It seems fitting, on this feast of St Francis, that the first post on this new blog should be about art inspired by the saint of Assisi [1]. Laura Gascoigne, writing in this week’s edition of The Tablet, marks the feast by exploring the ways in which, ‘while other saints have slipped from artistic view, Francis continues to inspire many contemporary painters’, focusing in particular on the work of two female artists. As is often the case, chancing upon an article in a magazine has introduced me to artists whose work was previously unknown to me, and thus opened up new ways of seeing.
Andrea McLean, ‘Brother Sun and Sister Moon’ (via http://andrea-mclean.co.uk)
One of the artists discussed in Gascoigne’s piece is Andrea McLean, who has described her own work, often modelled on medieval maps, as a kind of ‘spiritual mapping’ (as artist-in-residence at Hereford Cathedral, McLean created the Contemporary Mappa Mundi that can be seen outside the Map Room of the British Library). Two of her recent, minutely detailed pictures draw direct inspiration from St Francis. The circular painting ‘Brother Sun and Sister Moon’ is, as Gascoigne writes, ‘packed with symbols recalling his canticle’, while ‘St Francis in the World’ depicts the saint meeting the wolf of Gubbio and includes among its dense patchwork of images the figure of St Clare, other incidents from Francis’ life, as well as birds, trees and a host of other creatures, all beneath a benign and smiling sun and moon.
Andrea McLean, ‘St Francis in the World’ (via http://andrea-mclean.co.uk)
McLean’s brilliant images brought to my mind some of the paintings of David Jones, which are similarly many-layered and allusive (as is his poetry, the main subject, many years ago, of my PhD thesis). For McLean, as for Jones, a tree is never simply a tree, a bird never just a bird, though in Jones’ work the metaphorical content is perhaps more explicit, the intention more overtly sacramental, while for McLean the main priority appears to be representing what Gascoigne describes as ‘a dream of connectivity…a cosmos at peace’. In other paintings by McLean, the specifically Christian imagery is less obvious: some draw on mythopoeic themes to present a more universal vision of the spiritual quest and of cosmic unity, while in others it is the natural world itself which captures the attention of the artist. Incidentally, I was interested to learn that McLean, who is based in Ledbury, is an admirer of the work of the seventeenth-century Herefordshire poet and mystic Thomas Traherne, as am I.
The other artist highlighted in Laura Gascoigne’s article is the French-born, Devon-based painter and sculptress Lydia Corbett, who as a young woman, under the name Sylvette David, was a muse and model for Pablo Picasso. At the comparatively late age of 45, she became an artist in her own right, creating metal sculptures, ceramics, prints and a multitude of oil and watercolour paintings in a naive style, somewhat reminiscent of Chagall. Many of her paintings are on biblical themes. I find this one of the Nativity rather appealing:
Lydia Corbett, ‘Close Together’ (via https://www.iwassylvette.com)
Corbett features in the Tablet article principally because of the book of paintings she has created with the title Brother Francis and Sister Clare: Explosion of Love, which can be previewed (and purchased) here.
Cover and extract from ‘Brother Francis and Sister Clare’ by Lydia Corbett and Anne Ellison (Blurb Books, 2010)
Besides Chagall, there are hints of Blake’s mythopoeic paintings in much of Lydia Corbett’s work. Her characteristic manner of sketching human figures in pen, against a background of splashes of bright colour, also reminds me of the late style of the Austrian-born painter Theodor Kern, whose life I’ve been researching, and to whose work I plan to return in future posts on this blog.
Some of Corbett’s lightly-sketched, semi-abstract but deeply spiritual pieces also recall another West Country-based and Blake-influenced artist, the Iranian-born Partou Zia, who sadly passed away in 2008, and whose work I discovered earlier this year via an exhibition at Tate St Ives. Although less formally religious and more broadly ‘spiritual’ than either Lydia Corbett or Andrea McLean, Zia is another intriguing artist whose work I intend to feature on this blog at some point.
As I understand it, Andrea McLean and Lydia Corbett identify broadly with the Anglican tradition, though there are also clear influences in their work of non-christian spiritual traditions. Their shared attraction to St Francis is proof of his continuing appeal beyond the boundaries of his own Church, and of the ability of his story, and of art inspired by it, to awaken people from diverse backgrounds to a sense of the divine at the heart of the created world.
Finally, I notice that Lydia Corbett’s work is supported and promoted by her daughter Isobel Coulton, who is herself an accomplished sculptress. Another indirect but happy consequence of reading Laura Gascoigne’s article has been finding my way to Isobel’s website, and in particular coming across images of the sculpture of the Madonna and Child that she was commissioned to produce for Buckfast Abbey (you can watch a video about its creation here). I rather like the quirky juxtaposition of Our Lady’s queenly crown and her naturalistic facial expression, a contemporary and at the same time universal image of maternal love:
Image via https://isabelcoulton.com/
Notes
- It also has a personal significance for me: Francis was the name I took when I was confirmed as an adult.
the heart's attention 