Today I’d like to say a little about another of my pictures. This is entitled, William Golding’s Kingfisher (Acrylic and gold leaf). I’ve chosen it because it illuminates an important point about a good deal of the “religious” aspect of my art. It is concerned very much with searching, and not with preaching. It is involved with personal experience, and is not intended in any way to be didactic.
The picture is constructed in three layers, which refer in different ways to the incomplete or ephemeral nature of our perception of the divine. The first is the Hebrew “tetragrammaton”—the four letters YHWH (in gold leaf) which stand in place of the name of God—“I am what I am”. The second is an extract from the Book of Job, in which God silences Job’s repeated demands to know the reasons for his suffering. God reminds Job of the feebleness of his ability to understand anything at all, and in particular “by what way is the light parted” (the spectrum). Finally there is the image of the kingfisher. This only entered the picture in its current form late in the process of painting, following a conversation with my wife, in which she referred to an episode in William Golding’s novel The Spire. Jocelin is dean of a mediaeval cathedral. Despite the grandeur of his vision to build the new cathedral spire, which drives him obsessively throughout the book, his true encounters with the divine are momentary and unexpected—the apple tree and the kingfisher. Interestingly, both involve his sudden and intense awareness of colour.
Then, where the yard of the deanery came to the river and trees lay over the sliding water, he saw all the blue of the sky condensed into a winged sapphire, that flashed once.
He cried out.
“Come back!”
But the bird was gone, an arrow shot once. It will never come back, he thought, not if I sat here all day.
….
“No kingfisher will return for me.”
All the same, he said to himself, I was lucky to see it. No-one else saw it.
(William Golding, The Spire, Faber and Faber, Educational Edition 1971, p. 205.)
