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Looking down from the cross
Nicholas Cranfield on an unusual version of the Stations
 Second Station: He receives the Cross by Jonathon Brown, at St Andrew’s, Fulham Fields |
| THE Stations of the Cross were once a familiar piety for Christians who dared not risk the journey to the Holy Land. Increasingly, today’s artists make the journey for themselves. In recent decades, not only have such Stations been staged in a “contemporary” world (St Elisabeth’s, Reddish, Stockport), but individual artists have chosen to expand the number of stations from the conventional 14 or 15 (where the resurrection is included).
Iain McKillop’s series of 18 for Ewell Parish Church (Arts, 16 December 2005) perhaps most clearly demonstrated how this can be done successfully.
In the vaulting splendour of Newman and Billing’s French Gothic Church of St Andrew, in West Kensington, Jonathon Brown has hung 21 charcoal drawings. For these he used charred logs from the south of France, where he has a studio near Nice in a hall run by the local Mairie.
The series is drawn as from Christ’s own perspective. It begins before Pilate and ends with the post-resurrection appearances, at Emmaus, at the lakeside, and before Doubting Thomas. Since the banners hang around the church, encircling the Body of Christ at prayer, we, too, see the Passion from Christ’s viewpoint.
L. S. Lowry (1887-1976) once reckoned that “Had I not been lonely, I should not have seen what I did,” and there is a sense in which Brown’s search reveals his own inner journey. Again and again, in what at first appeared to be little more than naïve large-scale (two-metre-tall) “stick-drawings”, details emerge that detain the eye and alert the soul.
As Jesus receives his cross, he catches sight of the tools of the carpenter’s trade. Jesus falls three times, the first time on stony ground, then on softer ground, and finally, face down, into a field of wild flowers. The Sower sows the Word eventually in dying. At the foot of the cross, there is a single flower, next to the centurion, offering the possibility of resurrection.
In the encounter with Mary Magdalen, the gardener not only clutches a scythe, seized as it were from Death itself, but a first bloom of the new Day: the Risen Lord has to smell the new world for himself. Only in one post-Easter appearance does Christ bear the marks of his Passion, the appearance to Thomas. Only when we are lonely will we see.
Jonathon Brown’s Stations of the Cross are at St Andrew’s, Fulham Fields (between St Andrew’s Road and Star Road), London W14, until 4 April. |
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