Form and feeling: artists’ studies of the twentieth century

Paintings:

Stanley Spencer cuts an eccentric figure in twentieth-century British art history. He is unique for his depiction of biblical imagery in the twentieth century. Spencer located the Spiritual in the quotidian by depicting Biblical scenes set in his home village of Cookham. Spencer is also known for his identification of the Divine in physical and sexual intimacy, an approach that was received with mixed results in the early twentieth century. Spencer held an enduring love of the pre-Renaissance Italian paintings, and a key part of his originality lay in this fusion of the Old Masters with contemporaneous art practices. Distortions of scale in his paintings are a particular marker of Spencer’s visual vernacular. His paintings are made with a flat and sparing application of colour, yet his works have a highly sensual quality to them.

In 1938 Spencer embarked on his series Christ in the Wilderness, a planned undertaking of 40 paintings, one for each day and night of Lent. During this period of Spencer’s life, he felt an affinity for Christ’s exile, being set up in a small flat in London after having been banished from his home in his beloved village Cookham. Spencer wrote:

“I did … forty little squares and then filled in as many as I could with how Christ may have spent each day, the great adventure all by himself with leaves and trees and mud and rabbits and rocks, just as I was having among two chairs, a bed, a fireplace and a table.”

Quoted in Mary Kisler and Justin Paton, Everyday Miracles: The Art of Stanley Spencer (Dunedin: Dunedin Public Art Gallery, 2003).

Sketches:

Having studied at the Slade School of Art, London, under Professor Henry Tonks – whose teaching was based on the draughtsmanship of Ingres – Spencer was a brilliant student and draughtsman.

Meticulous drawing was central to Spencer’s practice, working from his imagination rather than life, and he often made first sketches on strips of toilet paper, which he used for its low cost and length. The sketches that pleased him he copied onto larger sheets of a sketchbook.

Spencer hoarded his drawings. Comparing himself to an old lady purling by a fireplace, he referred to them as his “knitting” – a reassuring pleasure that provided a creative outlet. Spencer adheres closely to his sketches, often lamenting his inability to recreate the feeling of his sketches on canvas.

Spencer made several initial drawings of each subject before completing a squared-up study. Once the canvas was prepared, he would draw a grid in pencil and meticulously transfer the image to the canvas. The grid lines can be seen in the light areas of the finished paintings; a technique called pentimento. The series was never finished, with Spencer only completing 8 paintings and a 9th begun. Four paintings were completed in the London flat in 1938-39, one each in 1940, 1942, and 1943, and the last in 1954.