Varnishing Day Homily

On Interconnectedness: In Praise of the Art of Attention and Artistic Imagination

 

We often imagine the artist alone in their studio. There is, of course, a necessary solitude in any serious work, with withdrawal a common part of making. But it is never the whole story. The language you think in was formed by community. The ideas you refine arise from encounter. The materials you shape carry histories of human intervention, including growing, quarrying, manufacturing, transporting. So, then, nothing we create – and perhaps nothing we are – stands entirely alone.

 

Which brings us to the theme of this year’s Summer Exhibition: ‘Interconnectedness’. Let’s begin with a question: what if the deepest truth about reality is not that it is made of separate things, but of relationships? And what if learning to see those relationships, through attention and imagination, is one of the most important human tasks? A painting, for instance, tells us a great deal about interconnection. It is never simply an image, but a field of relationships. On one level, it reveals material connections: colour interacting with light, form balanced within space, and so on. A small alteration – a line moved, a tone darkened – can transform the entire meaning.

 

But a painting or a work of art is also connected beyond itself. It exists in conversation with other works of art, across time and place. Artists are shaped by those who came before them, and in turn shape those who follow. That is why contemporary artists still come in their droves to study the historic collections at the National Gallery, where I work. In the 1980s, the Gallery mounted the groundbreaking ‘Artist’s Eye’ exhibition series, in which ten leading artists including Anthony Caro, Richard Hamilton, David Hockney and Bridget Riley were invited to help the public learn how to look and look again. They selected works from the collection for a public exhibition, arranged and interpreted them, and hung examples of their own work alongside them, making visible a dialogue across generations. As the then Director, Michael Levey, observed, these exhibitions revealed the enduring links between past and present, reminding us that artists we now call ‘old masters’ were once themselves modern, responding to and reimagining what came before. For instance, in his ‘Artist’s Eye’ exhibition of 1981, David Hockney displayed four National Gallery paintings, Piero della Francesca’s Baptism of Christ and three works by Vermeer, Degas and Van Gogh, alongside his 1977 painting Looking at Pictures on a Screen which depicted his close friend, the art critic Henry Geldzaler, contemplating poster reproductions of those same four paintings pinned to a folding screen. Unsurprising, given Hockney’s abiding love of Piero della Francesca, he reproduced Piero’s Baptism in another painting, this time as a postcard reproduction reflected in a mirror set between Hockney’s father and mother. The resulting work, My Parents, clearly speaks to Hockney’s genealogy and interconnectedness, both familial and artistic. Both paintings by Hockney subtly but powerfully remind us that nothing truly stands alone.

 

And yet, for all that, many people live as if it does. We move quickly and absorb thousands of images each day, our attention constantly fragmented across screens and competing demands. We glance rather than look; we register rather than discern. So perhaps the problem is not that connections are absent, but that they go unseen because we have not learned how to attend to them. And yet, if we pause long enough, we begin to sense that life itself is sustained by relationship: nothing exists in isolation, nothing flourishes alone. Breath, growth, perception, understanding – all emerge within a web of dependence and exchange.

 

Artists know that attention changes perception. Paul Cézanne painted the mountain of Sainte-Victoire in Provence, southern France, repeatedly, and Claude Monet returned time and again to the same subjects of haystacks, water lilies in his garden at Giverny and Rouen Cathedral. They did so not because nothing changed, but because everything did. In such series, the same form becomes, in different light and seasons, something entirely new. So art begins with attention, but it does not end there. Because when that attentive seeing generates a work of art, something remarkable happens: the artist’s way of seeing begins to shape the viewer’s. Attention becomes contagious. We begin to notice what we would otherwise have missed.

 

This is where imagination becomes essential. Not imagination as fantasy or escape or retreat from reality, but imagination as the capacity to perceive what is real but not yet obvious, or not yet fully seen. Philosopher and educationalist Maxine Greene speaks of imagination as the power to cross the distance between ourselves and others, and to resist indifference. We heard in the second reading, taken from her book Releasing the Imagination of 1985 her invitation to consider how imagination opens us to one another and to the world we share. She argued that imagination enables us ‘to cross the empty spaces between ourselves and those we have called “other” … to look through their eyes, hear through their ears, and feel through their feelings’. And she adds that imagination allows us ‘to see things as if they could be otherwise’.  That is a remarkable claim. It is a way of re-entering reality more deeply. It is the ability to perceive that the world is not fixed, not finished, not closed. It is, instead, open to relationship, and therefore open to change. Imagination is, in this sense, a moral faculty.

