•  Unravelling the Art of Stanley Spencer

    
                                       Analytic attention to process is the British genius.

                                                                                               Hugh Kenner,  A Sinking Island.
 
 

Stanley's creative impulse

For most artists the creative impulse remains indefinable and the mental processes by which it becomes a picture mysterious. In the evolution of a painting the whirl of ideas surfacing from an artist's subconscious becomes integrated into an entity (defined here as a percept, concept, idea or emotion to which the thinker mentally imparts form) which is almost inexpressible in words, so much so that some artists - Bonnard or Klimt, for example - refused to divulge the inner life which prompted their art.

But to love fully is to understand fully, 'understanding' in this sense having no need of explanation.

The procedure relies of course on the extent to which Stanley left records of his thoughts, in his case most generously. But then it has the drawback of evaluating each component in isolation, whereas its contribution only becomes apparent if grasped in its association with its fellows. Only when assembled together do the components energise the picture and help to provide its dynamism.

So although individual components of Stanley's art are laid out and discussed in sequence in the analyses which follow, it is important to appreciate that it was unlikely he thought them up in quite such a formulaic way. As with most artists, the components emerged slowly over time, and then, in his case, gradually assembled themselves in his mind as concepts, or notions as he called them. It was to meet his genius's inborn demand to make these concepts visual that Stanley's mind evolved instinctively - and even subconsciously at times - the systems proposed in this website.

And what concept-systems they were when rendered in paint! Not only do they surprise by their originality, but the procedure by which Stanley managed them remained consistent throughout most of his life. To fully appreciate the one, we need to master the other.

Stanley as a cautious thinker

But for Stanley the paradox did not exist. He did not see his paintings conventionally. If we are to see them as he saw them, we must get to understand his thinking. It is no easy task, but the purpose of this website is to offer indications which might help.

As one living thing among others, we humans also seek a state of perfection. But alone among nature we are blessed (or cursed, the sin of Adam and Eve?) with freewill consciousness. We can choose where our definition of perfection lies, as witnessed by the various world religions or political economies. Stanley, son of a professional musician and grandson of a master-builder responsible for erecting many of the big houses round Cookham, was born to an instinct for technical precision and to the understanding that he had to be exact in his thinking if he were to reach the perfection most personal to himself 

This austere approach Stanley applied even to the inevitable matter of death, his own or others. His mother occasionally performed the village service of laying out the dead, and in their late teens the Spencer boys were sometimes expected to accompany and assist her. To the onlooker, Stanley's undemonstrative acceptance of this conventionally traumatic situation could appear to verge on indifference. But it was not the deceased's physical extinction he mourned, so much as their imaginative-creative loss, their 'soul' - Donne's for whom the bell tolls. As will be suggested, he had other ways of dealing with death's emotional impact.

Stanley's observed paintings

Stanley's instinctive precision of mind - or literalness of approach if one cares to see it in that light - was reinforced by four years' study between 1908 and 1912 at the Slade School of Art, part of University College London (he commuted by train each day from Cookham.) It shows up particularly in his observed drawings and paintings. In observed work, and especially in his many down-to-earth landscapes and still-lifes which he sometimes called his potboilers because they provided ready income, he trained himself to record what he saw in exact detail, whether it was a glorious tree in full blossom or a dismal heap of scrapiron in a shipyard (both had equal identity in his view.) Moreover he did so with intense absorption, displaying a notice asking not to be disturbed when painting in the open.

An anecdote about the novelist Barbara Cartland's daughter Raine, then Lady Lewisham but later the Countess Spencer who became stepmother for a while to Princess Diana, illustrates both Stanley's intense concentration and his accuracy in rendering detail. In April 1959 his dealer had encouraged him, despite his still being convalescent from a major cancer operation, to accept a commission to make a portrait of Lady Lewisham, and he was, he complained, having difficulties with her eyelashes. For her part, Lady Lewisham, sitting to a preoccupied Stanley, could not understand his unexplained spells of leaving his easel, coming closely up to her face and staring long and hard into her eyes. Finally she plucked up courage to ask why. I am counting your eyelashes, he explained. 

None of this should be taken to imply that Stanley's observed work was photographic. In fact, in one important aspect, it was often unphotographic. Most artists look straight ahead when composing their landscapes and begin their subject some distance in front of their easel. But not so Stanley. To him, close-up detail seen by looking down to his feet was as integral to a scene as detail in the far distance. So he saw no reason why he should not only include it but render it equally sharp. To the eye, or to a standard camera lens (which covers a normal eye field-of-view) this is impossible. Only the close detail or the distant would be in focus. By making both sharp, Stanley is in effect imposing a foreground wide-angle perspective on the expectedly normal eye view, a presentation which can intrigue, if unsettle, a viewer. Hockney later used the technique in some of his acclaimed photo-collages, in his case with deliberation, but instinctively in Stanley's.

