There is a great deal of evidence from all over the
world that the origins of art are religious. As human
cultures have developed, however, art has acquired many other roles
- not all of them positive. Even so, that original purpose can
never, perhaps, be completely discarded.
There is always light and dark in my work.
Rejoicing in God's goodness, and protesting against evil are two
sides of the same coin. You can't protest against evil unless you
can conceive of something better. You can't rejoice in goodness
without becoming aware of all that opposes it.
The balance may vary in different pictures,
but, as in the Bible, both aspects are always there. Even in the
Song of Songs there is a sense of "the little foxes that spoil the
vineyard"; even in the Lamentations of Jeremiah there is the memory
of "mercies new every morning".
Fra Angelico may have been the person who influenced me
most. I think of the day I first set foot in the monastery
of San Marco as the beginning of a new epoch in my life. It
happened twice, actually: once when still at a school, and once,
when I'd left school, I went back. It's hard to put into words. . .
I was just aware of some quality in those paintings, which I
couldn't at first put my finger on, but knew I wanted, or wanted to
know more about.
It was the first thing that brought a sense of personal
connection with the Gospels - which I'd studied, but never
seen that you could enter into them in that kind of way. Something
art could do which I'd never envisaged before.
Richard Harries [Lord Harries of Pentregarth, former
Bishop of Oxford] came to the first exhibition I did, at
the Ashmolean in 1994. And he lived round the corner from me in
north Oxford.
At Bloxham, we'll be talking about 20th-century
Christian imagery: each choosing pictures alternately.
The most recent among my choices is Tom Denny's Thomas
Traherne window, in Hereford Cathedral. It's wonderful,
and Tom taught me how to make stained glass.
My painting Menorah was originally inspired by
a train journey from Oxford to London, in which I saw the
smoke drifting from the chimneys of Didcot Power Station, under a
sky that looked like the arch of a great cathedral. For the 20th
century, smoke from a crematorium-like chimney has one terrible
association, but the arch of the sky seemed to frame it like some
great religious moment.
It resulted in a series of paintings in which I tried to
make sense of that collocation. Then someone noticed that
the towers, from the angle I had painted them, lined up in the form
of a seven-branched menorah. Once I had realised that the towers
could symbolise both the presence and the absence of God, they
seemed to require a foreground that did the same - and that could
only be the crucifixion. The picture was painted for a
retrospective exhibition at the Ashmolean, in 1994. Fourteen years
later, the museum acquired the painting, and it now hangs on
permanent loan in St Giles's, Oxford.
All my pictures begin on a tiny scale. Some
stay like that, others grow into seven-foot canvases. For most of
my career, I have generally painted in oils; but in the last few
years I have been exploring other media, like mosaic, ceramic, and,
most recently, stained glass.
I started training as an artist while reading English at
Oxford. I drew at the Ruskin (where I now do some
teaching), and then studied for three years at the Royal Academy
School of Art.
The first ambition I remember was to drive a red
double-decker bus down the King's Road. The second that I
recall was to be an international man of mystery.
The first thing that almost always grabs my attention in
a work of art (or fails to do so) is some formal quality,
a colour harmony, or an impression of composition - the sense of
something shaped and formed sparkling in the random flow of
ordinary life.
There were three sermons that had a deep impact on me as
an undergraduate. The first was when I accidentally got
trapped in the Oxford Union, and found myself listening to the
evangelist David Watson. The second was when I voluntarily went to
hear Michael Ramsey speaking in my college chapel. The third was
when I heard Jackie Pullinger speaking to an audience of street
people, in the crypt of Westminster Cathedral, about her
experiences in the Walled City in Hong Kong. I was very much
inspired by seeing the extraordinary changes in people's lives.
The most important choice was to ask my wife, Annie, to
marry me, when she came back from working with St
Stephen's Society in Hong Kong. This was started by Jackie
Pullinger in the Walled City, that extraordinary city halfway
between British and Chinese jurisdiction, which become an
astonishing centre of the Triad gangs. She started working with the
drug addicts, and that grew into a great work. A lot of drug work
is now with younger teenagers in Hong Kong. Annie goes out there
every two years or so, and I go out more occasionally.
My biggest regret was not asking her 20 years
earlier, before she went out to work there - but then many
lives might not have been rescued that were.
It would be nice to be remembered for some wonderful
thing that one has not yet done, or else for some good
deed that one has forgotten. Although I hope, of course, that some
of my work will survive, once it's finished it feels somehow
separate from me.
Thomas Traherne's Centuries of Meditations is
perhaps my favourite book. Having said that, read- ing
Traherne sometimes feels like drinking liquid gold: it's so rich it
can be managed only in small doses.
There is stretch of landscape, to one side of a
road that winds from the Maltings at Snape to the quay at Orford,
which I have been captivated by since I was a child. It is the
source of many of the pictures in the current exhibition.
I've just finished translating the third book of Psalms
[Psalms 73-89], and by the end I was greeting the short
ones with a cheer and the long ones with a groan - though that had
nothing to do with their content. While those overflowing with
praise are more obviously attractive, I found that, when you dig
down into the motivation of the more bitter, vengeful psalms, they
turn out in their way to be equally moving.
It's a project I started ten years ago. At the
time, I'd been very interested in the Song of Solomon, and realised
I needed to learn Hebrew. I then got distracted by the idea of
doing Psalms. I wanted to do the illustrations partly because I
needed some way of getting into the psalms, to focus my attention.
The illustration would emerge from that process. I have eight or so
different translations in front of me, but there's no one modern
translation I'm completely happy with - no one ancient one, either.
I did it first just for myself. Whether anyone else likes my
translations or not remains to be seen. I did an illustrated
translation with wood engravings; then, more recently, the second
book, which also had paintings, was part of the Ashmolean
exhibition. I've just finished the third one, and it'll be
exhibited next year in March, in London.
My Hebrew? I wouldn't say it's good . .
. good enough. I learned it more than ten years ago now -
that's one of the nice things about living in Oxford. I just went
along to a class at the Hebrew Studies Centre, and the tutor had
only two undergraduates; so he was absolutely delighted to have a
third person to join. Translating the psalms meant I've kept it up
since then. The only way I can do the books at the moment is as
hand-bound artist's books; so they're quite expensive; but
eventually I hope they can be done in a more affordable format. The
next book is quite short, but the one after that is quite long, and
contains Psalm 119.
I tend to get irritated when I lose things.
Unfortunately, I am congenitally untidy, which means that I lose
things more than I should. Fortunately, my wife is very good at
finding them.
I am happiest in my work with a large blank canvas at
the beginning of a big painting, and when I paint the
final stroke at the end.
For me, the centre of prayer is thanksgiving. I
can never do enough of that.
If my Italian were better, I should like to be
locked in a church with St Francis of Assisi. As it is, I would
only really want to be locked in a church if I was doing some work
there, in which case I would prefer the company of a fellow artist.
Any of those who took part in the Regensburg exhibition would be
fine.
Roger Wagner was talking to Terence Handley MacMath. His
illustrated talk, with Lord Harries, "Christ in Modern Art", at the
Bloxham Festival of Faith and Literature, is at
10 a.m. tomorrow (Saturday); tickets £10. His next exhibition is at
The Gallery in Cork Street, London W1, from 30 April to 10
May.
www.rogerwagner.co.uk