R A C H E L M A S O N A Romantic/ Religious Interpretation of Artistic Reality

Let me explain why this critical interpretation of some obscure religious or mystical paintings has been submitted to a journal of art and design education. Firstly, the critical interpretation is based on research that was autobiographical in origin. Norman Adams was my instructor at art college and his religious or mystical understanding of artistic reality profoundly influenced both my conception of the subject I teach and my consciousness of what it means to be an art educator. Secondly, this research was located in an emerging strand of art education inquiry that has been described as ethno-historical, existential and hermeneu- tic [ 1 ) . Thirdly, it attempted to illuminate knowledge about art that had been transmitted indirectly at art college during studio- based training and in an educational context that was informal, personal and highly charged affectively [ 2 ] . Such knowledge, typically, remained unconscious and was therefore uncriticised.

Norman Adams, my former instructor, has quietly and effec- tively pursued his own aesthetic directions in painting for the last thirty years [ 3 ] . He has achieved most acclaim for his watercolour landscape studies, but has a reputation also as a religious or mystical painter. He has received major commissions from the Anglican and Catholic churches (e.g. for murals at St Anselm’s Church, Kennington, London, and Our Lady of Lourdes Church at Milton Keynes) and was selected by Oxford University Press to make drawings for their Illustrated Old Testament (41. Norman Adams is not a believer; he dislikes churches and all forms of institutionalised religion, but he describes aesthetics and religion as ‘inseparable’. The majority of his most important oil paintings, including the thirty-two can- vases that make up The Pilgrim’s Progress at St Anselm’s (Fig. l ) , are non-figurative. Their imagery is closely related to that of his watercolour landscape studies and they seldom contain much conventional religious iconography. In what sense is Adams a religious artist and why are these religious or mystical paintings?

The activity of painting has religious significance Norman Adams discovered the art and poetry of William Blake at the age of sixteen. He admires Blake for ‘inventing his own version of Christianity’, for his ‘Romantic spirit’ and for ‘his belief in great art’. He has adopted Blake’s perception of the artist’s role as something akin to that of a prophet or priest and has inherited Blake’s religious commitment and dedication to painting.

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R A C H E L M A S O N Romantic/Religious Interpretation of Artistic Reality

Adam’s greatest fear, like Blake’s, is that of producing super- ficial work. He condemns both the avant-garde and the art establishment for promoting work that is ‘vulgar’, ‘self-indul- gent’, ‘decorative’ or ‘too concerned with the manners of the day’ and dismisses artists without serious intentions. By his own admission, artists with serious intentions always attempt to ‘fit their work neatly into history like a paving stone, while combin- ing revolution with tradition’; they concern themselves with ‘non-corporeal’ or spiritual worlds that are ‘as big as they can possibly be made’. Serious paintings incorporate spiritual mes- sages that ‘combine elements of Christianity, Humanism and Buddhism, but are not contained in their entirety by any one of them’. If all this sounds lacking in humour, Adams asks ‘Do you go to church to be entertained?’

Adams is willing to undergo suffering, even agony, for the sake of his serious intentions. On different occasions he has compared the process of painting to ‘walking on red hot cinders’ or ‘on a bed of spikes’. He describes the life-and-death struggle and the dialectic of faith and doubt common to so many

F I G U R E 1. Norman Adams Panel from ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’, oil, 1972. St Anselm’s Church, Kennington.

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religious stories ( eg . the Crucifixion) as ‘wonderfully evocative of the artistic process’. When he completed a series of P A S S I O N paintings (Fig. 2 ) featuring large organic forms reminiscent of intestines, genitals and lavatorial plumbing encased in rigid geometrical compositions he claimed he had ‘invented symbols to express the extremes of ectasy and grief common to both the creative process in art and the Christian story of the Passion’.

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F I G u R E 2. Norman Adams Ecce Homo, pencil study for Passion paintings, 1961. Manchester Education Committee Collection.

