Seeing God through Painting
by Elizabeth Adekunle
sermon given at
Figurative religious painting is a tradition that has been around for thousands of years. Holy Images such as the Madonna and Child or Jesus as Pantocrator have inspired icons, rituals, feasts, shrines, hymns myths and miracles. These are precious and important images that relive the impact of biblical events. The image of the Madonna and child became one of the most popular images in the Renaissance. Painters such as Giotto, Massacio, Leonardo, Angelico, Titian, Piero, Botticelli, Raphel and Michelangelo refined this holy image to the point of near-perfection and overwhelming beauty. The historical importance as well as the visual significance of the painted holy scene lives on in our cathedrals, churches museums and galleries, and rightly so, for they are indeed masterpieces. These paintings continue to influence how we perceive religious art today.
For a long time traditional paintings defined our understanding of theology and the nature of corporate worship within the protestant church. For example, returning to the Renaissance image of the Madonna and child, we are presented with a women with strong characteristics, which influences the way in which we understand her. There are many tensions between her innocent painted appearance and her actual life with its multiple agonies. There are tensions between her sinless passive stance, and the vivaciousness of the Goddesses before her. In order to gain inspiration perhaps, painters drew mainly upon the apocryphal gospels and folkloric books, such as ‘The Golden legend’ by Jacobus de Voragine. As a result, the portrait of the Madonna that emerges is of an acquiescent young Mary, often surrounded with a complex array of attributes and symbols, for example vessels, flowers, churches, gardens, ‘the moon’ and so on. There is of course however, tremendous value in this traditional art that the elevates the sacred nature of physical beauty in this form.
The bible often refers to physical beauty in this way. In the book of Esther, King Ahasuerus favoured Esther because of her beauty, he provided her with beauty treatments and special food (2:9). Similarly, Absalom was praised by many as being the most handsome man in all of Israel (2 Samuel 14:25). It cannot be denied that beautiful things give us pleasure and engaging in and with beauty is an enjoyable act, ‘seeing’ that which God has given to us. Yet we are also reminded of the precious beauty that comes from the heart (1 Samuel 16:7). This inner beauty often manifests itself in a conversation, or a personal connection. Painting allows for a personal encounter, when a conversation takes place between the viewer, the painting and/or the artist via the painting.
Caravaggio expressed this subtle combination of physical beauty and intimate relational beauty in his 17th Century painting entitled ‘David with the head of Goliath”. In this painting, Caravaggio has replaced Goliath’s head with a self-portrait, so that Caravaggio’s own severed head hangs from the grip of David’s left hand. This painting hints at Caravaggio’s personal struggle with God and also suggests the possibility that you or I, could replace Goliath in the painting and come to a swift and gruesome end, so take heed. The reality of such an event becomes all too clear when we are able to see things personally, to engage with a painting subjectively and to allow it to take root in us.
In more recent times painting has tried to say what we struggle to say with words. Painting the divine, or sacred therefore, becomes a question of what is the holy or the numinous? And how should it be depicted in paint?
Christian artists are helped by their religion, but to encounter God through painting in this fundamental way, we can use the text in a more conversational way, where we need not take the texts too literally. This does not mean that we compromise on biblical truths, instead I would suggest that we use painting as a tool to explore how we understand biblical truths and how they can actively live in us.
Rudolf Otto has defined the numinous as pure mystery. The symbol or painting therefore is just the gateway to the divine, so paintings become metaphors. Eric Gill says, that ‘a work of art is a word made flesh. It is not the word, the Logos and it is not the sacred itself, it is however an intersection between humanity and the sacred’. In 2 Corinthians 4:5-12, God whose command produced light has now acted in the hearts of the apostles to give them the light that they must pass on. This light is a felt response as well as a visual one. Painting should be something that is felt as well as something that is a visual medium for passing on the light, i.e. the gospel message.
If a piece of art is to have significance for anyone other than the artist themselves, it needs to have within it something that will retain the viewer’s attention and generate an emotional response.
