Passio 1

Introduction

​My introduction proper to the art world came to me as an epiphany, a revelation. In my mid-20s I found myself in Madrid for a month so I decided to have a look round the Museo Nacional del Prado. There was little sophistication or formal training in my understanding of the Western art world but I was at the very least aware that the Spanish produced great art and I’d begun collecting postcards of religious art from my European travels, my own little portable gallery. Just before arriving at the Prado museum I found a smaller museum, more of a white cube. I don’t even know if it’s still there. It was open and showing work by Picasso. When in Spain... On the left as you entered the gallery I came upon a number of small oil paintings exhibited on a wall which I immediately recognised as the series La Femme qui Pleure (The Weeping Woman) painted by Picasso in 1937 in response to the atrocities of the Guernica bombings during the Civil War. These variations on a theme were fascinating and kept me occupied for some time but what I failed to notice was the actual painting, Guernica itself, high up on the wall to my right. How I missed a canvas of 11 ft 5 inches by 25 ft 6 I will never know but there it was, a masterful portrayal of suffering - the gored horse, a bull, screaming women, a dead baby, a dismembered soldier and the flames. As a young man already sensitised to the world of suffering, evil and transcendence through both Christian and Eastern spirituality I had to sit down and process the impact of this work. How could paint on a canvas say so much about human experience? 

A short walk took me to the Prado with a left turn into the main entrance and there it was. I actually lost my footing and struggled to breathe. Not only do they produce great art but the Spanish know a thing or two about curating because facing me as I entered the museum was the Christ Crucified by Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez. So there he was, Christ hanging off the cross, eyes down. I felt as if at any moment he would raise his head, look me in the eyes and claim yet another disciple. I have a postcard of the painting in my studio and still contemplate it waiting for Jesus to look up and smile. It’s the sheer scale of the painting that stops you in your stride because at 249 cm × 170 cm it’s bigger than any human, larger than a slab of plasterboard, the size of a barn door. I have never been struck so profoundly by a work of art than I was that day in Madrid. My Damascene moment.

Before me lay the whole of Spanish history, the counter-reformation, the Hapsburgs, a massive slice of European history in itself, all distilled into a painting. And there also was the passion that I saw in Picasso’s Guernica. We must of course understand the word passion here in it original meaning, originating from the Latin passio which means suffering or endurance, applied from the beginning to the very suffering of Christ on the cross. Over time the word has become conflated with the desires of romantic love (which of course has its fair share of suffering). I ended my day trip by visiting the section devoted to Goya. Yet more suffering, more questions than answers.

The questions raised by these encounters have remained with me as has the notion of what we hold to be sacred or more specifically the sacrosanct which I take to mean something you don’t touch or interfere with. Allied to this is the question of how we overcome or transcend suffering, pain or violence done by us to others or by others to us or, to finally get to the point, violence done to the earth itself. Like it or not this is where we’ve been since we evolved as anatomically modern humans and this is crucially and significantly where we are with respect to our custodianship of the planet.