'These Russian wanderers are wandering still': 'Laurus' by Evgeny Vodolazhkin

     Spiritually I've been drifting eastwards for years - a long drawn out process of becoming. It's not as though I think the Orthodox Church, or the other oriental churches such as the Copts or the Suryani, are perfect - far from it, only that these churches have the greatest potential to become so. The churches where 'axial alignment' is most likely to take place. Although I am still technically an Anglican, my heart is elsewhere. Most times I attend an Anglican service I feel a little part of me dies. It's not just Anglicanism; I know I'd feel the same in any other western church. Simply Western liturgy, as it is now, and has been for centuries, is an inadequate vehicle for encountering and participating in and with the divine. I'm inclined to extend my doubt to Western theology per se. The events of the summer here in the UK where a crazygolf course was installed in the nave of Rochester cathedral and a helterskelter in that of Norwich, have confirmed this. It is embarrassing. And now in this last week (it was a couple or more months ago now - this post has been a long time in gestation) a picture has appeared of seminarians confessing to a group of houseplants at Union Seminary in New York. Terminal decadence?  Who knows and who really cares anymore? They are in effect only symptoms of a wider cultural malaise.  Modernity from both inside and outside the church is in the process of shredding it.

     'He that findeth his life he shall loose it; and he that loseth his life for mysake; he shall find it.'

     'For the time being his only a blade of grass torn up his roots and blown through the air. And he feels it, and suffers for it, suffers often acutely!'

   It was a relief, then, months ago now to read 'Laurus', a novel by the Russian historian Evgeny Vodolazkin, English translation by Lisa C Hayden.  Here was something that was so deeply satisfying on so many levels: artistic, literary, intellectual and spiritual. At times it is deeply moving. (Here I feel I have to add an obligatory disclaimer: I am not commending a return to the superstitious world of the Medieval Russian Principalities. I wouldn't want to be misinterpreted after all! And the society depicted is deeply superstitious, bafflingly so at times.)  Anyway 'Laurus' has been awarded all sorts of prizes but no prize should ever be wielded by a reviewer as a reason to go and read a novel. As I've never won that many I'm ambiguous about them - they probably are more political than the organisers care to admit and are probably also only of transitory significance. I tend to ignore them. Even the Nobel Prize.
     Back to the novel. Deep in the bosom of Holy Mother Russia, that is the Orthodoxy of the time before the Petrine 'Reforms', before even the reforms of Patriarch Nikon and the schism of the Old Believers, in a society both organic and pre-Modern, rural and often isolating, a boy, Arseny, is raised by his grandfather, the local folk healer. Arseny has a gift for his grandfather's trade. A great gift. And concomitant with such a great blessing comes, as so often in life, a great price. That price, and it seems that Arseny cannot as a result accept death, is what pushes him out, firstly into the larger Russian environment and then further out still into Western Christendom and then the Middle East. Driven into the desert for the rest of his life haunted by his failure, forsaking houses, or brethren or sisters or father or mother or wife or lands*, unable to make a long lasting bound with another human being, endeavoring always to heal and save and cheat death. In spiritual terms his has entered into the state of Podvig that is 'spiritual struggle', what in Greek is called 'Catharsis.' I think some would describe Arseny as a marginal character, by which I mean one who dwells on the margins. I have to say I fight shy of such a description, as it is a misunderstanding of the central role of such figures in Russian, and indeed wider Orthodox, spirituality. Looking back now through the mist of several months I wonder how much autonomy, how much agency Arseny has in this process of spiritual being. At some points he is like a leaf carried on the wind of the Holy Spirit as he wanders through the bitter cold of a Russian winter barely, it seems, conscious. Arriving in the mercantile city of Pskov he (almost) finds himself a Holy Fool, the 'yurodivy'. I mean by that not some middle class bloke who dresses up as a clown occasionally for the benefit of middle-class Anglican congregations and then goes home again to the comfort of home, but somebody who has abandoned everything - home, possessions - even sometimes clothing - including the ability to be rational for the sake of participation with the Divine. Such figures continually re-occur in Orthodoxy, both consoling and disturbing. Paradoxical. But then Orthodoxy, unlike the West, has always found space for paradox. Alexy himself at one point lives with the bounds of a convent cemetery in a hovel he has constructed himself.
     Thankfully Vodolazkin does not the weigh the narrative down with too much explanation - that recurrent sin, as I have mentioned before, of much Sci-fi and fantasy writing. And this novel is in a way a sort of fantasy novel in that Vodolazkin is engaged on some sort of Tolkeinesque sub-creation, for Medieval Russia is almost as far removed from our times and concerns as Middle Earth. Better just to throw the reader in and hope they can swim. A writer should make the reader do some work after all. Not that the novel isn't alive with wondrous and intriguing detail. It is one of its delights and provides so much compelling atmosphere. Vodolazkin is a scholar in the department of Old Russian Literature at the Institute of Russian Literature (commonly referred to as 'Pushkin House') in St Petersburg, and is therefore well placed for such an endeavour. Detail is one way in which the writer can show and not tell. (Possibly one of the greatest exponents of that was the French catholic novelist Francois Mauriac - a novelist I think everybody should read.)

