SACRED MOMENTS - Picture This

The human desire to express themselves through visual imagery, has a history thousands of millennia old. From the very beginning the fundamental volition behind this has been a sacred one. A religious impulse akin to a magical, often animistic shamanism, informed art then, and can do so now. Driven by the desire to capture, conjure or beseech something into being through a symbolic visual form. Art was never solely an activity we chose to do, just to while away the long winter evenings in the cave, with a leisure hobby. This was not interior decor, it had a spiritual intent behind it.

That quality of capturing the essence of an experience or sense of divinity through art, continues to this day. In my experience, it is not necessarily the degree of lifelike verisimilitude in art that means it will move you, or connect you with what could be couched as sacred. Its probably better to consider art as a human patterning impulse, that is usually some form abstracted from reality. There have been modernist abstract works of art that have mesmerically stopped me in my tracks. 

Art can be a channel for the sacred to speak to us through the medium of our soul. Why that happens, very clearly evades closer examination and repetition. The sacred experience is always a one off. It takes you by surprise. Familiarity, expectations of where it might be found, or analysis actively kills it off.

During my nine years of living in London I  frequented galleries a lot. Often popping into The Tate or National Gallery on the spur of the moment of a Sunday. Usually with no particular purpose in mind. I wasn't in search of something. I was simply there to idly commune.

On one such visit I turned into one gallery in the Tate. My eye instantly drawn toward an absolutely gigantic picture hung on a false wall, disguising the exit at its other end. It was a painting where the mountains and heavens were collapsing in upon everything beneath it. The sense of awe and dread conjured up, astonished me. I stared open mouthed for quite some time. This was John Martin's painting - The Great Day of His Wrath. 

Mass produced engravings of Martin's work, made him the most popular painter of the Georgian era. The burgeoning hell realms of the Industrial Revolution, often referenced via the fire and brimstone of biblical stories. The anxiety over where all this modern technical innovation might be leading humanity, is a concern we still experience to this day. That one day God will just have had enough of us, and decide the best thing to do is wipe the slate clean, yet again. Sacred moments can therefore possess both a hubristic and an apocalyptic tone. The small insignificant face of humanity encounters the incalculable majesty of a divine presence in its wrathful form.

In a little corner of the National Gallery is a grouping of paintings by Van Gogh. It's where tourists generally seek out the well known Sunflower painting. There is also one smallish painting, often only casually glanced at the first time. It's visual humility makes it easily overlooked. On a subsequent visit, in the right receptive mood, I became utterly captivated by this painting. Overcome by a whole body experience of suspension in a deep ocean of calm. Long Grass with Butterfiles was painted by Van Gogh whilst he was recovering from his recent ear cutting breakdown in a hospice. And yet it has a peaceful, unassuming demeanour, one profoundly enraptured by its very ordinary subject matter.

Many years later, I'm in Amsterdam visiting the Van Gogh Museum. I've wanted to go there for decades. So yes, I was really hyped. I wandered around excitedly taking in all these familiar paintings 'in the flesh' so to speak. In one gallery I turned sharply left, I found myself facing another unfamiliar modest sized painting of woodland, called Undergrowth. The instant my eyes rested upon it I had this intense emotional rush, waves of energy ossilated rapidly from head to toe and back. For a few minutes I was taken aback by my heart racing, and this throbbing physical sense of an ecstasy. 

Afterwards I very inadequately explained to my husband what had just happened. This painting also came from Van Gogh's time in the San Remy hospice. I've pondered long on its significance. Was it something about the painter or the subject matter? Certainly there was an element of resonance, an emotional mirroring. But it is these particular Van Gogh paintings, which for some reason, channel a deep and unfathomable reciprocity, an identification within me.

Decades later The Royal Acadamy held a retrospective of Mark Rothko. On previous Tate Modern visits I usually prioritised visiting his brooding Seagram paintings. A favourite place to come, sit and contemplate. The sombre shimmering quality of foreground and background only really emerging in the half light they were originally intended to be viewed in. 

In the retrospective one painting, on the surface it was just the usual Rothko fuzzy rectangles of orange reds, yellow and purple captured my attention. For a brief moment it felt as though this painting was actively wanting to pull me into an altogether more elevated consciousness. The indistinct nature of its feathered painterly edges suggestive of the transcendentally ineffable. I stepped momentarily onto a liminal doorstep To which my bodily form felt drawn. Then just as quickly, I was back in the room.

Its 1985 The Royal Acadamy held a now famous exhibition devoted to 20th Century German Expressionism. The paintings which caught me spiritually off guard were really small. Emile Nolde, a man previously a supporter of the Nazis, found his work included in the infamous Degenerate Art exhibition. This propelled him into a state of extreme distress. Though he escaped to Norway, he remained petrified. He could only paint on a small scale. Reduced to executing work on the back of postcards. All so they could easily be hidden away.

Occasionally he painted in oils, but his small scale seascapes are more often executed in watercolour.  Vivid washes of colour incredibly expressive, intense seas, darkly brooding skies. Yet they are full of a magnificent strength and energy. With a raging sun trying to set or break through on the horizon. They give form to a more hopeful, defiant, uplifted perception. The swirls of colour hypnotising my emotional breath for a brief elevating few seconds. They were art that could unexpectedly plunge you into deeper emotionally sacred waters, the insightful reflections of a dawn or dusk that lingers.

Kettles Yard Gallery in Cambridge, 2011, held a retrospective exhibition of paintings by Bridget Riley. These vast canvases of sensationally coloured irregular patterns, are a highly stimulating optical feast for the eyes. Riley plays with, and deliberately misleads, your perceptions. But they are so much more than a technical experiment in optical colour and balance effects. What they do is communicate a whole love of colour and its joi de vivre. 

This is a quality she shares with Sol Le Witt's large scale wall paintings. Whose size and execution likewise thrills and conspires to uplift, not just the heart, but one's entire being. Placing you within touching distance of what is positive and optimistic within you and outside of you. Adjusting your supra conscious state for one brief slice of time.

Now the common thread for me in all these paintings, is that the sense of something sacred that they communicate, is not necessarily in what they are painting, but is contained within how they are painted. None of these artists deliberately set out to paint a painting to feel or create a sense for, the sacred. Its also connected with what we ourselves bring to the paintings too. There is a mutual reciprocity of perception and emotion present in the moment of our first meeting them. One that cannot necessarily be replicated later, by expectation or design.