A monograph would be needed to convey all the
subtleties of Stanley's use of words like joy, love, intimacy, peace, happy,
auspicious, perfection or
special meanings when in
up-in-heaven or metaphysical mode.
Briefly, joy, happy, peace and
auspicious are linked to the extent that they reflect the sense
of exultation which stimulated and accompanied Stanley's moments of
greatest artistic creativity. They invariably postulated a
mysterious isolation from the pressures of everyday existence and
usually implied a sense of mental assurance, as when hand-holding in childhood or
feeling a bird-in-the-nest
security. Their effect could transform him into a walking altar of praise.
The source of such exultations, the concomitant of Stanley's happiness, has been described by
philosophers from the time of Democritus, half a millennium before the
coming of
Christianity, who saw it as mankind's 'ethical goal' (a condition he
derived from the 'soul's freedom from disturbance'), to the biblical
concept of the 'peace which passeth all understanding', to the
exhortations of modern psychology. Just as a plant can be said to be in
a state of 'happiness' when its growing conditions permit it to find
its true natural identity by achieving its maximum perfection, so in
Stanley's more metaphysical interpretation, we as humans enjoy happiness when we achieve a perfection of our own, and so
enter our true or universal (spiritual?)
identity.
Phrases in The Lovers in
which Stanley describes the painting as restoring for him items such as
the teapot and the cabbage-leaves should not be taken to mean that he
necessarily wished to see them in their pristine form. In fact he
was already 'seeing' them in their original form in his mind's eye
because they were memories of times or events in which he recalled them
having been used. By restore,
it is more likely that Stanley means he was giving them back their
original nature and function, for he had an Emersonian
conviction that
everything reached its
most perfect form when functioning to its truest purpose.
His entire art, observed and visionary, was largely dedicated to
registering things, persons or events in the most perfect form his
contemplation - a
function of love - could devise.
In effect he was resurrecting
them into the perfection
they would have had
in the symbolism of the Garden of Eden. Thus for
Stanley each successful painting recreated through love its subject as
a perfection
set in a location (often
recalled from his early Cookham years) which he once knew as a 'paradise' and so could now render as
a metaphorical Garden of Eden.
In exploring these 'paradise images' Stanley was discovering the
sources of the special meanings
so significant to him. If his successful visionary paintings were
personal resurrections,
those he named specifically as Resurrections
- the Cookham Resurrection, or
the Port Glasgow Resurrections,
for example - reveal the comprehensions
which had special meanings
for him because they provided answers - redemptions - to the more
troubling of his disturbers of
the peace. Through these redemptions
he could reach the peace and
happiness so essential to
his continued creativity.
His word intimacy too
comprised more than a social or sexual relationship. It encompassed his
and his wife Hilda's ongoing exploration of the quality of duality in existence - the
male-female, the bi-polarity of animal life. Only when the two
individual elements are successfully conjoined to provide a state of unity reflecting their intimacy
can creativity - artistic or physical - take place. The definition is
significant in that it formed the basis of the counterpoint system which so much
of
Stanley's visionary art was constructed.
Love
Perhaps the most difficult to grasp was Stanley's meaning of the word love. It had little to do
with modern romantic or sentimental usage. At first it seems
to have
been used to describe his feelings of heightened self-identification
with whatever around him gradually came into his consciousness and
filled a missing gap or, as he put it, every time we appreciate something it
is a recognition of something in ourselves. The effect for him
was that the loved object (it
was not necessarily a person, it could be a thing or even a sensation)
had responded to his love and
had thereby restored to him a part of himself which he had not
previously recognised existed. It had expanded his comprehension
and carried him a little deeper into the universal consciousness. It
was to him a mysterious manifestation of the creative operation of
something beyond him which he came to define as
the Love of God (i.e. the Love from
God), as it knitted each personal moment or experience of Love towards the totality he
called perfection, the ancient spiritual or metaphysical
longing of mankind to be at one with the universe.
By 1934 the association between Stanley's
interpretations of Love
and God had become God is Love,
a text from the gospel of St John which he used as the title for his entry in Sermons
by Artists, a 1934
publication by The Golden Cockerel
Press. One can
only conjecture the depths of Stanley's meaning - perhaps that we should recognise and honour a creative element in the march of evolution - Bergson's élan
vital? - as an entity which
mankind has always viewed with awe, the basis of religious thought, and
perhaps the ultimate neurological mystery of the human mind which may for ever defy analysis by
logical consciousness. The
association was repeated again
by Stanley in his subsequent 'mantra' as Love
(or religion, I don't mind) =
happiness = gratitude = aspiration = passion = creative power.
As Professor Nigel
Rapport suggests, his [Stanley's] meaning of
love - ambitious,
arrogant, certain, strange - might sit uneasily alongside English
politeness and reserve, but one day
it would be acclaimed the truth.