     'Laurus' is a book that stands in line of descent from the works of Dostoevsky and Pushkin before him, sharing a number of themes such as the spiritual role of Russia and the individual's spiritual struggle particularly in face of tragedy. The quotes above are taken from Dostoevsky's speech at the unveiling of the Pushkin Memorial in Moscow on June 20th 1880, describing Pushkin's character Aleko from his poem 'The Gypsies'. Dostoevsky uses Aleko as a metaphor for the rootless nineteenth century intelligentsia, but one feels, perhaps wrongly, that Arseny is like Aleko. He is both deeply encultured in the society around him and yet alienated from that wider Russian society by the potency of his gift and the inexpressible weight of grief his carries and the consequent fear of death. Arseny presents to us a character that has failed to integrate fully his self, and that failure is the fuel for the narrative drive. His journey is an attempt to achieve that integration. In some respects then Arseny is a extended metaphor of our own spiritual restlessness and our inability to deal with death.
     I really can't recommend this book highly enough. Read it!

*  Matthew 19:29

Own work: Bethania Chapel

     A busy few days: Sunday - 'Stir-up Sunday' - was spent making a Christmas cake and yesterday a trip to that attractive market town of Ledbury to meet the brother. We stopped off in Monmouth on the way home. A return visit for me, finding I had forgotten much since that previous visit. The place is rather attractive, and busy. A return visit is a must. Today I managed to finish my latest collage, another, small, depiction of the Bethania Chapel, Morriston, Swansea.

Llansteffan Castle

     A busy weekend we've had of it. Saturday was spent at the 'Festival of Senses' in Llandeilo doing a bit of Christmas shopping, while yesterday we drove over to Llansteffan on the beautiful Towy estuary. Good weather on both days was a welcome bonus after all the rain of late.
     Llansteffan is a village clustering between the foot of steep wooded hills and the beach. A small, discreet seaside resort, a bit higgledy-piggledy really, but none the worse for that. Mainly Victorian by the look of it and all colourwashed including the church but not its tower. The church is mainly Perpendicular.
     High on a headland south of the village and at the very mouth of the river stands the castle. All dark grey and hoary rubble. Most of the finer stone, which would have been used for the details such as windows and doors, has been robbed out. Some details remain on the upper floors of the great gatehouse, which in the later Middle Ages was converted into the main lodgings. A donjon. Judging by those remaining details it must have been a pretty fine place to dwell. 

     The site is ancient - the castle defences utilise the earthen ramparts of an Iron Age hill fort - and strategic - controlling the mouth of the Towy and hence access up stream to Carmarthen and the upper Towy valley. The views  in themselves are worth the climb from the village: east over the estuary to Ferryside and south out across the mouths of the Gwendraeth and Loughor estuaries to the western tip of Gower. Quite haunting, that view south, on a cold winter's day.