Adams appears fascinated by the mystery of how art comes into being. Art-making represents such a colossal human effort, he is convinced it must have religious or mystical significance. Many of his oil paintings, e.g. T H E B L U E P R I N T F O R T H E C R E A T I O N (a large canvas, yellowed like an antique chart, heavily inscribed in pencil and crowded with complex, unintelli- gible forms) (Fig. 3 ) address, themselves directly to the problem of how to plan or plot the workings of the artistic process; they are paintings about painting. Their author understands artists like gods, as creating their own language and worlds, but judges artists’ worlds impoverished affairs as compared to the concrete example of nature. Paintings such as T H E B L U E P R I N T (which includes two mechanical forms copied from a diagram for fitting electric batteries) or M O R N I N G W A L K (which features a maternal form that has something like a door-hinge and spanner in place of a face) (Fig. 4) incorporate awkward puppet or robot figures deliberately designed to illustrate the inadequacy of mere human creation. Adams often implies that something other than himself speaks through his art.

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I ; I G L I R E 3. Norman Adams The Blueprint for the Creation, oil and collage, 1963. Peter Neubert Collection.

F I G I! R E 4. Norman Adams Study for ‘Morning Wulk ’, pencil, 1964.

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While he denies that his surrealist images come to him as visions, he has described himself as ‘surrendering the responsi- bility for inspiration to unknown forces’ and has claimed that communion with nature and/or God is essential to artistic imagination.

It is impossible to explicate the religious or mystical signifi- cance of Norman Adams’ paintings without reference to his biography. He defines the act of composition as ‘the purest delight man can known on this earth’ and his search for the meaning of existence in life and art are inseparable. He envies great masters such as Giotto their power to transcend material reality by eternalising great moments of human involvement, tragedy and suffering, both in and through art. Where William Blake sought ‘The Divine Embracing-a Union of All Souls with the Divine Substance’ [ 51 Adams, more prosaically, aims at ‘a basic oneness with all creation’.

A religious perception of landscape Adams’ choice of habitat in Yorkshire and the Hebrides has moral, if not religious, implications. Having spent his childhood and youth in London, he rejected the city in favour of the most scenically spectacular, remote areas of the British Isles. He described the city as ‘artificial’ and ‘so much trash’ comparing ‘the grotesque party’ of contemporary urban living unfavourably with a solitary, but more ‘real’ existence amidst nature. In Yorkshire and on Scarp, Adams spends long hours just looking at the landscape; he sketches mountains, skies and sea with an emphasis on atmospheric weather effects and dramatic lighting rather than on topographical representation. Whilst he insists it is absolutely essential that he paint directly in front of nature,

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F I G U R E 5. Norman Adams Sunrise, Mountains by Seu, water d o u r , 1976.

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R A C H E L M A S O N Romantic/Religious Interpretation of Artistic Reality

his sketch books, crammed full with literary and religious quota- tions about nature’s symbolic significance, demonstrate that literal transcription is never his aim.

The particular landscapes Adams selects are preferred British Romantic locations; he obviously admires nature at its most romantically rugged, awe-inspiring and sublime. His watercolour studies of tiny, vulnerable ships dwarfed by huge expanses of sky and sea, or of the moon glimpsed through mountains and mist (Fig. 5) are reminiscent of those by Joseph Mallord Turner and other British landscape artists. He employs a kind of graphic shorthand to make swift, fleeting impressions of favourite scenes, allowing wet paint to mix and flow, utilising white paper to suggest sky and favouring thin translucent layers of Turneresque colour. In his notebooks, quotations from Romantic nature poets (e.g. Shelley and Keats) and Biblical references to landscape (especially from Revelations and Genesis), mingle with pen- and-ink studies and scribbled designs for oil paintings. These combine to shape his religious-aesthetic mood or consciousness. Adams’ perception of the landscape he sketches is profoundly affected by a tradition of Romantic-religious nature poetry and by Biblical imagery and metaphor.

