The Painting behind the Painting

Recently I went with my friend James to an art gallery to see a small exhibition of just three paintings. One of them we both knew well, the other two less so. We spent a long time looking & talking about each painting in turn, and the more we looked the more we saw, and what we saw went beyond a simple description of the painting itself. We began to see what I would call “the painting behind the painting,” an awareness that the painting was about something more than just its surface subject. As the artist must have spent weeks if not months working on it, it was difficult to imagine that he was not aware of what we had begun to see. It must have been something he had glimpsed or become aware of and felt duty bound to share, while knowing that not everybody would understand it.

I suspect that all creative artists, be they poets, novelists, composers or whatever, would recognise this process: of creating something that hints of a reality behind the surface reality of what they have created. Indeed it may have been an awareness of this deeper reality that they were primarily concerned to communicate.

This is a process that I recognise. I enjoy reading poetry, for example, and a good poem has not only a surface meaning but something deeper that requires serious probing to reveal itself. The same is true of a good novel. Music often causes an immediate pleasure behind which lurks something deeper. But the same can be true of a meeting, or a conversation, a view of a landscape. Potentially it can be found in anything, and by anybody, although some people have a particular sensitivity to it.

The Irish writer Noel Dermot O’Donoghue in his book ‘The Mountain behind the mountain’ writes of this ‘hidden reality. In it he sets out to explore “the possibility that there is a region or regions of reality which are discovered by way of an imaginative inner perception that is not simply projective but delicately and profoundly receptive of a world or worlds of reality normally concealed. This faculty that perceives what is really there, comes as a fruitful marriage of what is in the mind and what is outside it. It involves a deep attunement not available to all.”

“Thematic and systematic thought may close the doors of perception. Primal perception, for all its elemental realism, leaves those doors open, or at least ajar, so that the light of imagination……may shine through & illuminate, for a moment or as a constancy, the mountain behind the mountain.”

Prayer invites us to do something similar: to be aware of a reality present in everyday reality but also beyond it, a reality that we are invited to trust and place at the centre of our lives.

Any activity that takes us there is prayer. Activities that lead us into stillness and silence take us there. It is an area of reality that we can try to stay open to and which enriches and deepens us. We find ourselves opened to a reality that opens itself to us, inviting us to trust it, to have faith in it, but over which we have no conscious control. We can only submit to it or choose not to as Lord Kenneth Clarke once did.

He described: “A curious episode……. I had a religious experience. It took place in the Church of San Lorenzo, but it did not seem to be connected with the harmonious beauty of the architecture. I can only say that for a few minutes my whole being was irradiated by a kind of heavenly joy, far more intense than anything I had known before. This state of mind lasted for several months, and wonderful though it was, it posed an awkward problem in terms of action. My life was far from blameless: I would have to reform. My family would think I was going mad, and perhaps after all it was a delusion, for I was in every way unworthy of receiving such a flood of grace. Gradually the effect wore off, and I made no effort to retain it. I think I was right: I was too deeply embedded in the world to change course. But that I had ‘felt the finger of God’ I am quite sure, and, although the memory of this experience has faded, it still helps me to understand the joys of the Saints.”

I shared this blog with my friends James and he commented:

“One of my reflections after our visit to the gallery was the astonishment at how long we had spent and I wondered whether a destabilized sense of time is common to all these experiences and is in some ways a confirmation of them…”

I think that’s he’s spot on.

First posted in http://contemporaryspirituality.blog