THE MARTYRDOM OF ST EDMUND By Sister Wendy Beckett

We are all familiar with religious painting that comes to us heart on sleeve, breast heaving with emotion, large banner held aloft proclaiming that it is a work of GREAT SPIRITUAL SIGNIFICANCE. Nothing could be less like the art of Brian Whelan, this astonishing artist who is drawn to themes of the utmost profundity and yet treats them with a whimsical originality that is surprisingly affecting. This is very strong art: not for aesthetic wimps. His colours are strong, yet its power comes from no obedience to the merely material. His work amazes, and holds us in its thrall: what more could be desired of a religious painting?

Here he depicts one of those iconic moments in British history, for ever commemorated in the name of the town of Bury St. Edmunds. The 9th century Danes focussed on East Anglia, ravaging and harassing. The national memory still reverences King Edmund, who fought so valiantly against the invader until they captured him. Because he would not deny his faith, the Danes used him as target practice. It was said, much in the realistic manner of Whelan’s painting, that he ‘looked like a hedgehog’. As a final mark of contempt the Danes beheaded him. But after battle and martyrdom, came legend, and here we have all three. On the left press the enemy, armed to the teeth, almost inhuman in their chain mail, hung with shields, one-eyed beneath their tight Viking helmets. They bear down relentlessly on saint Edmund. He has no protection. His armour is thin and ragged, he wears no helmet, has no weapon. On his head is the crown of East Anglia, which rises to a cross shape: this is a Christian people. Round his neck hangs an image of the true cross. His arms are tied behind him. Whelan shows no ropes binding him to the oak as he was slaughtered, as if to show that it is his faith that holds him there, upright and resolute, rather than constraint. Here we see what it means to die loving and affirming God. The Father himself comes to receive him. On the right, intruding visibly into our cruel world, looms the face of God the Father, tight-lipped with distress, compassionate, infinitely loving. He has sent angels to receive the soul of his saint, young now, and radiant, clean from life’s dirt and damage, mailed hands at peace. He no longer needs to wear the relic of the cross, since he is brought into the realm of the Resurrection. But Whelan accommodates not only the theological truth but also the folk legend.

After the beheading, his people said, a wolf guarded the head, calling “Hic, Hic” – the Latin for he is here. (Clearly an educated animal.) He lay in two pieces under the oak tree, and when found, another miracle: the head joined itself to the body and that body never decayed. It was incorrupt Edmund that was reverently laid to rest, and a mighty abbey built to pay him honour. He lay there in Bury Abbey until the Reformation, when his body disappeared and its whereabouts is still a mystery.

This is a painting alive with the brilliance of faith. We know that the fallen acorns will grow into new trees: this death cannot be an ending. The tree, incidentally, stood for a long time in Hoxne, Suffolk, where the local pub, The Swan, celebrates St. Edmund’s Day, November 20th. Whelan honours the noble wolf, while admitting its legendary character: it is ghost, as compared to the great reality of God and the angels. Like the oak, which the artist shows as bearing the young green of spring leaves simultaneously with the scarlet of autumn and the colourlessness of winter, holiness is ‘for all seasons’, and here this becomes incontestably visible to us. This is a work of exuberant freedom and absolute control, a good symbol of what the love of God is all about.

Sister Wendy Beckett is a contemplative nun who lives alone in the grounds of a Carmelite Monastery. She has written several books on art, The Story of Painting being the best known, and has composed and presented several television series, both for the BBC and for UPB in America.

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More than meets the eye
Martin Boland, Dean of Brentwood Cathedral, UK 2009

Contemporary religious art remains largely preoccupied with abstract visions of the “spiritual” or “transcendent”. This has become an hermetic industry with its own self-referential codes, tricks and conceits. The recommendation by the nineteenth century symbolist poet, Stéphane Malarmé, that “everything that is sacred and wishes to remain so must envelop itself in mystery,” has been adopted as the unofficial manifesto by this artistic establishment. Abstruse symbolism and the blending of world religions into a spiritual smoothie combine to make a religious art that may be palatable to a society stripped of prayer and sacraments, but is theologically insipid. In this aesthetic climate, Brian Whelan is a dissident whose work stands outside such current orthodoxies and challenges them.

Whelan’s art rescues the rich treasury of Catholic iconography from the fog of syncretist, solipsistic thinking. His is a preferential option for the narrative and figurative over the purely conceptual and symbolic; the emotional and carnival over the cerebral and puritanical; the forging of an egalitarian religious folk art over the elitism of esoteric impenetrability. The largely neglected tradition of pre-Reformation religious art fires Whelan’s imagination and provides him with a visual store of references that he raids, appropriates and reinvents for his own purposes. Each painting is an attempt to find a modern idiom that refuses to disown or camouflage its theological and cultural origins but chooses to act in continuity with them. In this way, Whelan makes his own stand against the stripping of the artistic altars.

