HAVING taught art for many years before his ordination, Andrew Vessey is now using retirement as an extension of the many ways in which he can express what he believes and the values by which he tries to live.
The 12 paintings that he has displayed as a “chapel within a chapel”, in the St Edmund Chapel at St Edmundsbury Cathedral, each have accompanying text, incorporating a reflection, a poem, and a prayer, all written by the artist. Arranging his works in this way makes a space for contemplation in which images and texts interrelate, and all attention given is prayer.
The centrepiece of the exhibition is Homage to John Mason, the 17th-century poet whose increasingly popular hymn “How shall I sing that Majesty” is about the glory of God and the questioning of humanity’s faith. Vessey considers Mason to be “a poet whose incredible theological vision deserves better exposure”. Mason’s hymn, he suggests, opens our eyes to ideas “based around an attempt to express the inexpressible, to unravel the mystery without destroying the mystery itself”.
Vessey, whose ideas about faith and art found particular inspiration in Walter Hussey’s ministry as Dean of Chichester, thinks that this “is what good poetry does, as well as us artists”: “We put words and images together so one can begin to find a truth always thought to be within reach but that, until now, we’ve never been able to express for ourselves.” In Vessey’s Homage, a single fissure of white expands or explodes in colours and pulses outwards from a still centre to form shards and splinters of coloured light.
Many of his paintings explore connections between biblical stories and those places in which the artist has been brought face to face with the sharp reality of the presence of God. Many are also set in his favourite part of Suffolk, the coastal area between Southwold and Aldeburgh. These were “the scene of many childhood holidays, making an indelible influence on my chosen colour palette and deep love for painting and writing poetry about the river Blyth”.
Courtesy of the artistHomage to John Mason by Andrew Vessey
Breakfast at Blackshore, Southwold is the third in a sequence of paintings based on John 21. Responding to Christ’s invitation, the disciples find themselves having breakfast with the Risen Saviour, are challenged, and become motivated. This stretch of the river Blyth, with fishing boats and industry on a human scale, is where Vessey imagines disciples “called away from the familiar and their routines, to forge Christ-like communities from a small rural movement”.
The natural world — through walks taken or locations visited — is often the inspiration for multi-layered works incorporating multiple images that fragment or distort the picture plane, but are unified within a larger whole. Vessey is an artist of integration, with a unitive vision, seeing God and stories interwoven within landscape. Christ and an angel underpin several of these landscapes, while light irradiates and illuminates from deep within. Images within images, paintings within paintings, are all set in a chapel within a chapel: visual and spiritual depth held together.
Vessey’s works celebrate the natural world, while also exploring the spirituality of a specific place or interpreting locations as settings for encountering the divine. Of these, three, including Homage to John Mason, were conceived as potential altar-paintings; images that, Vessey hopes, “might encourage reflection and wider interest in art in the service of the Church”.
“Returning Journeys” runs until 20 November.
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