Last week I wrote about Bodysgallen, a country house in the Conway Valley in North Wales. Here are some photos of somewhere I visited on the same day further inland on the same river valley. It is Bodnant Garden. The mountains you see in the distance are the Snowodonia range, the highest in England and Wales. I visited earlier this year in May and have just been working outside in my garden here in New England. I was looking for some inspiration to remind of the ideal I am aiming for. So here are some photographs of the National Trust property. As you will see the planting is in the traditional British style of drifts of colour and lots of herbacious borders – in the manner of Gertrude Jeckyll. I really can’t think of much more to say other than please just enjoy the photos and to ask, why can’t we have a few more gardens like this over here in the US?

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Here is a great story of how beauty really can change the world. A low-income housing complex in Boston has been transformed, through the work of its residents, into a place of beauty and dignity. It started with one or two people deciding to plant the little plots of land in front of their houses, then others seeing what was going on and starting to do the same. And according to the delighted director of the complex, who has just been watching this happen over the last year or so, it has brought benefits to the community as a whole that one just wouldn’t have imagined. I have written before about the importance of the pleasure of gardening and as the garden  as a symbol of the culture of life in which man’s harmonious work with nature raises it up beyond its natural state. But here is a story of how there is an underlying truth to this that really does affect people’s lives for the good; we are talking here of people who, bar one, have never read my blog and are not likely to. There are no Chelsea Garden Show gold medal winners. This is just everyone mucking in and having a go.

I heard about this from Nancy Feeman, who is working with me and a band of enthusiastic students to establish an English style garden at a farmhouse in Groton, Massachusetts.  The farm on which this stands will, once the money is raised for building, be the site for the new campus for Thomas More College.…

The Office of Readings for July 30th, the Feast of St Peter Chrysologus contains the following passage from one of his sermons: ‘Man, why do you have so low an opinion of yourself, when you are so precious to God?…Has not the household of the whole universe which you see been made for you? For you light is produced to dispel the surrounding darkness; for you the night is regulated; for you the day is measured out; for you the sky shines with the varied brilliance of sun, moon and stars; for you the earth is embroidered with flowers, groves and fruit; for you is created a beautiful, well-ordered and marvellous multitude of living things, in the air, in the fields, in the water, lest a gloomy wilderness upset the joy of the world.’He was writing in first half of the 5th century AD. This idea that the universe is made for man to see, and its corollarary, that man is made to see it governs how we paint in the naturalistic artistic traditions. The stylistic elements of baroque naturalism are generated from an analysis of how we observe the natural world and how this manner of observation of the beauty of creation, leads us to give praise to the Creator. If the work of man, in this case a painting, participates in the beauty of the cosmos then it too will raise the hearts and souls of those who see it to God through its beauty.…

And how a ‘marvel of Renaissance verse’ describes precisely this, by Corey French. This article started out as a simple description of a country house that I visited on a recent trip to Britain. It is in North Wales and is called Bodysgallen Hall.  I was introduced to the house by a friend who took me there for the very British event of afternoon tea. What a delight that was!

A number of things struck me about it. First was the harmony between house and grounds and the surrounding countryside. The gardens are more formally laid out close to the house, then they change into the less formal English cottage style and planting (a la Gertrude Jeckyll) and then into managed woods. Even the vegetable garden was arranged in an ordered and beautiful fashion, everything in its proper place. From the grounds we could see  and sheep fells on the Welsh mountains in the distance, beyond the Conway valley.

Second, is that every aspect of what we see is man made. There is no part that has not been shaped by the activity of man. This is not the untamed beauty of nature, but something even greater: nature conforming to a higher order. It has been raised up by the work of man.

Another aspect of note is the date in which the house was made. Or rather, dates. The various wings of the house were built over centuries ranging from the 17th to the 19th centuries.…

Here is some sculpture from France dating from the early 16th century. It is called The Burial of Jesus and is attributed to a sculptor who until I saw these I had not heard of called Froc-Robert. They are in the Cathedral of Saint-Corentin in the Region of Brittany. I am told that they are made from limestone although I am not certain of this, and because they are polychrome, it is difficult to tell from the photos.

At a personal level I love the fact that they are highly coloured. So here’s a request for all sculptors and patrons out there: can we work to reclaim polychrome for the liturgical traditions? At the moment it conjures images of sentimental kitsch plastic figurines in a Catholic gift shop? The gothic, as exemplified here, and the baroque (I’m thinking here of Spanish wood carvers such as Alonso Cano) demonstrate that it needn’t be so.

If we were to colour, we have to work even harder to avoid sentimentality in the style. So how might we go about learning to sculpt in, for example, this late gothic style. One answer is to go and apprentice yourself to a master sculptor who carves in this style. If we were talking about painting, the answer would be to go through a long training of imitation. For the skilled painter whose eye and skills are already developed and has the ability to analyse well what he is seeing then he might be able to adopt a chosen style by looking carefully and working out some working principles to guide him.…

One of the tasks that those who are interested in cultural renewal have to face today is one of reawakening to the symbolism of the cosmos. This faculty can be stimulated, I believe, by incorporating a language of symbolism into art. I have written before of how when painting today, the artist has to decide on a case by case basis which symbols to revive and which to ignore (see Pelican Brief – Should We Aim to Revive All Christian Symbols of Sacred Art). A symbol must speak to those who are meant to see it and some symbols are so rooted in a culture that is bound to a different time and place that it is unlikely ever to communicate much to any nowadays but learned art historians.