According to the philosopher, Charles Taylor, a feature of our secular age is that it is dis-enchanted. Only vestigial traces of the Divine and devotion to Mary, the saints and angels linger in our public spaces, social practice and discourse. The supernatural realm has been largely airbrushed out of our cultural imagination in order to create an unblemished secular aryanism.

“I do remember at art college,” Whelan recalls, ”being told that the crucifixion I had painted was so much better upside down because the viewer did not have to think about the content. When Catholicism tentatively raised its head at the academy, my teachers were mildly shocked and a lot of head shaking went on.” Charles Taylor suggests that such antipathy to the religious imagination would have been alien in other ages where “God was present in a whole host of social practices and at all levels of society: for instance, when the functioning mode of local government was the parish, and the parish was still primarily a community of prayer; or when guilds maintained a ritual life that was more than pro forma; or when the only modes in which the society in all its components could display itself to itself were religious feasts, like, for instance, the Corpus Christi procession.”

Whelan’s paintings are an attempt to re-enchant the secular world, to restore the religious imagination to its proper place in society. “As religion has become separate,” the artist observes, “what has happened is that this enchanting has been given to Elvis and Madonna (the pop tart).” Through his work, Whelan wrests the faculty of enchantment from such impostors and reclaims it for the artistic community. His paintings become visual mystery plays, where the sacred and profane collide; the supernatural and natural orders coexist; human history and salvation history intersect. Thus, the urban sprawl built by man lies flush with the City of God; navvies and drunks slouch next to angels and saints; a cosmic battle is played out against an urban panoply of architectural inventiveness while vulnerable humanity seeks sanctuary in the daily liturgies of altar and ale house.

A buoyant colour palate and the graphic, cartoon-like immediacy of his images allow Whelan to tell his religious stories with a pictorial clarity, energy and directness. He wants his work to be accessible and the untamed quality of the painting, while, never jejune, makes that possible. “I am painting for the faithless as well as the faithful – and probably more for the former,” the artist admits. Like many Medieval artists, Whelan recognises that religion is too serious and all encompassing a matter to exclude humour, drama and the feast of misrule. The sacred teeters on the edge of the profane in many paintings, leaving the viewer wondering whether these are pious religious images, social satires or both. But, in style and purpose, the paintings are the distant cousins of the underside of misericords, the drama of doom paintings and the wit of carved corbels. Medieval artists understood the relationship between the human and the divine as a theological zoomorphic, an intertwining, paradoxical symbiosis, rather than a relationship defined by a strict, binary segregation. Whelan tries to retrieve this ancient understanding and represent it in his work.

The city is the dominant leitmotif in Whelan’s work. His urban landscapes are fabulous architectural confections; Babels dense with memory and wonder. They are executed with an apparent naivety of draughtsmanship, a delight in the possibility of colour and decorated with Whelan’s trademark material: the foil from chocolates and sweets, poor man’s gold leaf, flattened, trimmed and glued to areas of the work. This technique not only gives the paintings an iconic richness but charges them with a metaphor for sacramental change, where the drab when caught in the divine light can shimmer with the miraculous and the gaudy, unliveable cities man populates find themselves drenched in religious meaning.

At the centre of this urban universe sits London. This is the London of the Irish diaspora that Brian Whelan was raised in, where the Pope, the pub and eventually, the Pogues were the ruling triumvirate. It is estimated that between 1943 and 1970 some 700,000 Irish came to Britain looking for work, many ending up on building sites or digging tunnels as casual labour on new infrastructure projects. But, far from being a sociological biopsy of a particular time or an exercise in ersatz nostalgia, the paintings of London are transfigured by the adult artist’s imagination. In the 2009 painting, Transmetroplitan (the title taken from a 1984 song by Shane MacGowan), autobiography, history and theology are built into the fabric of the capital city. There is, for example, the church where Brian Whelan attended Mass; the cemetery he used as a short cut to school; Irish labourers digging the underground tunnels alongside the skeletons of those who perished doing so; a local brothel; commuters snaking to work or home to bedsit land on the tube.

Drawing all these preoccupations together is the presence of the Triune God: God the Father, surrounded by a flotilla of the heavenly host, releases the Holy Spirit as a dove over the messy entrails of the city. In the opposite corner of the painting Christ stands at the jaws of hell, the damned imploring his help. Christ refuses Adam and Eve’s offer of a sneaky bite of their apple.