 

And this is where Christian teaching enters not as an interruption but as an intensification of this vision. In our first reading, St Paul was speaking to a fractured community in Corinth, southern Greece, and offers them an image of radical belonging: one body, many parts. We heard him say: ‘If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one is honoured, all rejoice together.’ This is not sentiment. It is ontology expressed as imagination: a claim about what is real. We belong to one another. That vision is carried further in another of St Paul’s letters, this time to the Colossians, a community of believers in Colossae – part of modern-day Turkey.  Christ is described by Paul as the one in whom ‘all things hold together’ and that ‘in him all things in heaven and on earth were created … visible and invisible … all things have been created through him and for him.’ Not some things, not religious things, not spiritual things alone – but all things. Visible and invisible, held together in him, through him and for him. It is a sweeping vision of coherence, of a reality in which nothing is isolated, but everything held within a deeper unity. And Christian theology dares to name the shape of that holding together as Trinity: Father, Son and Holy Spirit – not three isolated beings, but a communion of life, movement and self-giving love. God is relationship. And if God is relationship, then relationship is not secondary to reality; relationship is its deepest expression.

 

So interconnectedness is not an ethical ideal we impose on the world. It is a reality we are invited to recognise, to share and to celebrate. And this is where artists stand at the centre of this whole vision. Given that without patient attention connections vanish from view, the question for us and for our own time is urgent: how do we recover attention? And this is where artists come front and centre because art, at its deepest level, refuses our fragmentation. It interrupts us. It slows us down. It asks something of us. It demands that we stay with what is in front of us long enough for it to become more than surface. And when we do, something shifts. We begin to see what was always there but previously unnoticed. And more than that: we begin to see differently. And here the line becomes ethical as well as aesthetic. When we learn to look carefully at a work of art, we become more capable of looking carefully at one another. Attention breeds empathy. Imagination enlarges understanding.

 

So we come full circle. Nothing we create stands alone, and nothing we are stands alone. There is an interconnectedness deeper than we can see: a communion more intricate and more intimate. And if that is true, then every act of making participates, in some measure, in the world’s ongoing becoming. And that is why artists matter so profoundly. Because you do not simply make objects: you help the rest of us to see. To see more clearly. To see more truthfully. To see more generously. To see the world not as fragments scattered without meaning, but as something held – mysteriously, beautifully – together. To see more as God sees. And in a time when attention is fragile and division is easy, that may be one of – if not the – most important contributions anyone can make. Thank you and Amen.

 

 

ACCOMPANYING TEXTS

READING: Bible passage: 1 Corinthians 12:12–27 (Unity and Diversity in the Body)

 

^‘Just as a body, though one, has many parts, but all its many parts form one body, so it is with Christ. ¹³ For we were all baptized by^[a] one Spirit so as to form one body—whether Jews or Gentiles, slave or free—and we were all given the one Spirit to drink. ¹⁴ Even so the body is not made up of one part but of many.

¹⁵ Now if the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason stop being part of the body. ¹⁶ And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason stop being part of the body. ¹⁷ If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be? If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be? ¹⁸ But in fact God has placed the parts in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be. ¹⁹ If they were all one part, where would the body be? ²⁰ As it is, there are many parts, but one body.

²¹ The eye cannot say to the hand, “I don’t need you!” And the head cannot say to the feet, “I don’t need you!” ²² On the contrary, those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, ²³ and the parts that we think are less honourable we treat with special honour. And the parts that are unpresentable are treated with special modesty, ²⁴ while our presentable parts need no special treatment. But God has put the body together, giving greater honour to the parts that lacked it, ²⁵ so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. ²⁶ If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honoured, every part rejoices with it.

²⁷ Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it.’

 

 

READING: Secular passage: Adapted from Maxime Greene, Releasing the Imagination: Essays on Education, the Arts, and Social Change (San Francisco, 1995), pp. 3–6

 

Imagination is what enables us to cross the empty spaces between ourselves and those we teachers have called ‘other’ over the years.
If those others are willing to give us clues, we can look in some manner through their eyes, hear through their ears, and feel through their feelings.

Imagination is what enables us to see things as if they could be otherwise.
It is what allows us to break with the taken-for-granted, to set aside familiar distinctions and definitions, and to open ourselves to what is not yet.

To release the imagination is to open ourselves to the possibility of empathy, to become more attentive to the lives of others, and to the world we share.
It is to resist indifference, to refuse the dulling of perception, and to attend more fully to what is present before us.

When imagination is alive, we begin to notice what has been overlooked, to hear what has gone unheard, and to see connections where once there seemed only separation.

It is through such acts of seeing and imagining that we may come to recognise one another more fully, and perhaps begin to shape a world that is more just, more humane, and more connected than the one we have inherited.

