On the very morning I read of a new baby who’d arrived in this world with a prediction of fatness landed on him soon afterwards, I opened up a book one of the participants in the class I was attending in Atlanta had brought in that day to show me. And the picture I landed on there made me laugh with surprise, intrigue and delight, as I was presented with my first view of Saint Francis and the Birds, as painted by the eccentric English artist, Sir Stanley Spencer, in 1935.
OMG!! Can he get any larger??? How could he let himself go like that?? And those bhurds!! So many and so big!! Oversize themselves and an annoyingly large amount of them gathering and trailing him around. Would it be mildly infuriating to have flocks like that showing up, bawking, squawking, cooing, shitting on the ground and dropping feathers? Tons of them, far bigger and bulkier than the dainty two or three that usually appear perched on his thin and sainted body. What would his father say??? (“Which one??” you might ask.) The magnitude of the whole thing made me shake my head in awe and wonder. What a picture! What a concept! What was Sir Stanley thinking? Whatever it was, he made my day, sixty years after his death in 1959 when I was only five years old myself, a thin, wispy child who had yet to grow into herself. According to the account given by Dr Luke, the young boy Jesus was said to have "increased in wisdom and stature and favor before God and men” after he appeared in the temple and told his parents he was seeing to his Father's business; and to this day, centuries after his death, his larger body continues to feed many. All of which makes me wonder if size, along with favor, influence and import is in the eye of the beholder?
The words fleshy, frequently tubular, and sometimes slab-like and rectangular, describe Spencer’s scenic figures. Often faces are nearly featureless, although the tonality and positioning of the heads are expressive. Eyes appear in deep concentration. The portraits are remarkable for their warmth despite their uncompromising realism. Unfortunately, Spencer was severely criticized for what many viewed as his unattractive, ‘grotesque’ distortion of the human form. In some cases this was viewed as ‘blasphemous’. The most famous controversy concerned St Francis and the Birds (1935), in which St Francis is preaching to ducks and hens and chicks, near Fernlea, Spencer’s childhood house. The ample, bulbous girth and head of the saint offended many onlookers, but Spencer ‘justified’ the shapes by explaining that they symbolized the teachings of St Francis, which ‘spread far and wide’. The forms are part of nature, what Christ revered; and Spencer, like Christ, embraced the imperfections of humankind – the sick, the infirm, the ugly, the damned – and well as the young and beautiful. Why shouldn’t we? When the hanging committee of the Royal Academy rejected St Francis in 1935, Spencer resigned as an Associate.
8 comments:
You Think Spence Knows?
Is he trying to please anyone?
Is he trying to be...understood?
Ach, be done with understanding!
Compulsion's in the driver's seat,
Compulsion's got him good!
That is an unusual painting right there - I really have trouble reading it, perhaps due to my color vision, or lack thereof. Are his hands on the wrong arms? Just what is he signing there? This painting raises more questions than it answers for me.
And for the record, my skinny St. Francis is now emerging from his leafy bower as winter approaches. He has kept his birds safe for another year.
He is every which way AND loose, SixtyG, with the arms reaching in two different directions and appearing to be on the wrong side, and his feet sideways to his body. I can't tell if the body is backwards as well. The birds, however, are together in their focus.
I am with the birds on that one!
In them thar days, you had to have some extra weight (you still do today, actually*) against the time you got really sick.
Why, you ask? Ever get a bad flu? What's the first thing you notice after you get better?
Lost a few pounds. Turns out you need a reserve on you. Even at places like Ranger School, they'll tell you to pack on the carbs.
That's why, in all those painting by guys like Rubens, the girls (who were all working girls (servant girls, farm girls), if you look, you can see the musculature) are all goddesses of abundance.
* The Blonde is always telling me I need a few more carbs.
I've done several carvings of the St Francis figure. One of them is toothpick thin, due to the fact that I kept shaving more and more off during a stressful time in my life, as doing so satisfied my compulsive need to do something. Part of my intrigue with this painting has to do with my eyes and hands being familiar with one view, with this showing the very opposite, including all the body parts that I'd worked so hard to represent in wood and get "just right" turned around; and all those birds. It portrays another view in which the eye cannot rest or quite resolve the visual puzzle presented.
He also takes ahold of the leperous nature of fatness, which visually shouts "unclean" to the many who find it despicable and repulsive or judge it to be evidence of poor character, he puts in on a saint. No wonder it was viewed as blasphemous, the same charged leveled against the one who was known to eat with sinners and tax collectors.
Well, he did the roof good anyway, ha ha ha.
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