In annotations to his unfinished painting of Christ
Preaching at
Cookham Regatta, which is normally on view at the
Stanley Spencer Gallery in Cookham,
Stanley provided insight to the meaning he came to
attach to his up-in-heaven or metaphysical use of the
word identity.
The figures in the painting
represent locals - the gentry in their punts and the villagers on the
bank - together with holidaymakers from London enjoying
a day out at the Regatta of his youth.
Stanley's point is that the happiness of the
occasion is a
reflection, an encapsulation, of the message Christ is proclaiming from
his
punt (for which Stanley used the old horse-ferry barge made derelict
by the 1860's building of Cookham Bridge.) In the glow of Christ's
message, everyone in the painting, whatever their individual outlook or
social
class, is in such a state of true happiness that they are no longer
in their everyday down-to-earth identities, but are passing into their
perfection, their true
universality as human beings - their spiritual identity - and so
are
uplifted from the actuality in which Stanley depicts them into forms (shapes)
in which they are in his 'up-in-heaven'. Here, for
example, he refers to his 'upper-class' ladies in their punts:
They are
nearly all middle-aged ladies and all either asleep or nearly
so. They have had a tiring day dismissing servants, and they are all
going
bye-byes under a shared blanket. Ah, then my Puck magic gets to work.
The
Christ-talk [Stanley's concept of
the dominance of love in
transforming
the down-to-earth to its up-in-heaven] o'ercrows all those
bothersome things,
and they sleep their way into this critical no-servant-dismissing joy
and
peace. I don't love them in their hoity-toity-ness. I love them because
I know this is not them at all and that they are just as lovable as the
servants they dismiss, and that's saying a lot! Bringing them to the
Regatta,
I so to speak ensnare them and bring them to my joy, which in this
painting
is Christ's joy.
The
visuals Stanley uses might appear, as in many of his visionary
paintings, to depict the actualities which he remembered, but he is no
longer 'seeing' them in their actuality. They now provide for him that happy or enlightened state of
metaphysical existence he defines as heaven.
The Regatta scene represents for him an evocation of his
youthful Cookham paradise,
as powerful and as meaningful in recollection at the close of his life
as
was the churchyard of The
Cookham Resurrection of the 1920s. In that painting he
took into his metaphysical perfection
the familiar friends and acquaintances of those days. Now, in his
1950s Christ Preaching at Cookham Regatta, he
embraces into their metaphysical perfection
the entire social
hierarchy of his remembered village.