 

 

HYMNS 

Opening Hymn: For the beauty of the earth by Folliott Sandford Pierpoint (1835-1917)

 

For the beauty of the earth,
for the beauty of the skies,
for the love which from our birth
over and around us lies:

Chorus: Christ our God, to you we raise
this our sacrifice of praise.

 

For the beauty of each hour
of the day and of the night,
hill and vale and tree and flower,
sun and moon and stars of light:

Chorus

 

For the joy of ear and eye,
for the heart and mind’s delight,
for the secret harmony
linking sense to sound and sight:

Chorus

 

For the joy of human love,
brother, sister, parent, child,
friends on earth and friends above,
pleasures pure and undefiled:

Chorus

 

For each perfect gift divine
to our race so freely given,
joys bestowed by love’s design,
flowers of earth and fruits of heaven:

Chorus

 

Second Hymn: Brother, Sister, Let Me Serve You (The Servant Song) by Richard Gillard (1953-) 

 

Brother, sister let me serve you.

Let me be as Christ to you;

pray that I may have the grace to

let you be my servant too.

 

We are pilgrims on a journey,

and companions on the road;

we are here to help each other

walk the mile and bear the load.

 

I will hold the Christ-light for you

in the night-time of your fear;

I will hold my hand out to you,

speak the peace you long to hear.

 

I will weep when you are weeping;

when you laugh I’ll laugh with you;

I will share your joy and sorrow

till we’ve seen this journey through.

 

When we sing to God in heaven

we shall find such harmony,

born of all we’ve known together

of Christ’s love and agony.

 

Brother, sister let me serve you.

Let me be as Christ to you;

pray that I may have the grace to

let you be my servant too.

 

Final Hymn: God, whose almighty Word by John Marriott (1780-1825)

 

God, whose almighty Word

Chaos and darkness heard

And took their flight:

Hear us, we humbly pray,

And where the Gospel day

Sheds not its glorious ray,

Let there be light!

 

Lord, who once came to bring,

On your redeeming wing,

Healing and sight,

Health to the sick in mind,

Sight to the inly blind:

Oh, now to humankind

Let there be light!

 

Spirit of truth and love,

Life-giving, holy dove,

Speed forth your flight;

Move on the water’s face,

Bearing the lamp of grace,

And in earth’s darkest place

Let there be light!

 

Holy and blessed Three,

Glorious Trinity,

Wisdom, love, might!

Boundless as ocean’s tide,

Rolling in fullest pride,

Through the earth, far and wide,

Let there be light!

 

PRAYERS

For Artists and Creativity

Creator God,
whose Spirit brings light out of darkness and form out of formlessness,
we give you thanks for the gift of imagination,
for colour and texture, for rhythm and silence,
for the desire to make and to shape.

We pray for all artists –
for those whose work is seen this day at the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition,
and for those whose labour remains hidden.
Deepen their vision, strengthen their courage, and sustain their joy.

May their work reveal connections where others see none,
awaken attention where there is distraction,
and enlarge our shared life.

May their work encourage a world of generosity,
where questions are welcomed, creativity is honoured and goodness valued;
and where we are delivered from small imaginations and narrow sympathies.

In all their making, may they reflect something of your creative abundance.

Amen

 

For Attention and Imagination

God of truth,
in a world crowded with images
and restless with distraction,
teach us to look again.

Slow our hurried seeing,
steady our distracted minds,
and open our eyes to what we so easily overlook.

Give us patience to attend,
humility to receive,
and imagination to perceive what is not yet obvious or seen.

That we may see one another more clearly,
and recognise the dignity and depth of every life.

And may our eyes be opened to your presence among us,
even when we have not yet recognised it.

Amen

 

For Collaboration and Community

God of communion, Father, Son and Holy Spirit,
you are perfect relationship – life in love, and love in relation –
and you have made us not for isolation but for shared life.

Bless all collaborations –
studios and production teams,
galleries and guilds, mentors and students.

Heal rivalries that corrode trust,
and transform envy into mutual delight.

Teach us to rejoice in one another’s gifts,
and to see difference not as division but as richness.

May our distinct voices become harmony,
and our shared work become a deeper song
of what it means to live together in peace.

Amen

 

For Interconnectedness and Healing

Lord of all life, in whom all things hold together,
we pray for a world that often feels fragmented,
divided by fear, strained by injustice and wounded by neglect.

Where relationships are broken, bring reconciliation.
Where voices are silenced, bring justice.
Where creation is harmed, bring renewal.

Help us to recognise our shared life,
that we belong to one another,
and to the earth you have made.

And may the work of human hands,
in art, in craft, in care,
participate in your ongoing work of mending the world.

So that what is scattered may be drawn together again,
and what is wounded may begin to heal.

Amen