“ALL the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” Have you ever imagined your life as a stage play? Richard Kenton Webb has, and his series of drawings, Passion, sees his experiences as a victim of iconoclasm portrayed as a story with parallels to that of Christ. While this may sound presumptuous, is it not what we are all called to, as we follow in the footsteps of Christ, becoming imitators of him and players in the five-act drama of salvation history?
Webb’s own passion experience came firstly through “the pockets of academic disdain for painting” whch he has had to navigate in his professional life as an art educator. Within a three-month period in the early 2020s, his full-time teaching post of 15 years ended, he started a new position, and moved to Devon, and then Covid struck. He found himself alone in a hut in the woods by the sea, teaching online, away from his family.
Exhausted, broken, and alone in the lockdown, he experienced grief as he reflected on his experiences in teaching. In response, he began a cycle of drawings inspired by the Passion of Christ. Through these, he began to understand his own passion in the events of the Passion while, by out-scaping his experience and belief, he found comfort, healing, and restoration.
Richard Kenton Webb/photo Andy GreenAssassins by Richard Kenton Webb
Richard Kenton Webb/photo Andy GreenAssassins by Richard Kenton Webb
In intensely worked and deeply felt charcoal and chalk images, where tone and line are balanced to suggest colour, Webb sets his figures on stage as players in symbolic tableaux that are both scenes from Christ’s Passion and depictions of the betrayed artist-teacher. This figure is betrayed by, as Hugh Adlington writes of Webb’s image Assassins, “long-gowned academics” poring “over a clipboard, conspiring”. It is such as these that have changed education so that it has “become very narrow, very pigeonholed, very word orientated and very digitally biased”. As Adlington notes, “the allegorised Christ of Webb’s Passion is the suffering artist — betrayed, vilified, crucified, before coming at last to miraculous rebirth and transcendence”.
Webb’s reflection on iconoclasm extends beyond the context of contemporary academia, however, and also encompasses the impact of the English iconoclasm that, as Webb explains, for more than 120 years, obliterated much of “our rich and vibrant visual past”. Between 1540 and 1660, making an image of God (such as the painting titled Trinity, which confronts us as we enter the exhibition) was seen as idolatry and heresy. This was in direct reaction to “a deep and rich heritage of image-making” that had for “well over a thousand years” “represented God”.
Fourteen centuries of visual creativity were lost to iconoclasm, and Webb’s Acknowledging English Iconoclasm triptychs are visualisations of what was lost, including our understanding of medieval poets, English mystics, and “the many Mystery, Morality and Miracle plays that were actively acted out all over England bringing communities and classes together”.
By viewing Webb’s English Iconoclasm images, we enter deeply into the experience and nature of mysticism through images visualising the extent of the Cloud of Unknowing and the approach to it or the possibility of climbing the ladder of perfection and reaching for the light of Christ.
Richard Kenton Webb/Photo Andy GreenAcknowledging English Iconoclasm, No.3: Early English Contemplatives by Richard Kenton Webb
These mystical images are formed, however, from the stuff of earthly existence, meaning that Webb recognises that mysticism has an incarnational rather than a solely visionary basis. Making his own paints by physically mixing oils and earth pigments, he works with the dust of the earth to fashion the substantial stuff of paint, which is then applied to his canvases with palette knives, brushes, and fingers, as he physically shapes its form. With some of these images, he also scribes or scores into the wet paint to indicate the force of storms in these lives and images.
Webb writes that, by re-imaging what the English iconoclasm destroyed and by “re-imaging God’s self-sacrifice and death” by placing himself inside of it, he is trying “to make some sense of living in this violent world, where human beings are capable of such acts of hatred, anger and stupidity”. These wonderfully realised and achingly beautiful evocations of self-sacrificial and mystical love are themselves expressions of hope in the face of senseless destruction.
“Richard Kenton Webb: Passion drawings + English Iconoclasm Paintings” is at Benjamin Rhodes Arts, 62 Old Nichol Street, London E2, until 11 July. Phone 07768 398428. benjaminrhodes.co.uk