This is the fourth image in the series of Temenos paintings. The introduction to this sequence of work can be found here.

I reached the peak of my knowledge about faith in my early twenties. I knew so much, particularly about God and who God did and didn’t accept, what behaviour he (and God was definitely a he) found acceptable and what would send me on the slippery slope to hell. My belief was strong and firm and I clung to it until my knuckles were white because to leave go would mean risking the wrath of this loving God (and he was only angry at me because he loved me so much). The following 20 years have been a continual unfolding and deepening understanding of my own ignorance. I hadn’t realised how small my world was, and whilst I could laugh and roll my eyes at my naivety I think it’s fair to say that none of us realises just how small our view of the world really is – how can we? The goldfish can only begin to conceive that there may be more to the universe if it’s moved from a fish tank to a lake. I simply believed what those I trusted told me about God, it was only when I began to step out and explore for myself that I realised there was so much more.

These are disconcerting moments when previously held certainties melt away. The fourth image in the Temenos series begins to explore this: the clarity of the ancient icon dissolving, shifting and changing. The elements are still there but the image becomes unclear, even disappearing entirely. At the same time tangled lines of thought and experience, confusing and unsettling begin to resolve into a gentler flow. This is the path of unknowing that leads to sacred space, it is an unweaving of the structures that have held us securely perhaps for most of our lives.

New places, and encountering different cultures do this to us. We being to understand that not everyone thinks like we do, not everyone experiences the world in the same way as we do and so assumptions that we’ve made about the way the universe is are called into question.

When these moments in our lives arise, when the solid certain ice begins to melt into deep clear water, we face a choice. We can cling in fear to what remains of the solid ground, closing our ears to voices that disturb us by excluding the experiences and lives of those who challenge us. Or, we can realise this moment as a generous gift, a time to leap into the deep.

The leap is fraught with risk and uncertainty for sure. This is a fearful moment when we prise our fingers away from the deeply held certainties we have clung to in the past and there may well be a genuinely sense of grief at what we have lost, but it is the way forward to freedom.

This is the third image in the series of Temenos paintings. The introduction to this sequence of work can be found here.

A woman walks alone through the subterranean passageway of loss. The fractured halo of grief around her head. There are many gateways into sacred space, the liminal place where we are changed in the deepest parts of our being, but the threshold of loss is the most painful to undergo.

A piece of our life disappears, a person, a relationship, a home, a job; and we are left reeling at the consequences. Even years later the grief can resonate through anniversaries or objects discovered that uncover the concealed pain.

Many years ago, during the summer after I finished at university I spent some weeks interrailing around Europe with a good friend. It was the days before the ubiquity of the internet and smartphones were still a sci-fi dream so we relied on paper maps, a chunky European rail timetable and the goodwill of people we met en route. Ever the time optimist I hoped to see the major sights of Europe over 3 short weeks and so we attempted to do Paris in a day: ridiculous in retrospect. Our plan was to use le metro and pop up at salient locations to experience the Eiffel tower, Arc de Triomphe, the Louvre and so on before dropping down underground to speed between the various tourist spots to emerge once more into the light. It was a curiously dislocating experience.

Moving through the earth with no sense of direction or distance or time before bursting into the day above it was hard to discern how these places connected and related to each other. Only time and wandering in the light would have enabled us to join the dots of these disconnected spaces.

So to emerge from the tunnel of loss is such a disconcerting experience. A piece of who we thought we were has gone forever. We are in unknown territory and there is a sense of disconnection between who we were and who we have become through the process of loss. Perhaps wandering for some time in the light will help us pick up the thread of our identity, perhaps we will never find it and the sense of loss is compounded so that this is not only a loss of that which we we grieve for but also a loss of the very idea of who we are. We emerge from the tunnel blinking and bewildered with tears in our eyes.

This experience of loss is at the heart of the story of Jesus. He gives everything and then, hanging in the bright sun, he shouts out with the ultimate crisis of faith and identity, “my God why have you forsaken me?”. He gave everything of himself and at the end experiences a deep dark absence. A void that his friends entered into, having centred their whole lives and their whole sense of self around trusting in Jesus they experience all of that ripped from them in his death.

In this cold lonely tunnel beneath the earth there are no comforting words to help. That fractured halo of grief splinters and cuts us. Broken glass to the heart.

Keep going.

The full set of Temenos paintings along with accompanying poems by Ian Adams are available to exhibit from September 2017. We are now taking bookings from those interested in showing the work in a public venue and simply ask that transport costs are covered. In addition an artist’s talk, poetry evening and/or led meditations that engage with the work can also be arranged.