Own work: Life Drawing LVI

     After a long gap (over a year) I have finally returned to the life-drawing studio.  Here are my efforts - not too bad considering. It was a two hour session with a number of poses of increasing duration as the morning went on. Apologies for the photography. I find the photography of life drawing difficult.

Own work: 'Rocks and Cave, Pennard'

     Latest painting, after a short-ish hiatus: 'Rocks and Cave, Pennard'. Mixed media on 300gsm watercolour 30x26cms. What more can I say?

Dune I: The Discontents of Modernity

'I had this idea that charismatic leaders ought to come with a warning label on the forehead: 'May be dangerous to your health.''

'When religion and politics ride the same cart when that cart is driven by a living holy man, nothing can stand in their path.'

I Introduction: The Discontents of Modernity

     I've been reading around Jung for several weeks now. He is endlessly fascinating. That mix of the intellectual, the spiritual and the artistic. One way of understanding the rise of Jordan Peterson is to see it as part of a larger Jungian revival. Perhaps Jungian thought is a way through the crisis of Liberalism, of Late and Post-Modernity, that is laid upon us.  It is certain that we have culturally, spiritually and possibly politically driven ourselves up a dead end.

     So discovering that Frank Herbert (1920-1986) had read Jung, as well as Nietzsche, I decided to re-read Dune (which I had first read in the early Eighties when the David Lynch film came out), and - as a long-term project - all the sequels Herbert wrote. From doing a little research into them things get pretty weird. Not that 'Dune' isn't pretty weird of itself. There are some rather strange things going on. I should add here that Science Fiction (and fantasy fiction) is something I don't normally read, perhaps, I have to admit, out of literary snobbery. It is certainly something that serious literary types look down upon. There are a small number of exceptions to this general rule: H G Wells, J G Ballard, George Orwell, for '1984' and Aldous Huxley for 'Brave New World' - but then who reads Huxley's early works now, and who, save the New Agers, the later quasi-mystical works such as 'Island' and 'The Doors of Perception'? I suspect Herbert may have read them, or at least been aware of them and of Huxley himself down the coast in Southern California and a user of mescaline. Both men had various degrees of interest in Vedanta. One feels that Huxley's influence is close in this book, perhaps most obviously in the similarities between the Seitch Tau Orgy and the 'Solidarity Service' in 'Brave New World'.

      (I feel the influence of the Jungian psychologist Erich Neuman (1905-1960) is close at hand too, especially his book 'The Great Mother - An Analysis of the Archetype' of 1955, but more of that later. I would also add, 19.10.22, the French philosopher and mystic Henri Corbin, but I'm not sure how Herbert would have come across Corbin's work as only two of Corbin's books had been published before 1965 when Dune was published, and only one of those in English. Were Corbin's ideas already in circulation in certain proto-New Age Groups on the American West Coast?)

     Dune, then, is an exception to the rule, and I have to admit I find it fascinating. Compelling, even. Perhaps not for the quality of the writing as such (it hasn't changed my opinion about the literary quality of sci-fi to be honest) but for the ideas and imaginative vision. It is the use of Jungian ideas, archetypes and so on, that gives this story its heft, its continuing resonance. Their presence, via Campbell, helps explain why the first Star Wars film succeeded and their absence why the subsequent films waxed in failure until they reached the bathetic 'Rise of Skywalker'.