Stanley's imaginative paintings.

Such precision of eye and mind worked well for Stanley in his down-to-earth thinking. But how could the same precision, when carried into into his up-in-heaven thinking, be expected to convey the infinitenesses of his conceptualisations?

All artists use memory for their purpose. But there must be few, if any, who used it Stanley's way. It was the well-spring of those paintings which he regarded as his important work, his imaginative compositional 'up-in-heaven' pictures. In an observed painting he was able to image his feelings solely in the setting, the location of the scene. But in an up-in-heaven picture he had to image his feelings in both the setting and the 'message' of the picture. It had to convey the concept he wanted to express which might or might not have obvious relevance to the scene through which he chose to depict it. 

For Stanley, the process of evolving a visionary painting worked as follows.

This can help explain why Stanley thought of himself as two different people. However joyous, exultant, bewildering or infuriating an experience was in his practical everyday existence, he had the gift of seeing it at the same time as offering universal (up-in-heaven) insight. He conveys this duality in some paintings by inserting himself as part of the experience. Or else he shows himself - not necessarily in his own person but in some equivalent form - as undergoing the experience which is being transformed by his picture from down-to-earth to up-in-heaven.

Making the switch

Sometimes Stanley's contemplation was sterile, or would offer only inept - what he called incompetent - memory-feelings, and he would complain bitterly of frustration. His recalled memory-feelings were truly effective when they replicated for him creative moments associated with aspects of love in his spiritual meaning.

When such contemplation generated apposite images, Stanley would record them as detailed pencil drawings, or sometimes as ink-and-wash sketches to test their compositional tonality. He generally used Imperial-size (30 ins x 22 ins) paper for this task, and left many thousands. If any did not convey quite the feeling he wished, he would set them by until more suitable examples cropped up. But on those he decided to use he would pencil a grid with a draughtsman's accuracy in readiness for enlarging it to a (usually) primed canvas either as the basis of a single painting or as a component in a composite work. The attached drawing, one of a series called Patricia with Dogs, is an example.

Stanley's memory-feelings.

Resist such sensational 'exposures'. They can fascinate, amuse, even shock. They often make good after-dinner yarns. Stanley never greatly minded, provided they did not promote the scaffolding of his paintings in place of the edifice (a particular public temptation, it seems, when dealing with their sexual content.) But art-wise such comments, however titillating, are vapid, because they are restricted to his down-to-earth life, and for him that part of his life had no meaning if not set against his up-in-heaven life. Whoever seeks them out but fails to make that connection is wasting his time - and ours - as a critic of his art.

Stanley's large visionary paintings.

For his large composite visionary paintings - invariably those which had major significance in his outlook - Stanley would kaleidoscope his selected drawings into a master-composition. Once satisfied with this master-composition, he would use his pencilled grid-system to transfer it, section by section, to a full-size canvas ready for painting. These assemblies could thereby became 'modernist' complexes of multiple or mixed perspectives, and his adjustment of them in the interests of overall composition, achieved instinctively as he worked, was always consummate. The task was usually undertaken in such high creative excitement that he would refuse or postpone uncongenial social invitations in order to work undisturbed for hours or days at an end until he had achieved the effect he wanted.

The final application of paint - often postponed for weeks, months or even years - was normally done thickly in dark tones, but, when time pressed, so thinly in light tones that the pencil lines showed through. Being right-handed, Stanley usually worked diagonally from the top left corner to avoid smudging. He knew he was a great artist, but never claimed to be a great painter in the traditional sense, although his techniques were invariably adequate for his intentions.

Because Stanley's visionary paintings were constructed to convey a concept rather than depict a narrative, his figures were not meant to be viewed as 'real'. They were essentially metaphors in his up-in-heaven interpretation of the emotion. So he would modify them from their physical originals and transfigure them into what he called shapes. Sometimes, like most painters, the forms and attitudes of his shapes could be influenced by those used by past artists, especially those from the mediaeval and early renaissance period with which he was so familiar.

Thus Stanley's figures emerge on the canvas in their transfigured form.  His down-to-earth feelings about them might or might not have any relevance. For him, they were no longer in their down-to-earth personalities. Yet for those who knew them in real life they invariably remained recognisable as the actual people they were, in the same way that his settings are generally identifiable.

Stanley's counterpoints in operation

Stanley's use of the counterpointing principle is apparent even in early work, such as Apple Gatherers which can be interpreted as based on the 'separateness' of the two sexes coming into the mutuality - 'unity' - of adult understanding, and in Zacharias and Elizabeth where the separateness of husband and wife is gloriously 'married' into their cosmic unity as Elizabeth announces to the disbelieving Zacharias that she is to give birth to John the Baptist. 

Unravelling The Nativity .

