When then is the distinction between such paintings and his visionary work? Why were the latter more significant for him? Essentially it was a question of how fully he could join himself to whatever he was painting. In observed painting, even the most sympathetic, he was not able wholly to amalgamate himself with his subject: ‘It is strange that I feel so “lonely” when I draw from nature, but it is because no sort of spiritual activity comes into the business at all – it’s this identity business,’ he was later to write.8 Place became ecstatic for him when it became wholly subjective: ‘It must be remembered that whatsoever I talk about is the whole thing, by which I mean that if I refer to a place, I am talking of a place plus myself plus all associating matters of personal characteristics respecting myself.’9 He saw it through a filter of personal associations which transfigured it into metaphysical meaning.
But when it came to the visionary paintings this raised a pictorial problem: ‘I need people in my pictures as I need them in my life. A place is incomplete without a person. A person is a place’s fulfilment as a place is a person’s.’10 But figures depicted in the same way as he portrayed the detail of merely observed places or objects would destroy the stasis, even when his feelings about the figures made them its fulfilment. They could not be shown in that way, even when they were derived from people he knew and were associated with the place.
Stanley’s solution was not to paint the detail in such pictures as it could be observed. The places would be real, but not painted objectively. Nor would figures: they could be real persons but would emerge from his composition in a transfigured form. Both place and people would be reconstructed visually out of his metaphysical relationship with them, after contemplation and invariably in the quiet of a studio. Thus when Stanley paints visionary effusions he is not painting a real place, even though he makes use of one; he is not painting real people, even though he is using them; he is not even painting his feelings about both, though he is making use of them. He is painting a transfiguration of experience. *
This did not mean that he painted such pictures with less meticulousness than he painted his observed scenes. On the contrary, the transfiguration involved him in the most exact choices, for it demanded forms of expression which to the untutored eye can appear to be distorted. If he had to use such distortion of detail, then it had to be in tune with the emotional content of the whole. The balancing act in this process made composition frequently an agony, especially in his novitiate years:
I have [only] as yet been able to see something I want to write or paint in a disarranged state. It is as if I had seen a box of chessmen and had no idea of how or in what order they were to be placed. But I would know if a domino or some draughts got into the box that they had nothing to do with the chess pieces. I know to the last detail what does belong to the game. I only don’t know yet the order. It is a big ‘only’. I have noted in all my various desires that they have a relationship to each other and that they or many of them, come together to suggest some clue as to what their final form will be. This final something, the thing that ecstasy is about, God alone can give the order and reveal the design.13
His own expressed distinction between his observed and visionary paintings was that the observed paintings ‘had no memory-feeling’. Memory-feeling was the mainspring of transfiguration. Only when memory-feelings crystallized as moments of metaphysical illumination would people and places merge for Stanley. Then the figures would become personifications, incarnations, of experience through which Stanley strove to approach the meaning by restoring the experience. But the miracle to Stanley was that the attempt to capture the illumination, to approach the meaning, enabled him to compose a work of art based on the sensation of the originating experience but in an imagery which transfigured it and gave him a joy and happiness he could find in no other way. It is a true source of art: certainly of Stanley’s art.
‘What do they mean by religious art? It is an absurdity. How can you make religious art one day and another kind the next?’
Picasso1
MYSTICISM? EXORCISM? ESCAPISM? SUBLIMATION? Stanley’s astonishing access to the disjointed memory-feelings of his subconscious, and his creative ability to associate them, in whatever random or involuntary way they might have come to him, into patterns of meaning – paintings – which constructed for him a metaphysical world alternative to the physical world, all these could fascinate a psychologist: as in fact they were to do in later life. Through his midwifery of the metaphysical from the physical, his redemption, Stanley was evolving a unique form of expression, a language.
Modernism was arriving, its battle-cry ‘directness is all’. Directness was to be achieved by dismembering an object, event or sensation into its apprehended constituents and then clinically and unsentimentally reassembling them into a taut form which, however surprising it might at first appear, was to the artist more truthful in re-fashioning the essence of the original than contemporary representational art could offer.
It may seem a far cry to a puzzled young painter cloistered in an English village. But the link existed. Picasso’s exploration of cubism remained as solidly based on real objects as Stanley’s compositions did on places. Proust’s happiness in his cobbles2 was echoed in that of Gwen in hers, his mysterious feelings about his hawthorn blossom by Stanley’s for his Cookham wildflowers.* James Joyce exactly recalling sensation, even of the cloacal, parallels Stanley sitting seemingly for hours on the outside loo at Fernlea with a worm or newt on his bare thigh to relish its movement against his skin; a habit his family, awaiting their turn, found infuriating. D. H. Lawrence, celebrating sexuality, presages Stanley having an ‘interesting discussion’ with young Peggy Hatch ‘on the relative sizes of our legs just above the knee, but only just above’,4 or tentatively feeling the penis of a boyhood companion and wondering at its softness,* or in the quiet of Wistaria Cottage imagining a girl ‘squatting’ before him, then feeling a ‘warm glow’ at the spectacle of the uncovered legs of girls as they played in the straw, or momentarily breathless at the sight of a girl bending to retrieve a ball through railings.6 For each artist, the minutiae of physical sensation demanded a place in the totality of experience, even if for Stanley their expression in pencil or paint was still hesitantly circumscribed.
The parallels cannot be pushed too far. Modernism was more a state of mind than a specific movement. In the best of it can be found the sense of awe without which no artist can accomplish – Picasso shouting from his studio, ‘I am God! I am God!’ The disjunctions of Joyce’s Ulysses or Eliot’s The Waste Land parallel the many-layered but essentially unified compositions of Stanley’s The Nativity or of The Centurion’s Servant or of the many visionary paintings to come. The awe, the impetus to truth, is ‘spiritual’, ‘religious’. It pervades the work of the great modernists, even though many rejected canonical faith; as did Stanley in liturgical literalness. But ‘spiritual’ and ‘religious’ it remained for him, and we must continue to use his adjectives in that sense.
If Stanley’s interpretation of Christian tradition seems sometimes less than orthodox, he saw no point in divesting his art of its power. When such a magnificent paradigm lay at hand, one with which he was familiar from childhood, why squander its resources in crafting, as did so many