naff, but let us focus on the moment when the painting viewer turns from the picture back to the normal world I which le or she lives. What do they carry with them? Possibly they retain the image. “That was a great Turner.” Or, “What an incredible effect!” Possibly, there is a disjunction between the world Turner has created and the natural world in which we live. Turner is striving for something more and the natural world is something less.
By comparison with Turner, and many people did compare, Constable was a bit of a plonker. He just did landscapes. They were often big – his six footers – but they were landscapes, rooted in the Stour valley but extending throughout England. We are not concerned about status within the English art establishment – both had problems there and it was mainly a matter of selling and earning a living – but why was Constable different from Turner? He was a Christian. He would have done more explicitly Christian art but the Rector of East Bergholt Church did not pay him for the Resurrection painting he did. There is a lovely expression of his faith in the great Vale of Dedham painting in the National Gallery of Scotland. In the foreground, but quite hidden is a peasant woman’s hovel. It expresses Constable’s concern for poverty, but if you go up very close, round the head of the poor babe with her is a halo. Constable has put Jesus in his great painting. Constable was painting God’s creation. He loved it, and his landscapes are reflecting what was going on. To us the horses and barges are pre-industrial idyllic, but then they were normal rural life. Sometimes he overworked the skies, but Constable is never bigger than the Creator. The landscape is respected, studied, and understood, especially in his smaller cloud studies. The heavens are telling the glory of God.
Interestingly, the area where he tends to theatricality is around Salisbury Cathedral, partly because it became his spiritual home, especially after his wife had died. The views are a little too strong, romanticised, but we can forgive him that. Salisbury Cathedral Spire is an obvious indicator of the Almighty and he used it as such. So my choice is with Constable, because his painting, like that of the Dutch 17th century landscape painters from whom he draws, is painting God’s creation, is reflecting the same glory as I see each day, rain or shine.
In this era of digital cameras everywhere, we can all take landscapes anywhere, often without looking much at them, which are technically better than Turner or Constable. But Constable the artisan bearing witness to God’s creation talks to us even more strongly now. For a century human creativity has been loosed upon the West. It is interesting, sometimes perceptive, but often vain, whether in the Turner Prize – see the echo – creativity of arbitrary choice and self validation or in distorting or ignoring the creation in which we live. Human creativity is as a baby with a rattle in God’s creation, and our western culture is lost within God’s creation.
But Constable was not. Now, of course, we have to peel back nearly two hundred years, but we all need to understand that we are artisans in God’s world, not Creators in our own right, and that is a major cultural revolution. So the painting above is a homage to the Creator and to Constable. It is of the Stour valley slightly downstream from Constable’s main haunts. It is a great spot, but we all have Stour Valleys.
The Heavens are telling the Glory of God
Experiencing the creation as it is, this morning and every day, cannot be done without the word “glory” crowding in. Glory is everywhere in little things and big. It is the glory of God, the exquisite Creator in things big and small. For me glory to God painting starts with Durer’s big clump of weeds in Vienna and the sonnet reflects this. I think it was the first Creation sonnet I did. Millions of people especially on holiday take millions of photos of the creation when it looks especially awesome and we see them everyday. This painting is like them, Achmelvich again, on the longest day with a seal swimming lazily by looking at us, and the Creator showing off a bit. The heavens are telling the glory of God.
NO SIGNATURE
God, without paintbrush, come and paint the year,
Big canvas, never framed, and always here.
You take your time, build slowly, sort light dark,
Prepare the ground, earth wet, keep contrasts stark.
Start with dark twigs, drip wet with diamond snow
Or prick dot milky way on indigo.
Perhaps you need red tulip, hearted black
Before white wedding hedgerow, blue eggs crack.
Keep colours hidden fresh in little seeds.
Like Dürer, make a masterpiece of weeds.
My mother’s lily and my father’s rose,
like summer bombs, cool, livid love expose.
Time ochres, kharkis, russets grass and trees.
We view the final glory on our knees.
I CAN’T BELIEVE
This is another painting of Achmelvich not far from where Elaine and I were camping. It is the time of the incoming tide, that singularity that God has given the planet, within which we all live. The sonnet suggests the belief in chance is a bit thin.
So you believe no God created this,
no great design, but just a happenstance,
not personal, but rather hit or miss,
not even aim, but just a primal dance
of stupid chemicals. Yet even they
need pre-constructing into atom, quark,
from which non-aiming hits, you say,
the universe was made. Shots in the dark,
no guns, no big N “Nature” doing things,
sand with IQ (but not computer chips)
has done it all. The cosmic order springs
from elementary particles with slips.
I can’t believe – unless the quarks have phones
and don’t pay extra for more distant zones.