For more information contact rjstott@hotmail.co.uk

This is the second image in the series of Temenos paintings. The introduction to this sequence work can be found here.

The mystic Thomas Merton writes about how we mistake our false self for the fundamental reality of our life. It is something that we wrap around ourselves to make ourselves feel real:

“…I wind experiences around myself and cover myself with pleasure and glory like bandages in order to make myself perceptible to myself and to the word, as if I were an invisible body that could only become visible when something visible covered its surface”

The second image in the Temenos series invites us to cross the threshold into sacred space by reaching out to what we see in the mirror.

Bands of red and gold loop over the outstretched hand like a curtain shielding the observer from contact with the real.

If we pay attention to the masks we offer to the word, the false self will be evident. But Merton pushes us deeper and asks us to consider the false self that we present to ourselves. This is the person we mistake for who we really are. I wonder what stories we tell about ourselves to make us feel solid and real. Stories that, rather than being liberating, actually limit us whilst the true self glows with a gentle constancy beneath the wrappings, beautiful and still, .

The false self is a wily beast and employs all kinds of clever tactics to prevent itself from being unwound. It is inevitable that the moment we attempt to draw our attention to the inner life the false self will come up with any excuse to prevent us from making that journey. It’s just so comfortable to cling to the safety of illusion because the alternative path is long and hard and leaves us deeply exposed. Anything; be it TV, social media or religion that fills our time and attention can distract us from the journey. Even stuff that, on the face of it looks like we’re being a good person such as devoting all our time to a worthy cause or to physical exercise can do it: anything to stop us sitting still in silence to notice how and who we really are. And if the activity gives us a nice boost of ego: “look how good I am for spending all that time helping others”, then all the better. This is how the false self protects itself.

The invitation here is to look in the mirror and consider how we see ourselves. Am I wearing armour, to prevent myself from being hurt, to avoid making mistakes or saying the wrong thing? Am I wearing bright gaudy clothes so people notice me and tell me how brilliant or good or clever I am? Both are the work of the false self; it manifests just as much in the brash show off as in the person shrinking alone in the corner thinking “poor me”. Neither are true reflections of the peaceful beauty of the real. And, depending on our circumstances, we can find ourselves wearing many different falsehoods throughout the day as tell these stories to ourselves and mistake them for something true.

Conversely, the real self is not revealed in how successful or unsuccessful we are, how popular or unpopular, how good we are or how pious our prayer. These things are entirely incidental to the unwinding of the bandages that cover us.

To find a way forward wise men and women have pointed the way over millennia. Ways that help us to begin to untangle things, or at least find the end of the ball of string so that we can start to work out how to unravel it. They point to the notion that the energy that comes from the false self has a different quality to it than from the deeper flow of truth.

Consider a river as it flows down the mountainside: there will be times when it passes swiftly over rocks, churning and falling into white water and at other times the river becomes wider and deeper, the flow is still strong, there is a life and energy there, but the surface is smooth as mirror giving little hint to the deep strong flow beneath. The false self thrives on the drama; the experience of being churned up and excitable, whether its our name up in lights as the hero of the hour or the tortured lonely soul in the corner. The deeper self pays no heed to these things, real as they may feel (and the thrill and excitement or the loneliness or the pain may seem very real indeed) but this is all just froth. The deeper self is flowing sure and strong whether people are cheering us on and showering us with accolades, or ignoring us or insulting us.

To live from the true self is to find that place in silence and stillness where the deep river flows. It doesn’t mean we won’t have successes and failures, joys and grief. But it does mean that when we look in the mirror we will be able to see clearly who we really are.

The full set of Temenos paintings along with accompanying poems by Ian Adams are available to exhibit from September 2017. We are now taking bookings from those interested in showing the work in a public venue and simply ask that transport costs are covered. In addition an artist’s talk, poetry evening and/or led meditations that engage with the work can also be arranged.

For more information contact rjstott@hotmail.co.uk

This is the first image in the series of Temenos paintings. The introduction to this sequence work can be found here.

We see a child on the swing, reaching that momentary point of weightlessness, giddy and free with a crudely painted halo. The symbols are taken from the icon of Christ the pantocractor meaning a word which means ‘almighty’ or ‘all powerful’ . There is something important about envisioning such a figure at play: Christ laughing, learning, stumbling, picking himself up off the ground with grazed knees and beginning again.