If the purpose of a counterpoint is to show a 'marrying' between 'separates' - a unity from duality - it will help the viewer if it contains imagery indicating the separation point or 'barrier'. In Stanley's early paintings the barriers were sometimes symbolised by the property walls which so affected his boyhood (Zacharias and Elizabeth) or by the steep banks of the Thames where he swam, as in John Donne Arriving in Heaven.

In The Nativity a fence of a design common then in Cookham gardens marks the division between the 'public' and 'private' sections of the Lane. There seems to have been a metal railing there originally, no doubt with a gate or stile, but Stanley has imported his garden fence from some other Cookham spot as a substitute 'barrier'.

To the right, in the 'public' or 'universal' part, is the Holy Family, the up-in-heaven group, the subject  of what will become his fugue. To the left, in the 'private' or 'personal' part, are two couples embracing. They are the down-to-earth group, the episodes. They make sense if we surmise they are lovers modelled on Stanley's older siblings who had recently wed or were about to do so. Visually the separateness of the two groups is further emphasised by distinction of costume.

How then does Stanley 'marry' them? He does so by asking us to see the barrier as metaphysical, not as the actual metal railing it probably was. When we, the viewer, comprehend - or at least glimpse - what the painting is 'about', then the garden fence, the barrier, will 'disappear'. We will have been transferred into Stanley's thought-world. We will have expanded a 'private' percept to 'public' concept. We will be 'listening' to his fugue. So let's follow his associations.

In real-life Stanley's brothers and sisters were, like himself, well-versed in the Bible. Ma, a convinced Methodist and local secretary of the British and Foreign Bible Society, insisted on daily Bible reading by her children when young. So they were all familiar with the meaning of the Virgin Mary in her Christian rôle as Mother of God. But, through Pa's more searching humanistic outlook, they also knew her as emblematic of the Creatrix, the archetypal Great Mother.

So it is odd that here, in Stanley's painting, the lovers do not see Mary, although she is gazing at them intently (one of his cousins, Amy Hatch, was persuaded to model for her.) They cannot recognise her beyond the fence because Stanley is presenting her as an abstraction; that is, she represents an invisible entity in our conceptualisation, counterpointing his corporeal brother and sister on the other side of the fence. He is reinforcing the prison-wall tapping he so desired in his outlook and metaphysically morphing 'private' personal feeling into collective 'public' concept  - the basic process of his visionary work.

part of our existence, even if only intermittently thought about. If we can begin to appreciate the implications of the imagery Stanley is using here, we can begin to draw near the heart of his painting.

There is, however, one figure in the composition who can see Mary and the Babe, a strangely ecstatic figure kneeling by the fence in worship. Stanley once described him as the third of the Three Wise Men who are worshipping baby Jesus (the lovers no doubt represent metaphysically the other two.) For that figure, the barrier does not exist. The figure must surely be Stanley himself in a visually odd - and therefore pinpointedly significant - up-in-heaven persona.

It is noteworthy that Stanley even at a young age had already realized that few viewers or questioners would understand his ideas unless he set them in a form within their experience. The Three Wise Men they could grasp. But if he said the kneeling figure was himself in awe of the spiritual atmosphere he discerns beyond the fence, most would probably have thought him 'peculiar'. So it was less wearing to prevaricate. The habit was to persist throughout his life.

By means of such images we at last arrive at the threshold of Stanley's thought-world (as we are expected to do in all his visionary pictures.) The 'marrying' in his counterpoint has taken place. Through his assembly of relevant down-to-earth percepts, the circumstantial in our lives is revealed as linked metaphysically to the eternal in our existence. His concept has been transfigured into the up-in-heaven for him - and, hopefully, for us. 

Stanley does not tell us in his writings what was the 'master' experience or notion from which the painting sprang. The picture - the comprehension - originated as an epiphany in circumstances personal to himself. Its specific associations lie outside our own background, but the whole is offered in the hope that we might be able to recognize the message from within our own experience.

Because each viewer will interpret the concept - the 'message' of the painting - from his own experience and in his own way, there will be as many 'meanings' to the painting as there are viewers who respond to it. But the meanings will tend to cluster into categories which we can call, as Jung did, archetypes, because they have the property of illuminating the evolutionary emotions, feelings and comprehensions common to the universality of humanity.

Perhaps the imagery tells that the lovers' unions are part of cosmic destiny, the animate will to procreate and renew. Or maybe it tells that human love and physical sex are sacred and that marriage metaphysically reflects the historic unity of dual gods into a monotheistic unity, a single Godhead. Alternatively it may offer no 'message' at all, but a viewer will be intrigued by the superlative composition of the painting, or by the sense of mystery it conveys. In fact it can provide whatever meaning we wish to find in it, surely the sign of a masterwork.