     The Lord of the Rings, which is without doubt better written, falls into that same category; and having said that I've been struck with a number of similarities between the two works. Not an obvious parallel perhaps, though both authors could be described as conservatives, though of somewhat different stripes - Herbert being a sort of Thoreau-esque frontiersman, doughty and independent. Be that as it may, both books are an attempt to address, and come to terms with, through the use of mythological metaphor, the gargantuan horrors of the twentieth century, depicting societies that are poised at the point of monumental change - a change that is only achieved by the shedding of blood in war, and in the case of the Dune sequence much blood. Untold amounts. In both books the main character undergoes a series of trials and initiations that lead to an altered (higher) consciousness. Being burdened with a power beyond their comprehension, (and that of their companions and the wider society around them), and that makes living in the real, mundane world ultimately unbearable, they are compelled in that process of change to make a bitter renunciation, rather like the knights in the Grail legends. Perhaps you can see the Ring in the LOTR as an inversion of the Grail. Another link between both books is the almost inordinate length of vision; thousands of years are traversed in which the events described are set against a vast panoramic view of history. Both books explore ideas of destiny, fate and agency. Tolkein, Herbert, and Huxley for that matter, were all concerned with where Modernity has gone wrong and in particular with the disenchanting of the world, and its effect on the individual, society and environment as humanity waxes in alienation. 'Dune' however contains themes such as religious and political fanaticism, terrorism and the rise of dictatorship that are alien to Middle Earth. It is a novel, too, saturated with the emerging drugs culture of the 1960s. 

     A novel about the opening of the 'Doors of Perception'. A rich, complex and multi-layered work then, of almost infinite interest, that reflects not only Herbert's wide field of reading but also his autodidactism - for good and ill.

Own work: Lettering

     Continuing my series of lettering as gift here's the one I finished only this morning for the bf's mum - it's her birthday today. Perhaps not quite a successful as the others mainly because the right hand serifs are, perhaps, too long.

London II: David Inshaw at The Redfern Gallery

     Another artist that stands in the long and continuing tradition of English 'spiritual' art is David Inshaw, though of a different more pastoral vein. Paul Nash seems to be the great influence. Inshaw is one of those artists largely ignored by the media - not modern enough and not controversial in a sort of shark in formaldehyde sort of way - but is popular with the public. (The BBC in particular seen only content to parrot the art establishment line.)  Inshaw's most famous painting is the painting originally called, quoting Thomas Hardy, 'Remembering mine the loss is, not the blame" and now 'The Badminton game".

     Inshaw started out as a Pop-artist but in the Late Sixties, at, I suppose, the same time as David Hockney, Inshaw eschewed the fashionable and changed to the lyrical and figurative. Though, of course at that time Hockney was not that interested in nature and the rural. In 1972, along with the Pop-artist Peter Blake and others he was a founding member of the 'Brotherhood of Ruralists', and although the Brotherhood is now defunct Inshaw continues to paint in the figurative tradition, which, let's be honest, has been central to the story of British art in the 20th century. His brushwork freer than it used to be. As with the work of David Hockney of that Late Sixties/Seventies period there is a element of distance, even disengagement, between the painting and the viewer in Inshaw's work. In Hockney's work that is partly a result of practice - he worked very often from photographs - and the intellectual (he was heavily influenced by the work of the French film maker Alain Resnais in particular the strange and mesmeric 'L'Annee derniere a Marienbad'). I do not know the influences working on Inshaw's work. His work though has a quiet, slightly haunted quality. An emptiness at times. Meaning perhaps is just over the hill or round the corner. But it is there none the less.

     Before meeting an old friend for lunch at Brasserie Zedel (my first visit) I had a wander along Cork St taking in another couple of exhibitions - both figurative. I have to say I was not at all disappointed with Zedel. Eating as a near theatrical experience, the restaurant being housed in what was once the vast ballroom of the Regent's Palace Hotel. A terrific opulent space built between the Wars in the best Beaux Art Tradition that seems to ennoble the most ordinary of things - having lunch - and transforming it into an occasion.  I feel the need to return.  Afterwards we ambled up to Nordic Bakery for coffee stopping off at a gallery to look at something that was a sort of installation/action piece. The contrast could not have been greater, or telling, with the intensity and vision of what I had experienced that morning.

Own work: Lettering for the bf

     Last few weeks after the exhibition have been almost barren of new work, the only exceptions being a couple of lettering exercises, birthday presents for family members, like the ones I've shown you before back in July. Here is the one I made for the bf: 6.5 x 7.5cms, pencil crayon and collage (hand marbled paper) on the smoothest cartridge paper.