This first image of thresholds into sacred temenos space invites us to lay aside everything we feel we have achieved, in learning, in wisdom and spiritual experience, to find the right perspective on all we have built for ourselves and realise once again the child-spirit that leaps for joy within us.

I remember reading “The Interior Castle” by the medieval mystic Teresa of Avila. In this book she envisages the spiritual journey as a mansion with many rooms and describes the process of going deeper as movement from one room to the next. When I came across this work I had been trying to follow Christ for nearly 25 years and had been engaging seriously in contemplative prayer and meditation for around a decade. I have done this with varying degrees of success and discipline over the years; as with physical exercise these things manifest themselves in my life more in good intentions than actual practice. My feeble attempts at meditation notwithstanding, I thought that I would at least have travelled deeper to some profound spiritual plane after all that time. But reading Teresa’s words brought home to me that, in her great mansion of spiritual experience I was only standing at the gate. I’d walked down the driveway, stood at the doorway and congratulated myself on having such a remarkable deep experience without realising that if I pushed on the door, which was unlocked all along, I’d discover that really I had only been paddling in the shallows, the real depth was still in front of me.

After 25 years I was still beginning. And after another 25 years I will still be beginning.

The gift of the child-Christ is that the place of beginning isn’t a source of despondency, where we fret over so little progress made after so much time, but a source of liberation at the notion that the very idea of progress is anathema to the deeper journey. We are always simply beginning.

To begin is to be open to be taught and everyone you meet has something to teach you. To begin is to realise that it’s not just OK to make mistakes but that mistakes are inevitable and that there will always be times when we fall face down in the dirt. But above all the beginners soul is playful. There is a lightness and a joyfulness here.

I don’t want to romanticise a child’s example, children can be as fretful and avaricious as all of us, but seeing a child jump into a swimming pool to come up delighted and gasping for air, to see her run across a beach whilst holding no energy back, to see him at the top of the swing’s arc shouting “higher!”, we see moments of such focus and singularity of vision. Moments of pure freedom.

Human beings seem to be the only ones in the universe who have difficulty with this. The swift, swooping down to skim clear water and looping in the twilight air doesn’t yearn to be something else. The waves rising from the ocean to break and fall and sink into sand only to rise and break and fall again and again don’t worry that they should be doing something more productive to justify their existence. The swift, the ocean, the mountain, the tree simply are as they are and in their being they are at peace.

Perhaps that is why we struggle so much: we think it should be complicated. We think there is a trick to it or 10 essential steps to be enlightened when in fact the tricky bit is stripping away those illusions that cleverness or goodness or some technique will make us worthy of some beatific vision. The beginner’s soul has the joyful naivety of being liberated from such pretensions: In all the things to know and experience in the universe you know so very little, you are as you are, and that is OK.

So whether your life has been spent in pursuit of ancient wisdom for decades, soaked in profound meditation or whether you have never given such things a second thought. Whether your life feels sorted and together, building success upon success or whether everything has crumbled to dust and there seems no way out but despair. Take a breath, open your eyes and begin again.

The full set of Temenos paintings along with accompanying poems by Ian Adams are available to exhibit from September 2017. We are now taking bookings from those interested in showing the work in a public venue and simply ask that transport costs are covered. In addition an artist’s talk, poetry evening and/or led meditations that engage with the work can also be arranged.

For more information contact rjstott@hotmail.co.uk

“There are lost wavelengths and Atlantic sensations, ways of thinking and feeling that are conditioned by long term living on the Ocean’s edge – events of the mind that could only occur on the coasts”

Robert Macfarlane The Old Ways

Macfarlane writes about “events of the mind” that can only occur on the coast, in the edge and transitional spaces between land and ocean. Place has a significant impact on what events of the mind (and heart and soul) are possible. Place has the potential to beckon out from within us aspects of our deep self that may otherwise have been hidden, perhaps for our whole lives. Our being and our knowing are intrinsically bound to where we are standing and there are times when I travel somewhere new with the sense that the place has a gift for me.

So, it was that I found myself 7,000 miles from home on a bus winding its way up the mountain slopes of the northern territories of the Philippines. There are many stories to tell about that journey and that place held many gifts for me, some of them weren’t easy to receive, but this is where I discovered the word temenos. You may already know of it, you could have found it in a book or stumbled upon it online but as it happened I had to travel a third of the way around the world to discover it.