F I G ~ J R E 6. Norman Adams Winter, Moors, watercolour, 1959.

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Adams considers nature indispensable both to religion and art. It supplies the majority of his oil paintings with what he describes as ‘form, tone and colour’ and with religious imagery and symbolism. One of his earliest series of mystical works (Fig. 6) , features moorland grasses painted in detail and enlarged so that every blade is silhouetted starkly against the sky; a second series, E AS T E R P A I N T I N G S , depict rainbows as bright streaks of primary colours contrasting with sullen grey surroundings; a third C R E A T I O N series features the sea as a crazy-patterned modular surface rushing towards a central vortex. Each series of paintings incorporates religious iconography that has been de- rived from watercolour studies of landscape in which Adams has looked through, added to, or seen beyond nature’s visual effects. He has envisaged crucifixes in the grasses, paradise in the rainbow and a cycle of birth and re-birth in the shifting sea surface. Like other Romantic landscape painters and poets who look at nature with a special kind of concentrated attention, Adams is capable of glimpsing eternity in a bleak ridge of Yorkshire mountain and infinity in uninterrupted expanses of Scottish sky and sea.

Adams subscribes to Blake’s view that visionary perception can transcend the bounds of ordinary human consciousness. He understands natural events, such as the sun looming ‘apocalypti-

F I G U R E 7. Norman Adams Temptation and Murder of Becket, 1975.

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R A C H E L M A S O N Romantic/Religious Interpretation of Artistic Reality

cally’ through clouds, or gannets diving in front of a cliff ‘splitting it asunder’, as bringing the invisible into conjunction with the visible. He has elected to live a life of almost ascetic denial away from civilisation because nature alone offers him the experience of visionary revelation. While his search for the meaning of existence leads him to commune with nature as if with a god, he does not cultivate visionary apprehension as an end in itself. Like his mentor, Blake, he awards the activity of painting supreme significance because it can open up, or make public, alternative spiritual worlds.

Painting as stoy-telling and the Bible as a great code for art Unlike the majority of his contemporaries, Norman Adams seeks to perpetuate a historical link between painting and literature. He conducts extensive literary research before commencing work on oil paintings that are adaptations, modifications or transcrip- tions of verbal stories; he understands the craft of painting as story-telling and the artist’s profession as that of the bard. It is difficult for his audiences to distinguish plot, character and action in non-verbal fictions in which dying daffodils personify humans or narrative is represented by the movement of water into a vortex. Some of Adams’ canvases (e.g. T H E M U R D E R 0 F BECK E T, Fig. 7) however are divided up into picture-strip story sections and the majority fit into a sequence, or are designed to be placed adjacent to each other. Adams explores fictional reality by skilfully manipulating compositional structures and with refer- ence to what he describes as ‘the inherent illusionary quality of pictorial space’. When he wishes to emphasise ‘spiritual reality’ he encloses the main body of his imagery inside a characteristic envelope design (Fig. 8) that accentuates the distinction between worlds inside and outside the picture frame. Conversely when he wishes the two worlds, or realities, to mingle (eg . L I G H T ,

R O C K S A N D S E A , Fig. 9), the enclosing devices are omitted and replaced by a compositional structure akin to musical counterpo- int in which layers of floating imagery weave in and out of the picture plane. Adams’ paintings often exhibit Romantic fictional tendencies; they focus on themes like creation and death and utilise the metaphor of life as a pilgrimage, voyage or journey. They incorporate huge Christian mythological conceptions e.g. ‘The Fall’ or ‘Redemption’ and they project existential hopes, fears and anxieties. His canvases always have titles, and their subject is man even where they are without any obvious narrative content or structure or appear to refer exclusively to landscape.