Subconsciously Stanley has superposed so many levels of meaning - as he did in all his visionary paintings - that although we can deconstruct the imagery by the linear thought processes we use to define our down-to-earth lives, we can best distinguish its levels by using a vertical up-in-heaven thought process which invokes our feelings from our experience, our intuition. Reliance on intuition rather than intellectual logic became a major element in Stanley's artistic thinking and output, as will again be apparent in coming webpages.

Stanley's retrieved associations - his memory-feelings - are ingeniously used to construct the painting. For example, he felt the need to convince us that we should see his image of Mary as having the characteristics of a monument. Statues have plinths or pedestals, so in his precise mind she cannot be a monument without one. None existed at that spot in Mill Lane. But at the river end of the Lane path, where at that time it met the ferry, the ferryman had strengthened the bank with sacks of mixed sand and cement left to dry to concrete. What better association to import for Mary to stand on, seeing that the ferry was called My Lady Ferry?

The watermeadow by the Thames seen in the picture (one of young Stanley's adored Cookham marsh meadows) was in earlier times flooded in winter but lushly grassed and wild-flowered in summer. The two tall stones Stanley shows (gone now) formerly marked allocated village hay lots (the Haywarden is still a fossil Cookham parish office.) The Lane had such a powerful meaning for Stanley that he once took the unexpected step of 'marrying' himself to it by burying a tin of his precious drawings there (where, alas, enthusiastic tries at metal-detecting have failed to find it.)

Was Stanley perhaps using his 'marriage' of himself and the Lane to honour an ancient Rite of Spring, linking it with a highly personal experience which overcame him there?

It is possible. Joseph on the right (imaged from a drawing Stanley made of a Slade male model) is shown as a virile young man, not the old man beyond the possibility of fatherhood who would in traditional terms have been more accurate. Some commentators have seen him derived from the image of Mercury in Botticelli's comparable Primavera, others as the figure of Joseph picking fruit in Gerard David's Flight into Egypt. He is, said Stanley, doing something to a chestnut tree. Stanley later confessed his boyhood guilt about defying Victorian prohibitions and yielding to masturbation, his woeful habits as he called them, perhaps for their physicality but also because they dredged up fantasy associations which seemed to him to have no relevance to the stringency of his thinking. Maybe he was using that detail in the painting to exculpate his bewilderment, or in his words, to help redeem it into his up-in-heaven thought-world.

Look, for example, at the kneeling figure of Stanley in his thought-world. He is almost masked by a tall plant. It appears to be a sunflower which, because of its profusion of seeds, can traditionally represent the fecundity of the sexual, but which is also known for its habit of turning to face the sun. In Stanley's picture it faces the Baby Christ, a figure which he mentioned in one account he came to as an afterthought. It is entirely possible that already in these early years Stanley was touching on one of his links between Christ - today's conflation of the ancient Sun God with light in the form of the Light of the World - as a symbol of the 'up-in-heaven' in our existence, with the sexual instinct as the 'down-to-earth' which sustains it, a theme he was to develop powerfully in later paintings, such as Sunflower and Dog Worship.

In this Nativity painting the sunflower is not yet fully grown. Is Stanley telling too of his uncertainty about the implications of his adolescent urges? If so, his lovers, his older siblings, are entering a state of awareness as yet denied his youth. He is still an onlooker, with an over-the-wallish feeling about their anticipations. Their sexual expectations are sanctioned by the universality of humanity. They are holy. But are his? Could this be yet another of his personal confusions awaiting elucidation?

The mind begins to reel with the profusion of implication. No single layer of meaning can be more significant than any other. Each chases another's tail. They begin to intermingle in our minds into a rotationary form, a poetic thought-form once called a vortex. It is as though we are being battered by a tempest of ideas and feelings. Then, with luck, we reach a comprehension. The effect, if we manage it, is as if we had reached the calm eye at the centre of a storm. All around us is the roaring of the whirlwind, the vortex, but we are suddenly becalmed into the peace of an understanding. We have reached that moment when the two dynamic themes of Stanley's counterpoint achieve for us what has felicitously been called the 'stillness of synchronicity'. The artist and his imagery disappears, and only his product, his concept, emerges in our mind as pure emotive sensation, often beyond the power of language to contain. The experience provides us with dramatic catharsis, a momentary glimpse of timeless universality, an aspect of the identity of God for those who see it in that light.

There is a salutary lesson here in our analysis of Stanley's method. Although detail is skilfully used for compositional effect in his visionary paintings, little of it is random or inserted for infill. Nothing can be ignored. Every detail contributes.

For a ninteen-year old art student such a combination of art, poetry and drama was a remarkable achievement. It won him a deserved Slade prize.

As with all geniuses, Stanley appeared on the artistic stage already fully-formed, so to speak. And like all geniuses, he continued throughout his life not so much to develop his early promise as to amplify and fulfil it.
 
 

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