My hosts had taken me to a shopping mall In Baguio, a city in the mountains, where clouds roll in and engulf you as you drink coffee on a café terrace. In some ways familiar to me in the way that city malls around the world resemble each other but in so many other ways there were a million little sights entirely alien to my comfortable frames of reference such as the tropical butterfly alighting on the escalator or food stands mixing up sweet tofu. Only a few days into my stay I was still reeling from jet lag, humidity and the disconcerting culture shock that comes from the realisation that billions of people across the world live in ways that are entirely outside of my own limited realms of experience. It’s a realisation that, whilst self evident in many ways, only really hits home through encounter with the other.

We wandered through a large bookstore, the type that sells office supplies and cheap art materials alongside piles of books. Whilst my friends browsed, my eyes drifted over the shelves, not expecting to find anything to pique my interest but in the midst of that strange daze and sense of dislocation I saw a familiar name. A book by the artist Keri Smith called “The Wander Society”.  I’d read some of her work before, it is charming, quirky and enthusiastic about enabling people to engage deeply and creatively with the world around us. Seizing on the familiar in an unfamiliar place I paid the Pesos and took it with me.

And here is the uncanny thing about finding this wonderful little book at the edge of my world: Smith unfolds ideas about the importance of wandering in places both strange and mundane. She explores the richness of the impact of place on our being, our doing and our creating, in fact, she describes exactly why it was that I travelled to the Philippines in the first place. So far from home, in the corner of a bookshop in a Philippine shopping mall I had wandered into a text that enlightened my wandering.

I don’t know whether it was coincidence or something else but really the distinction is irrelevant. These moments of synchronicity enable us to fold meaning into our lives. In my experience, the more I live with a creative heart that is open to risk and possibility the more these synchronicities occur. Living with our eyes open and our hands outstretched enables us to receive the gifts that we stumble upon. Furthermore, whether coincidence or not, I find it is invariably true that when we follow the pathways that these moments of grace open up then they lead to fruitful ground, rich in creative potential. For me this is a statement of faith: There is a kindness and a generosity in the universe that we will find if we choose to live with our eyes open.

John O’Donohue encourages this in his book ‘Eternal Echoes’:

“The very nature of the universe invites you to journey and discover it. The earth wants our minds to listen attentively and gaze wisely so that we may learn its secrets and name them. We are the echo-mirrors of contemplative nature. One of our most sacred duties is to be open and faithful to the subtle voices of the universe which come alive in our longing” 

Tucked away in the pages of Smith’s book was a page outlining the concept of temenos: A sacred space or grove set aside for the gods, a special place that enables the exploration of different ways of being in the world.

Discovering the idea of temenos was the discovery of a name for something I had been working on for the previous few months, a series of 10 paintings that are thresholds into sacred space. They each form a gateway into the sacred grove that the word encapsulates. In addition the poet Ian Adams has written a piece to accompany each picture. The paintings overlay image, colour and gesture and the poems weave words that open up spaces and invite each viewer to bring their personal stories and experiences as we move into the temenos.

Over the next few weeks I will be posting the images here with reflections about their creation along with some of the stories of gift that I encountered in the Phillipines.

Deep in the belly / unseen, new life stirs, seeding / flowers into spring. 

Ian Adams

The full set of paintings and poems are available to exhibit from September 2017. We are now taking bookings from those interested in showing the work in a public venue and simply ask that transport costs are covered. In addition an artist’s talk, poetry evening and/or led meditations that engage with the work can also be arranged.

For more information contact rjstott@hotmail.co.uk

This is the seventh in a series of 7 paintings I have made for Methodist Conference 2016, an introduction to the series can be found here.

This series of paintings began in cool blues, it moved with growing warmth to the central image of a heart offered in love that erupted with red fire and now, in the final piece, back to blue. With the ebb and flow of warmth and colour I hope we are changed by the journey.

On the Sinai coast of Egypt, where the desert meets the sea, the waters teem with life. The coral reefs host strange and beautiful creatures. I travelled along the track north from Dahab in the back of a pick up truck, dusty and clinging tight to the hot metal. We came to a lone building by the water, it was closed and shuttered tight with an old wheel chair on its veranda. This was a medical centre by the popular diving site called the Blue Hole.

The shallow reefs mean that the sea is turquoise/white as you step into it, swimming out further the blue hole opens up. A sink hole in the reef that suddenly drops away to the depth of 100 metres. I gasped as I swam over the precipice moving from a sea bed close enough to touch to oblivion. In the centre of the circle free divers, who swim deep with one breath, anchored themselves to a floating buoy before taking their turn to plummet. The water is as clear as air but the depth of the hole is fathomless and as they swam down they disappeared into the deepest blue I’ve ever seen.