William Blake at Tate Britain

     I've just returned from a hectic two night stay in London. First port of call Tuesday afternoon was the British Museum and a fruitless search for Greco-Bactrian and Indo-Greek art. Not sure the guides quite knew what I was actually looking for. That evening I attended the annual TAG Awards at the Art Workers Guild in Queen Square. Viscount Linley presented the prizes. It was good to catch up with friends.

     Wednesday was almost entirely given over to exhibitions. I came up to town intending to do just two: William Blake at Tate Britain and David Inshaw at the Redfern Gallery in Cork St.. In the end I did five. My first port-of-call was The Tate. I have to confess to still attempting to calibrate my response to this exhibition which contains some of the most incredible, moving and disturbing art I've ever yet seen, painted by a man, a mystic of sorts who saw spiritual beings, God himself once, from his childhood onwards. I have to confess I can't recall ever seeing any work by Blake 'in the flesh' before this exhibition (though I suppose I must have done) and I don't think any amount of reproduction in books and the media can prepare you for the sheer force of some of the art on display here. It really is astounding. I really can't recommend a visit enough. You will be amply rewarded by what you see; disturbed may be but a little of that won't do you any harm. I should say here that stylistic breadth of the work is very large from the fey to the profound; the techniques however cover a smaller, tighter range being mostly print, watercolour and egg-tempera. I suspect that the exhibition presents itself at an opportune time in the culture, arriving at a moment of increased interest in the occult, and the spiritual in general, the psychedelic, and at the nascence of a Jungian revival vis Jordan Peterson. For this is an art that admits us to another realm - "I give you the end of a golden string," said Blake of himself, "only wind it into a ball and it will lead you to Heaven's Gate." It is a place at once fabulous and frightening, that I feel doesn't just represent the imaginative world of Blake's own mind, his own psyche, his own sub-conscious, but contains something more universal, something indeed more, dare I say, objective. And it is that utterly compelling quality that it gives this art its 'terror'.
     As I was walking around, gadfly-like sampling this and that without order, I kept thinking of the paintings of both Carl Jung and J R R Tolkien, who both underwent spiritual crises at roughly the same time in the early twentieth century which brought for work that was, and is, passing strange. Both Jung and Tolkein placing their creative and spiritual insights in 'Red Books'. Blake too produced prophetic books. There are even flashes, no more, of stylistic congruity between the three but these are, I have to say, rare. It goes without saying that, obviously, Blake was the greater artist, but having said that it not an easy art to place stylistically to what had immediately gone before except in its Neo-classicism, which is oddly persistent throughout his career. For Blake's work is not only so personal as to defy categorisation, but comes at the end of the long Whig century with all its complacencies, the age of Reason and Sensibility, against which Blake was in such conscious rebellion. It may owe something to contemporary French neo-classical art, but it must be remembered that Blake did own a copy of Henry Fuseli's "Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks" (1765). (Though lacking in formal education Blake was, none the less, prodigiously well read.) Through such influences Blake quickly established his ideal human form - those 'Greek profiles', for instance - and remained true to that throughout his life, although so much else developed in his technical ability and interests. Archetypal figures emerged quickly too and likewise repeatedly appear throughout his work. Males, both physical and spiritual, are heavy featured (perhaps owing something to Blake's own physiognomy judging by Thomas Philips's portrait of 1807) and muscular, perhaps following Michelangelo, who like Durer was a great and continuing influence. And indeed Blake was an artist obsessed with the human figure. I can't recall seeing a single image where landscape predominated. Given the deep influence of the Classical it may seem paradoxical that Blake eschewed, as Camille Paglia points out in 'Sexual Personae', classical mythology as a suitable subject for his art, taking his inspiration instead from Biblical and Medieval literature. The one exception seems to be Roman writer Virgil, who appears in the Divine Comedy and whose 'Aeneid' was taken in the Middle Ages to be prophetic of the coming of Christ. In obvious contra-distinction to this strain of classicism was Blake's great devotion, artistically, to the art and architecture of the English Middle Ages, an interest spurred by his repeated visits to Westminster Abbey, where as an apprentice engraver he was sent to study and draw the Medieval tomb sculpture. This interest which is both artistic and in a broad sense political, seems to herald the work and politics of both Pugin and William Morris, both of whom can be read as counter-Enlightenment. His illustrated books, both prophetic and poetic, which he etched and coloured himself, are equivalent to the illuminated manuscript. Perhaps therefore he can seen as some sort of liminal or transition presence in British art history.
     That art forged, ('sublimated' with its occult, alchemical connotations maybe a better expression), from these contrary influences is often hierarchical and very often theatrical, melodramatic even - gestures and expression heightened and exaggerated as though the figures are not merely signifying their own emotional states but the greater spiritual and cosmological ramification of the event depicted. Some of the images I think can be read as 'diagrams of redemption', complex arrangements of figures. To me Blake's radical politics, and his distrust of organised religion (he was a non-conformist) sit uneasy with this tendency towards the hieratic and the Medieval. There is, without a doubt a (creative) tension there, perhaps even a contradiction. After all his desire, surely, was a return to the pre-Modern and he was as equally distrustful of the Enlightenment project - scornful of scientific progress in particular.  Blake then appears a lone voice, an individual adrift stylistically and spiritually in an increasingly materialistic society. As I have already mentioned he saw his role as prophetic - "If the doors of Perception were cleansed, then everything would appear as it is - infinite." And Neo-Platonic. (I really don't want to resort to that well worn trope of the artist, like the prophet without honour in his own country - Blake's art even now is too unsettling, to strange for him ever to be a 'popular' artist.)
     What is far, far easier to trace is his effect of the artists that immediately followed him: Palmer Linnell, Calvert, who formed 'The Ancients', and who with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood could to be seen as counter-Enlightenment, and in the 20th century Nash, Piper and the other Neo-Romantics and also Burra and Cecil Collins and, and surprisingly Edward Bawden - all three of whom are sometimes connected to Neo-Romanticism but who's interests are tangential to the movement, but who with Tolkien and other writers such as Arthur Machen could be said form part of a broader, perhaps spiritualised, certainly artistically 'conservative', British Romantic Tradition. Nor should we forget the influence of his poetry and mysticism on W B Yeats, and on the whole Occult revival of the late 19th century and on that of the 1960s & 70s.  His reach has been very great.

