Seeing the Unseen | Reality and Imagination in the Art of Stanley Spencer

About

"Everything has a sort of double meaning for me, there's the ordinary everyday meaning of things, and the imaginary meaning about it all, and I wanted to bring these things together." Stanley Spencer (1891 – 1959)

Stanley Spencer’s art is autobiographical, personal and strangely mysterious, and sometimes beyond comprehension of an unseeing eye. He was one of the most original artists of his era, belonging to no major art movement. His work was primarily influenced by his personal reality and extraordinary imagination.

His love for Cookham and his happy childhood memories of family and local life were the bedrock of his art, and he returned many times from his travels and travails to the village of his birth. His originality flows from his ability not only to see with his eyes but with his soul. Each work is layered, a mixture of acutely observed reality, memory, fantasy and spirituality. Spencer’s artistic impulse drove his very being, his genius lying in his ability to see beyond visual reality.

"I was moved by that quickening of spiritual meaning which came at moments when I saw the created being that the artist had made in the midst of bare reality……like the sound of one of Bach’s Preludes mingling with the smell of Ovey’s Farm opposite our house…"

Spencer spoke of his desire to ‘marry’ his works; to ’marry’ his subjects to Cookham and often to a religious experience. He painted what he loved – his compelling motivation for creating some of the most extraordinary art of the 20th century. Using the collection of the Stanley Spencer Gallery this exhibition will look at what inspired him and show how his reality merged with his imagination. It will also invite the viewer to look with their own eyes beyond what they see, just as Spencer did.

Works on show will include: Sarah Tubb and the Heavenly Visitors 1933; The Last Supper 1920; The Betrayal 1919; Patricia at Cockmarsh Hill 1935; Christ Preaching at Cookham Regatta 1952-9; and The Beatitudes of Love: Contemplation 1938.

Stanley Spencer brought the angels to Cookham…..as can be seen in his striking painting Sarah Tubb and the Heavenly Visitors (1933). In his vivid imagination the heavenly host arrive to cheer up Sarah, who had flopped to the ground to pray. She feared the end of the world, so Spencer brings her things to comfort her.

This is a wonderful example of the new exhibition at the Stanley Spencer Gallery, in Cookham, which has a fine collection of the artist’s work. Born in the village in 1891, Spencer (1891 -1959) is synonymous with the Thames side village from which he took much inspiration.    

Following a long artistic tradition, he set many bible stories in his local environment – he has Christ Preaching at Cookham Regatta (1953 -59) on the Thames and the Last Supper (1920) taking place in a Cookham malthouse. Christ is betrayed to the Roman soldiers by the back wall of his Cookham home of Fernlea on the High Street.

In keeping with his love of nature and the fields and meadows surrounding his home he sets his second wife Patricia Preece against a background of Cockmarsh Hill, as he described, marrying her to the landscape so that the thistles, her necklace, her hair and the bushes become as one.
He was a truly original artist, and his work continues to intrigue.