Swimming over the sinkhole I felt fear: an awe and trepidation at encountering something so much bigger than I could conceive. It didn’t feel like a safe place to be and yet I could sense the call from the depths that beckoned the divers onward.

When I take the time to sit in silence. Time enough for the depth of my own soul and the depth of God’s being to open up to each other, I get the same feeling. It’s an encounter with something unimaginably vast that teems with life unknown to me. It’s easy to mask this fear with words and clever doctrines about god but waiting in silent stillness I am swallowed up by mystery. Over millennia wise men and women have found ways that can help us to navigate these depths. If we listen to them: the mystics, the contemplatives and the deep pray-ers of an ancient tradition, we can begin to find these deeper paths.

The labyrinth stencil in this painting is one such path. It is a design that appears scratched in stone from thousands of years past and continues to enable people to pray today. Is it a labyrinth, or is it a fingerprint? Mine is different to yours, my path is different to yours. But if we heed that beckoning from the deep, dark blue, as we listen to the wisdom of those who have gone before us and who have had the courage to embark on the journey into mystery, we will find our way.

PRINTS FOR SALE

A limited edition series of A3 size high quality art prints of these are available for purchase signed by the artist. All profits from the sale of prints will go towards funding the creative at 35 Chapel Walk, Sheffield.

Prices: £30 per print or £200 for the full set of 7. This is a strictly limited edition of 25 prints for each painting.

If you are interested in purchasing prints then please email me: rjstott@hotmail.co.uk

In addition the framed original paintings are for sale at £425 each.

All views on this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Methodist Church

This is the sixth in a series of 7 paintings I have made for Methodist Conference 2016, an introduction to the series can be found here.

With the previous painting in this series I wrestled with how we can live positively in a liberating manner when we are caught up in the unjust systems that hold sway in the world. This image points us towards one aspect of the answer to that question…

We do not need to wrestle with this alone, we do not need to grieve alone, and we do not need to stand alone: this is an invitation to walk forward together.

The stencil image is taken from Rublev’s icon of the Trinity . Created in the 15^th century this icon invites us to participate in the community that is at the heart of who God is. It is a deep and powerful icon that I would strongly recommend taking time to pray and meditate with.

For me, using a spray paint stencil to depict a sacred image such as this liberates the piece from its usual context. No longer confined to sumptuous Churches with incense heavy in the air the image roams free. The black spray paint is thick and oily without the luminosity of the carefully and prayerfully painted icon, it can appear in an instant. An illicit image; the stencil could be found on a city back street or an abandoned building or appear overnight on the outside of a church building to be scrubbed off or painted over because it’s not in the right place and the powers that be don’t have control over it.

And from this image, where the sacred is displaced beyond the protective walls of the institution, community flows. The rich and complex spectrum of humanity walks together.

PRINTS FOR SALE

A limited edition series of A3 size high quality art prints of these are available for purchase signed by the artist. All profits from the sale of prints will go towards funding the creative at 35 Chapel Walk, Sheffield.

Prices: £30 per print or £200 for the full set of 7. This is a strictly limited edition of 25 prints for each painting.

If you are interested in purchasing prints then please email me: rjstott@hotmail.co.uk

In addition the framed original paintings are for sale at £425 each.

All views on this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Methodist Church

This is the fifth in a series of 7 paintings I have made for Methodist Conference 2016, an introduction to the series can be found here.

Of all the themes I was invited to explore for this series of paintings this is the one I approached with the most trepidation. I was asked to make a painting exploring the experience of asylum seekers in the world today.

Some issues feel too big and are so overwhelming that my temptation is to turn away and do anything to distract myself from the responsibility we all share in the way our increasingly interconnected world crushes those least able to speak out.  We live at a time where 1 in every 122 people in the world is a refugee or is internally displaced and more than 3,700 refugees are thought to have died crossing the Mediterranean in 2015.

I don’t even know where to begin with this abhorrent story of our planet. This is why I’m grateful for the likes of Rachel Lampard, Vice President of the Methodist Church and her call to engage not in the sentimental manner of a hand wringing do-gooder, but with a strong, focussed and informed approach that respects all human beings as people to work alongside and not objects for us to do things to. I commend her speech to the Methodist Conference this year that you can read here.

