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.

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.

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.

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.

So, slowly I paint rocks for several days,
Building the texture, modulating greys,
Until Achmelvich’s sheep strewn crag appears
Clothed with stiff grasses, wind bent bouncing ears.
But you have started several billion years
Before my flat, pathetic, instant fix.
There is the era before molecules,
Space sprung gigantic galaxies evolve,
Slow without form and void throughout the earth.
Then, even slower, rocks as treacle bake
With crystals set in granite, lost to sight,
And buried to mature three billion years.
So shrinks our human quick fix arty stuff
Before the glory of your slow, worked craft.