Adams admires secular stories (eg. plays by Shakespeare and novels by Hardy), but the majority of his narrative ideas are inspired by the Bible or by literature closely associated with it. (Piers Plowman, Genesis and Pilgrim’s Progress are recurrent themes). He is directed to literature and to the Scriptures by the work of other artists or by writers and musicians. Neilson’s opera for example, led him to the story of David: Lorenzetti’s and

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F I G U R E 8. Norman Adams The Raising of Lazarus, watercolour, pencil, and collage, 1963.

F I G U R E 9. Norman Adams Light, Kocks and Sea, oil, 1973.

Cimabue’s paintings introduced him to The Passion. He is fascinated by archetypal ‘quest’ stories [ 61 that polarise good and evil and combine religious or ethical ideals into tales of fabulous, miraculous adventure. In most of the stories he tran- scribes for visual ends (eg. T H E c R u c I F I x I o N , Fig. 10) a hero engages in a violent struggle with adversity and transcends a tragic death or dying. Adams claims he is not interested in the details of verbal fictions but utilises the openings to provide him with a big scene of landscape that he can ‘people with his own imagination’.

Adams agrees with Blake that the story of Jesus constitutes the supreme aesthetic achievement and is the ultimate work of art. He is unwilling to cormnit himself to the Christian vision of the total human situation, but admits not only that Biblical narra-

F I ( ; U R E 10, N~~~~~ ~d~~~ Crucifixion, oil, 1975.

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tives are ‘exciting’, ‘violent’, ‘beautiful’, and ‘marvellously inspi- rational’ but also that there is a sense in which they should be understood as ‘true’. The Christian myth has been important to so many people for so long that he believes artists and their public are naive to ignore its impact. He utilizes Surrealist and Expressionist developments in 20th century painting to help him revitalize Biblical messages and to situate them inside a con- temporary frame of reference. In modifying and re-describing conventional Christian iconography, he tends to transfer the experience of divinity to nature. In today’s world in which people no longer reject religious faith by conscious decision, but simply do not encounter its subject-matter at all, contemporary artworks that continue to deny a commonsense or secular vision of reality can be understood as attestations of faith. Whether Adams is a believer or not, they are religious paintings.

My teacher’s Romantic doctrines and practice were inconsis- tent; he preached a curious mixture of idealist and imitationist aesthetic theory and he decribed himself as ‘surrounding inspira- tion to unknown forces’ while dependent on nature for inspira- tion. He identified artists as a particular psychological type; someone with an overpowering sense of vocation labouring after spiritual truth. He limited concern for art to an interest in it as a presentation of something ideal that is its subject matter, and he judged it as an instrument of edification by the vicarious expan- sion of experience. Finally, he posited myth as art’s orgaising principle or structure. Once the research had explicated Norman Adams’ Romantic view of artistic reality, I was able to test it against critical discourse in art education literature and to reflect on its implications for art teaching and for my own professional situation.

On reflection, I found that many art education experts [7] tended to dismiss the Romantic knowledge of art I had acquired from Norman Adams’ tuition as inappropriate for future art educators. They complained that artist-teachers with Romantic views about art set a premium on their students’ artistic develop- ment and failed to initiate any pride in teaching; they criticised them for emphasising the importance of personal experience, emotion and intuition at the expense of intellect or for project- ing the view that art is something that defies rational explanation and is mysterious and strange. While I accept that there is a sense in which a Romantic interpretation of artistic reality can be described as cognitively inadequate, dogmatic and restrictive. I feel the experts have underestimated the benefits of its effects on art teacher training and instruction.