There are cogwheels in this image, the mechanisms of injustice that I am a part of. In the way I live, in the products I buy, in my silence and inaction I am complicit in systems that oppress the poorest in our world, that lead to the displacement of humanity from their homes. I am complicit in racist systems and systems that discriminate against those who are disabled. The complex web of interconnections in the world mean that my actions and your actions have consequences that ripple across continents.

When faced with the enormity of our responsibility if we don’t succumb to the temptation to disengage and look the other way and have the courage to face the grief and pain of this world how can we avoid being overwhelmed by hopelessness? It’s too big for us.

I’ve come away from making these paintings realising that I know less than I thought I knew when I started; art is at its best when it opens up a journey into not-knowing. This is one more question I don’t know the answer to. But I suspect the answer does lie somewhere in the interplay between holiness and justice. When we find for ourselves a spirituality that sustains us and calls us to a deep embracing of the world’s grief then I sense that this gives us the wisdom, energy and (above all) love to enable us to live in such a way that the ripples we send out through the international web of interrelationships result in liberation rather than oppression.

In this image the wheels are cogs that crush and consume, we need wisdom and courage to live in such a way that we are not simply one more cog in the mechanisms of injustice but become the wedge, even the small piece of grit, which disrupts the whole machine.

PRINTS FOR SALE

A limited edition series of A3 size high quality art prints of these are available for purchase signed by the artist. All profits from the sale of prints will go towards funding the creative at 35 Chapel Walk, Sheffield.

Prices: £30 per print or £200 for the full set of 7. This is a strictly limited edition of 25 prints for each painting.

If you are interested in purchasing prints then please email me: rjstott@hotmail.co.uk

In addition the framed original paintings are for sale at £425 each.

All views on this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Methodist Church

This is the fourth in a series of 7 paintings I have made for Methodist Conference 2016, an introduction to the series can be found here.

Colour plays an important role in the way that this series of paintings work together. Viewed together the colours progress from cool blues in the outside images through progressively warmer browns and greys to this central image that blossoms with red/orange.

As a painter it’s a useful discipline to work with a limited palette, often one I find hard to keep to. As a painting progresses and I get carried away I reach for tubes of colour from across the spectrum and my initial resolve to be restrained evaporates. But, if I can keep my nerve and stick tightly to three or four initial pigments then this unifies an image and helps to convey a particular mood. You can see this in my painting Slab (2015) where I restricted my palette to Titanium white and Paynes grey, towards the end I had to grit my teeth to resist the urge of adding a few strokes of a bright colour and now I think the painting is stronger for it.

For this central image I wanted to portray Jesus, which is always tricky. The works that I have done in the past for which I have received the most challenge and criticism have been paintings where I have attempted to express my experience of Christ. Our experiences differ; that is to be expected and celebrated. In my view the Methodist Church is at her strongest when we can uphold a broad spectrum of theologies and approaches to Christ whilst also standing together; knowing that we all see and experience in part and can learn from each other as we tell our stories together.

This image, at the apex of the series of paintings, blooms with warmth and light. The gentle and playful breath of a child at once destroys the dandelion clock but in so doing the seedhead achieves its purpose. Light and nimble in the breeze, the seeds find their way at the mercy of unseen currents in the air and eventually some come to rest on fertile ground. Where they fall they grow as weeds unbidden, pushing strong through the cracks in concrete or besmirching a pristine lawn with a bright yellow circle. This is a plant that acts as a mischievous trickster it is uncontrollable and irritating and yet beautiful when seen with the right eyes.

Over the painting I lay a stencil taken from a detail of an icon of the sacred heart of Christ. A heart offered with open hands that bleeds and suffers whilst radiating love.

Painting is for me a way to pray and the work that emerges is a sacrament* of my time in that quiet, sacred place. As I step back from the finished piece I realise that I set out to create a picture of Jesus and I do see Christ here: in the child, in the breath, in the disintegrating seedhead, and in the open hands offering a wounded heart.

*A sacrament is a physical outward sign of an inner, intangible experience.

PRINTS FOR SALE

A limited edition series of A3 size high quality art prints of these are available for purchase signed by the artist. All profits from the sale of prints will go towards funding the creative at 35 Chapel Walk, Sheffield.

Prices: £30 per print or £200 for the full set of 7. This is a strictly limited edition of 25 prints for each painting.

If you are interested in purchasing prints then please email me: rjstott@hotmail.co.uk

In addition the framed original paintings are for sale at £425 each.

All views on this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Methodist Church