The symbols that seem most prevelant and useful are those that are based on scripture or tradition and furthermore speak naturally of what they are trying to convey. These are the ones that I tend to focus on. So while the halo represents the uncreated light of sanctity it is not an arbitary symbol. It is as much a stylised representation of light eminating from the person.

In contrast colour symbolism is more arbitrary. In fact no strict colour code of symbolism for any of the liturgical traditions, including even iconography (perhaps surprisingly). That is not to say that artists have not chosen colours in order convey spiritual meanings, and temporary trends can develop when artists are influenced by others in their choice.…

This is the title of a satirical song written by Noel Coward, the English. In describing the self-indulgent behaviour of a small number of very rich in the 1920s, he seems to predict whole course of the 20th century in three verses and a chorus with an accuracy that makes one shudder.

When writing an article about new numbers of Brits going walking in Spain, I quoted the title of another of his songs, Mad Dogs and Englishmen Go Out in the Midday Sun. As I was trawling around for the link, YouTube offered a series of other Noel Coward performances and curiosity took my cursor to this one.

In this song, Coward is brilliantly making fun of the hedonism of the upper classes in 1927. In his characteristically English and erudite way, he describes how the adults behave like children right through middle age and and on to old age.

The pleasures that once were heaven, look silly at sixty-seven,

Does it amuse the tiny mites, to see their parents high as kites?

One day you’ll clench your tiny fists, and murder your psychiatrists’

He describes excessive drinking, drug taking (he lists the drugs), plastic surgery, undignified drunken ‘jiving’ by the elderly trying to stay young, people seeking distraction through radio and television in order to avoid the responsibilities of life and then trying to assuage their consciences by running to the psychiatrist’s chair. My guess is that this song was popular at the time because those to whom he refers would take a perverse pride in being wealthy enough not to have to behave like responsible adults; and then many of the rest of the population would genuinely like the idea of poking fun at wealthy for their childishness.…

Here is a second in a series about late gothic sculpture. This one is written by Dr Christopher Blum and appears in Crisis Magazine (http://www.crisismagazine.com). You can find the article itself here.

One of the questions that I always think about as an artist when I see work that I enjoy is how could we train artists today to work in a similar way today. How does an artist learn to make this style his natural modus operandus. Dr Blum is a historian and his interest is as much on the spirit of the times as the technical skill of the artist. He describes the training and working environment that Riemenschnieder experienced, and focussed particularly on his membership of his town’s Guild of St Luke. When guilds are mentioned nowadays there tend to be two reactions. For some it conjures up images of a culturally rich past that we hardly dare dream of emulating today. For others, they are professional organisations that flourished by imposing restrictive trade practices, rather like strident medieval trade union. For my own part, I prefer to put aside the possible negative aspects of the economic organisation of the guilds, and focus on how these associations preserved the attitude of tradition by preserving skills and creating structured environment to train apprentices and which directed their activities activities to the common good. Here is an article that has some thoughts about how the guilds might be a model for the teaching of practical skills today.…

Over the summer, I read the Hymns on Paradise written by St Ephrem the Syrian. Ephrem is a 4th century saint who lived in modern day Turkey and wrote in Syriac. Although much of what he wrote is liturgical – in the form of hymns, it is theologically rich. There were two reasons why I read this. The first was at the suggestion of Dr William Fahey, who told me that Ephrem described the visual appearance of Adam and Eve both before and after the Fall. This was of interest to me because in his Theology of the Body, John Paul II asked artists to portray man in the manner of Adam and Eve prior to the Fall – ‘naked without shame’ – in order to reveal human sexuality as gift, that is, an ordered picture of human sexuality. In order to be able to do this, I wanted to do some reasearch to see what the Church Fathers had to say on what Original Man (ie man before the Fall) looked like. In the Christian tradition, we have iconographic art which portrays mankind redeemed and in heaven (Eschatological Man), and the baroque, which shows fallen man (Historical Man) but we have no fully formed tradition in which the form and theology are integrated to portray Original Man and so no visual vocabulary to draw on in order to paint him.

The desire to read him was reinforced recently on my trip to Spain, when I read Pope Benedict’s Wednesday address on St Ephrem, a Doctor of the Church, as part of my own personal ‘Office of Readings’ in the morning (I have written about this here).…

When I did my summer trip, after seeing my parents in Spain I went to stay in England and the area where I grew up (a little town near Chester called Neston). As well as seeing friends and family there I wanted to re-establish my connection with the familiar places and especially the walks and the countryside that I remembered from when I lived there (not all that long ago – I don’t want to sound too whistfully romantic here!). Neston is near the border with Wales, which is rural and hilly.

Just to give you a sense of the place, I thought I would post some photos of one of these walks; but also there are interesting parallels here between this walk and one that I did in Spain (I wrote about this in an article posted on 6th July). First is the existence of laws of ‘right to roam’ and ‘public right of way’ on private land. In the UK there are public footpaths across farmland, which require the farmer to maintain for the common good. Second and even more specifically, for part of this walk, one of the reasons for this public access is that we can follow the line of an old aqueduct. The idea of the common good and access to private land here.

The Spanish aqueduct  was built by the Moors, this one was built by the Romans. The Spanish one was in a good state of repair and still used to irrigate olive groves, this has fallen into disrepair and is now a toepath along a muddy ditch in the woods because it is not needed for water any more.…