Floating above the city in Transmetropolitan, like some image that has escaped from the world of magical realism, is a boat with bearded passengers, lowering an anchor to catch on the cross of a church dome or a tower block satellite dish. This is an allusion to the ancient Irish legend that the brothers of the monastic city of Clonmacnoise, founded by St Ciaran in the sixth century, were once at prayer when a curragh appeared above them, its anchor snagging in the altar rails of their chapel. A man climbed out of the curragh and unsuccessfully tried to free it. Seamus Heaney concludes the story in his poem Lightenings:

“This man can’t bear our life here and will drown,”
The abbot said, “unless we help him.” So
They did, the freed ship sailed, and the man climbed back
Out of the marvellous as he had known it.

The Enlightenment project of finding a fixed category for all human experience is found wanting. By returning to the miracle at Clonmacnoise, both the poet and the artist agree that when we dissolve the artificial barriers erected between the mundane and the marvellous, when we remove the laboratory labels and allow the human situation to breathe and pray, then surprising vistas of the real and eternal world materialise. “Art indicates what the character of a spiritual situation is,” writes the theologian, Paul Tillich, “it does this more immediately and directly than do science and philosophy for it is less burdened by objective considerations.”

Such ideas are further explored through another Irish saint, St Brendan. His life provides Whelan with a rich seam of inspiration. Brendan, “The Navigator”, sails out in search of Tír na nÓg, the Isle of the Blessed. Drawing on his family’s history, Brian Whelan interprets this perilous journey as one which generations of Irish have made, trusting in God to find them work and a better future for their children. Many of the early Irish saints – Columba, Ciaran, Patrick and Brendan - were migrants, moving from one place to the next with the gospel message while simultaneously making the spiritual journey from this earthly life into the eternity Of God. These saints are representatives for all those who find themselves wayfarers or at sea and longing to return home. An experience that is the primary expression of our spiritual condition, as beings who alone are made for communion with God and, in the words of St Augustine, remain restless until they rest in Him.

Such saints were explorers of the natural and supernatural world, travelling to places that initially appeared godless and desolate. In these unchartered territories, they set up base camp and from there, reported back to humanity signs of God’s presence and sightings of His angels. Brian Whelan has staked his corner in the urban landscapes of post-modernity and, following his artistic and saintly forebears, reminds us that there is more than meets the eye.

Green Pebble Magazine Oct/Nov 2009
Ruby Ormerod (editor) of the Greenpebble Art Magazine

THE ROCK AND ROLL PAINTER.
By Paul McGuinness of The Popes. October 2009

These days it seems everyone is looking to find a bit of Irish in them,
“Have you got any Irish in you? Would you like some?”
I think Phil Lynott of Thin Lizzy said that.
It wasn’t always like that.

I was born in London in the 50’s to two Irish immigrants. By the time I was 4 years of age, they had packed us all up and returned home to Waterford. I arrived home on the Monster express, not in first or second class, but cattle. Artist Brian Whelan’s parents did the same when he was nine.

Both our families lived in the shadow of emigration in a time when it was THE story of Ireland. But later, in the days of the Celtic Tiger, the Irish living in Britain seemed part of an almost forgotten age. Ireland acquired an historical and cultural amnesia, turning its face against anything that belonged to the old country, even shunning their didiley ah.

As immigrants in Britain we were all made to feel inferior and it was only through some cultural giants like Shane McGowan and The Pogues and The Dubliners, that the beauty of our heritage was expressed,

Things have changed again. In the age of the “post” Celtic Tiger, Whelan’s art is ahead of the game. It looks revolutionary but it is also familiar, poignant and relevant. The story of the immigrant, so central to his work, is now THE story of the world into the 21st century.

Now a new era of British Irish relations has banished the gun and taken up the tongue. It is right to remember your past as a counter weight to the future and in this future, art is the new rock and roll. If nothing else, contemporary art has challenged our pre-conceptions with sharks in formaldehyde and unmade beds. Whelan on the other hand does not look for novelty or shock drama. His methods are traditional. When he rolls up his sleeves and gets his hands dirty, he is one of the old school.

I was aware of Whelan's work before we met. I had seen his work in reproductions, but nothing prepared me for the “live” experience, seeing the paintings in the flesh so to speak. It’s a bit like the difference between hearing a record and going to a live gig.

The best way I could describe Brian Whelan would be to call him the rock & roll painter.