Great Malvern Priory

     To Worcestershire Saturday to see family. En route we stopped at Malvern, that most salubrious of Birmingham's suburbs, for breakfast - and a slightly curious affair that was.  Malvern and the Priory were much better.  Malvern itself is a sprawling, hospitable nineteenth century spa town - all ad hoc around the base of the Malvern Hills (from Moelvryn meaning 'bald hill') like a big-boned but friendly dog. Sometimes picturesque, sometimes confusing.  The whole is very much the territory of John Betjeman and John Piper. I went there as a teenager with my folks and the experience was at once interesting - all those villas, etc. - and boring - small shopping area. The residential, as now, dominated. As an adult my experience was more positive, though I can image living on one of those interminable suburban roads a bit dull no matter how good the architecture is. That said the place is a sort of open-air museum of nineteenth century architecture, and a such endlessly fascinating. A place of random and extraordinary buildings. I think we often forget how good the Victorians could be in creating the built environment partly because of their failures in the Industrial Cities, though even in a small industrial town like Pontardawe in the Tawe valley here in Wales you can come across a street as delightful as Thomas St lined with small semi-detached houses of stone and brick, some even retaining their cast iron railings. The only difference being that the Thomas Streets of this world are far more vulnerable to slow evisceration and destruction than the Malverns.
     It was Betjeman who likened Malvern to the tiny Italian republic of San Marino, it being so set apart from the usual run of the West Midlands. And it is strange, being a suburb detached from its city and dropped from a great height into the mist of heath and farmland. Other writers have said that hills form the true border of Wales. There is certainly a difference between east Worcestershire, beyond Severnside, and the western part of the county which can be very remote.
     Breakfast over we headed to the Priory Church. But first a little history, and it is a little confusing it has to be said.  All we really need to know is that there may have been a community of hermits living about the hills pre-Conquest in some sort connection with the martyrdom of St Werstan which is thought to have occurred at Malvern during the Viking Invasion of England (the presence of hermits may though predate St Werstan), and that sometime around the Norman Conquest (or after) this community developed into a regular Benedictine community with connections to Westminster Abbey. At the Dissolution of the Monasteries it was bought by the local community and became parochial.  The church subsequently lost its Lady Chapel and s transept. Apart from the Priory gatehouse all the monastic buildings were also lost. There are larger parish churches it has to be said, but what survives is superlative, for the church was rebuilt in Perpendicular Gothic some time late in the Middle Ages in a beautiful sandstone.  

