I was recently in Sheffield with my daughter Lizzie, and we visited the Graves Gallery hoping to see a favourite painting of mine by Gwen John, ‘A Corner of the Artist’s Room in Paris’. It was out on loan, so I bought a postcard instead. It is a remarkable image.

It captures what R S Thomas might have called ‘the presence of an absence’ for neither the artist nor anyone else is in the picture. There are no signs of the artist’s equipment. We just have an empty chair with a white cushion facing slightly towards us, there is a blue garment strewn across it, a white parasol resting against it; and a table in front of a window, on which is a small vase of flowers. Gwen John is conspicuously not there, but there are things that indicate that she has been there and will return there, and together with the room itself, simple and uncluttered, with a window onto the world outside, they give a powerful sense of her presence. We can intuit quite a lot about her from this space that we know she inhabits, despite her absence. The existence of the picture implies that the artist herself must have been present in order to paint it, but chose to remain absent from it. Not even the title gives her away: it could be any artist.

I find that quite fascinating. On reflection its saying something that in many ways is commonplace and obvious. If I enter a room it will tell me a lot about the person/people who have created and inhabit it. If I visit an urban space it will tell me something about the culture of the people who live there. Reading this blog you might get a sense of the man who wrote it, without having ever met me in the flesh.

The winner of the Booker prize has just been announced, its ‘Orbit’ by Samantha Harvey, and I read it a couple of months ago. It’s about a day in the life of the International Space Station currently orbiting the earth sixteen times a day: the cosmonauts rather humdrum existence, and what they feel as they gaze at the planet, their real home. Earth looks very different from out there of course, it’s awe-inspiringly beautiful.

While in Sheffield, Lizzie and I went for a walk in the Rivelin Valley, and it was stunning & awe-inspiringly beautiful too, with its bare trees & autumn colours.

The Great Cosmic Artist, of course is as absent; from all this as Gwen John is from her painting, but we can intuit much about Her/Him from the clues that are available to us. Its just a matter of looking and being aware of the Presence that is hiding in plain sight.

First posted in http://contemporaryspirituality.blog