All religious painting is abstract. In most mystical traditions one can only approach the divine through non-rational contemplation, because the divine or sacred, it is pure mystery. As painting is pure presence and so the silent nature of painting can indicate realms that are not available to limited language. In painting the sacred or numinous, the painter is exchanging one abstraction for another, even though paintings are tangible objects the ‘real’ is elsewhere. For the artist and the viewer there can be a deep self-identification with the painting, like that of Caravaggio’s painting. The painting is the materialisation of the artist’s relationship with the super meaningful.
Abstract art, is now generally understood to mean art that does not depict objects in the natural world, but instead uses colour and form in a non-representational way.
It is the relationship that counts, as in most human experience. The Christian artist aims to make manifest his or her relationship with the eternal divine and to reflect in some way the depth and imagination of the created order. It’s no wonder that some painters have chosen abstract art as their way of describing an abstract entity such as God. Abstract and non-figurative art was among the very first forms of art because art at it’s very core is about communication. Abstract art involves paintings, which represent things that aren’t visual, such as emotion, sound and spiritual experience.
Artist Kandinsky said, “Of all the arts, abstract painting is most difficult. It demands that you know how to draw well that you have heightened sensitivity for composition and for colours, and that you be a true poet. This last is essential”.
A further distinction tends to be made between abstract art, which is geometric, and abstract art that is fluid and where the apparent spontaneity often involves careful planning, such as Kandinsky describes.
In western art history, the break from the notion that a painting had to represent something, ‘look like something’, happened in the 20th century with impressionism and later Fauvism and Cubism. From these movements the idea developed that colour, line form and texture could be the subject of the painting. Creation itself could be the subject of the created piece of artwork. The potential to communicate ideas through painting in this way becomes endless. In the 80’s Brice Marsden created 5 paintings, illustrating the 5 stages of the Annunciation of Mary. These paintings are characterised by the purity of colour, a feeling of space, geometry and relationship.
We find this abstraction in Genesis 9:11-17. Twice in Genesis the Lord says that when the visible sign of the rainbow appears in the clouds, this will be the reminder of Gods covenant with Noah. This visual sign was made as an assurance for us humans that God will not forget his covenant. The rainbow is a visual aid, where the meaning of the image lives on in the hearts and minds of the believer. The rainbow is a non-figurative abstract painting in the sky, communicating multiple messages of hope, beauty, creation and growth and ultimately the fullness of life, which is found in God. The most magnificent rainbow I have seen was in Cambridge last year. The appearance of the rainbow, full of colour and bursting out from behind a building reminded me of an abstract painting by a female artist entitled ‘Anticipating Joy”. The painting holds within its composition an array of different colours melting one into the other. For me, the colours are a light, an illumination in the midst of the clouds; that is the darkness, which occurs when we do not live in anticipation. A rainbow bursting with colour is a joy to see, it is a striking and beautiful sight chosen by God to communicate a message, firstly to Noah and then to every living creation for all generations to come.
Within each painting there is a message, art is so much more than simply what the viewer sees, within its meaning it incorporated a feeling and invites a response.
Classifying a painting in terms of genre and period is helpful but simply classifying artwork as a means of understanding, can reduce its meaning and potential. It is possible and should be encouraged that an artists work is seen as an individual entity as well as being part of a tradition or movement. Since creativity and imagination come from God, they are Gods gifts to us, so we need not limit or contain our creativity, but look to art as a way of broadening our understanding of God.
Religious painting in all its forms has within it a means of encountering something of the divine. The use of traditional art, such as Byzantine art and architecture and icons used in a devotional sense can provide a glimpse of the heavenly splendour that is the life of God himself and that Christians will share in this after death. We are reminded that ultimately the beauty of being in space and time was accomplished in Jesus Christ the true and seen image of God. An exploration and recovery of beauty through painting is based on the actual and continued presence of God.
As we live and experience this splendour through art we can progressively become more Christ like. In contemplating the depths of beauty found in painting, God gives us something of himself to see and hold on to for all generations to come, which enables us to live in an exciting response to his love and in anticipation of Joy.
The Revd Elizabeth Adekunle is a curate at St Luke’s Homerton, Hackney in the Diocese of London and is an artist.
Elizabeth Adekunle is Archdeacon of Hackney