As a ‘significant other’ [ 81 entrusted with the responsibility of initiating art education students into the field, Norman Adams did not attempt to protect us from our own artistic limitations, nor from the harsh realities of the professional world of art. Nevertheless, his Romantic sense of vocation functioned to motivate us so that we too came to understand a career devoted to art as something desirable, morally uplifting and

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eminently worthwhile. He allowed us only a limited access to knowledge about our subject. He ignored the question of artistic method (we never had any lessons or demonstrations designed to teach us specific art skills or techniques) and he restricted art history lectures to discussion of his own artworks or examples by his favourite artists, but, in concentrating his critical attention on our artistic intentions or choice of subject matter, he forced us to realise the necessity of developing a strong personal view point. Moreover, his passionate love for and understanding of his favourite objects of study illuminated them for us so that most of us will have images by Turner, Blake or Giotto indelibly stamped on our visual memories for the rest of our lives. His own Romantic philosophy was expressed dogmatically but it incorporated a justification for artistic endeavour on the grounds that it nourished our souls and, if afforded us some romantic criteria for making artistic judgements. Adams' emphasised the role of personal experience, intuition and feeling in art but he took us on pilgrimages to national museums and galleries where he encouraged us to engage in dialogue with artworks with which we felt we shared an affinity. As a result, we gained a contemplative as opposed to an acquisitive understanding of art history and we learned that artistic innovation arises out of tradition and does not occur in a vacuum. Most importantly, Norman Adams' Romantic teaching style and his life-world appeared consistent. They afforded us that unity of truth, lan- guage and method in art education that Kenneth Beittel [9] has argued that students recognise as authentic.

Personal inquiry in education of the kind that I have outlined in this paper is open to criticism on the grounds that it is too subjective and apolitical. But it may offer art educators a means of distancing themselves from the particularised and limited knowledge of their subject they tend to assimilate indirectly in person-to-person interaction with artist-teachers in the studio. Ethno-historical, existential and hermeneutic forms of research or inquiry can provide readers with expressions of unique situa- tions as seen through the eyes of the people who live them. They also aim to keep alive a tradition of aesthetic understanding in education and in critical discussion about art.

Notes and References 1 BROOKS, CATHY (1982) Using interpretation theory in art education

research. Studies in Art Education, 24, ( l ) , 43-47. 2 BERGER, PETER 8t LUCKMANN, THOMAS (1967) describe emotional

identification with a maestro as a pre-requisite for socialisation into professions like music or art that require a high degree of inevitabil- i ty and commitment. The Social Construction of Reality, p. 164, Harmondsworth, Penguin.

3 ADAMS, NORMAN, BA (b. 1927), is currently Professor of Fine Art at Newcastle University. This paper is based on a critical study of his life and work between 1945 and 1972 (Mason, Rachel (1980) Interpretation and artistic understanding: the paintings of Norman Adams, Ph.D. thesis, The Pennsylvania State University. Disserta-

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R A C H E L MASON Romantic/Religious Interpretation of Artistic Reality

tion Abstracts, 1981, 41A No. 5, p. 200. University Microfilms No. 81054473). The quotations are from unpublished personal docu- ments, notes and letters in the artist's possession.

4 (1968) The Poetical Books, Vol. 111: The Oxford Illustrated Old Testament. London, Oxford University Press.

5 GRIMES, RONALD (1977) The Divine Imagination, William Blake's Prophetic Visions. New York, Scarecrow Press.

6 FRYE, NORTHROP (1957) Anatomy of Criticism, p. 187. Princeton, University Press.

7 EISNER, CHAPMAN & LOGAN examine the inadequacies of studio- based training and the misconceptions art educators appropriate from artist teachers in the following articles. CHAPMAN, LAURA (1979) Research means searching again. Art Education, 32, (4), 6-10. EISNER, ELLIOT (1979) The relationship between theory and practice in art education. Art Education, 35, ( l ) , 4-9. LOGAN, FREDERICK (1961) Artist in the schoolroom: a modern dilemma. Studies in Art Education, 68-84.

8 BERGER & LUCKMANN describe society as presenting candidates for socialisation with significant others or socialising personal whose subjective realities or worlds are taken over and interiorised.

9 BEITTEL, KENNETH (1979) Unity of truth, language and method in art education. Srudies in Art Education, 21, ( l ) , 50-55.

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