     The Tower in particular, based on the tower at Gloucester Cathedral, which in turn is based on that at Worcester, is splendid, a powerful design full equally of strength and intricate detail. Poised. In the past some credited Sir Reginald Bray (born nearby at St Johns, the western suburb of Worcester) with the design of the tower. He was also credited with Henry VII's Chapel at Westminster Abbey and St George's Chapel Windsor. However Bray, who had been an officer the household of Lady Margaret Beauchamp (Yes, her again) and later that of her son Henry VII was essentially an administrator and not an architect, and that explains his involvement with the Royal commissions.  The real architect of the priory remains unknown.
     The interior gives a sense of great space and luminosity.  Of the earlier church there survives the powerful Norman nave arcade and the s aisle wall which contains at the e end a blocked Norman processional doorway which led to the cloisters. Everything else Perp. Soaring and lucid. The influence of Gloucester is present in the space beneath the crossing tower and in the base of the great east window where the mullions extend down to the ground forming the screen to the Lady Chapel. (Delightful Gothic Revival internal porch hiding the original doorway.)

     The chancel, rightly, is the culmination of the interior. Light floods in through the vast clerestory windows, and where the again the mullions descend from the windows down this time on to extrados of the arcade arches leaving very little, if any, inert wall surface. And little space, it has to be said for, large scale mural painting as you would find, say, in the Italian peninsular. All is articulated and decorated by architecture. Architecture has, as a result of a long-term trend in the Gothic, become essentially its own decoration.  The chancel aisles are, in contrast, much plainer, more utilitarian, with simple quadrapartite vaults. The scale of these too is 'parochial'  - the difference so marked that I'm tempted to assign them to a different master mason. All of that said there are some slightly strange details in the chancel: the capitals of the arcade are weak as to be almost obsolete (the arcades at near-ish Merevale Priory are similar but cruder in design) and the springers of the unattempted high vault look 'wrong' somehow. But these are minor quibbles.

     And in addition to all that architectural richness there are fittings to match: the original choir stalls, the very rare Medieval wall tiles and the Medieval stained glass, which includes two Royal commissions - the E window paid for by Richard III and the N transept window by Henry VII.  All lucky survivals. Perhaps it was the connection with Royal monastery of Westminster that inspired such Royal patronage. In addition there are several good monuments both Jacobean and Neo-classical. The priory was restored in by Sir George Gilbert Scott in 1860 and a relatively sensitive job he did of it; I particularly liked the nave ceiling which is beautifully decorated to his design. Alas the place is awash with well-meaning clutter, and muzak - well, classy muzak to be fair - was playing.

Exhibition

     Just thought I'd share a few pictures I took of my recent exhibition at the beautiful Aberglasney Gardens, Carmarthenshire. It was a rather interesting experience; lots of good feedback from visitors but alas only two sales. I must say a massive thank you to my friends Jones & Grey who helped with the hanging and were utterly marvellous! I hope to do the same next year - I'll keep you posted!