This is the seventh in a series of 7 paintings I have made for Methodist Conference 2016, an introduction to the series can be found here.

This series of paintings began in cool blues, it moved with growing warmth to the central image of a heart offered in love that erupted with red fire and now, in the final piece, back to blue. With the ebb and flow of warmth and colour I hope we are changed by the journey.

On the Sinai coast of Egypt, where the desert meets the sea, the waters teem with life. The coral reefs host strange and beautiful creatures. I travelled along the track north from Dahab in the back of a pick up truck, dusty and clinging tight to the hot metal. We came to a lone building by the water, it was closed and shuttered tight with an old wheel chair on its veranda. This was a medical centre by the popular diving site called the Blue Hole.

The shallow reefs mean that the sea is turquoise/white as you step into it, swimming out further the blue hole opens up. A sink hole in the reef that suddenly drops away to the depth of 100 metres. I gasped as I swam over the precipice moving from a sea bed close enough to touch to oblivion. In the centre of the circle free divers, who swim deep with one breath, anchored themselves to a floating buoy before taking their turn to plummet. The water is as clear as air but the depth of the hole is fathomless and as they swam down they disappeared into the deepest blue I’ve ever seen.

Swimming over the sinkhole I felt fear: an awe and trepidation at encountering something so much bigger than I could conceive. It didn’t feel like a safe place to be and yet I could sense the call from the depths that beckoned the divers onward.

When I take the time to sit in silence. Time enough for the depth of my own soul and the depth of God’s being to open up to each other, I get the same feeling. It’s an encounter with something unimaginably vast that teems with life unknown to me. It’s easy to mask this fear with words and clever doctrines about god but waiting in silent stillness I am swallowed up by mystery. Over millennia wise men and women have found ways that can help us to navigate these depths. If we listen to them: the mystics, the contemplatives and the deep pray-ers of an ancient tradition, we can begin to find these deeper paths.

The labyrinth stencil in this painting is one such path. It is a design that appears scratched in stone from thousands of years past and continues to enable people to pray today. Is it a labyrinth, or is it a fingerprint? Mine is different to yours, my path is different to yours. But if we heed that beckoning from the deep, dark blue, as we listen to the wisdom of those who have gone before us and who have had the courage to embark on the journey into mystery, we will find our way.

PRINTS FOR SALE

A limited edition series of A3 size high quality art prints of these are available for purchase signed by the artist. All profits from the sale of prints will go towards funding the creative at 35 Chapel Walk, Sheffield.

Prices: £30 per print or £200 for the full set of 7. This is a strictly limited edition of 25 prints for each painting.

If you are interested in purchasing prints then please email me: rjstott@hotmail.co.uk

In addition the framed original paintings are for sale at £425 each.

All views on this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Methodist Church

This is the sixth in a series of 7 paintings I have made for Methodist Conference 2016, an introduction to the series can be found here.

With the previous painting in this series I wrestled with how we can live positively in a liberating manner when we are caught up in the unjust systems that hold sway in the world. This image points us towards one aspect of the answer to that question…

We do not need to wrestle with this alone, we do not need to grieve alone, and we do not need to stand alone: this is an invitation to walk forward together.

The stencil image is taken from Rublev’s icon of the Trinity . Created in the 15^th century this icon invites us to participate in the community that is at the heart of who God is. It is a deep and powerful icon that I would strongly recommend taking time to pray and meditate with.

For me, using a spray paint stencil to depict a sacred image such as this liberates the piece from its usual context. No longer confined to sumptuous Churches with incense heavy in the air the image roams free. The black spray paint is thick and oily without the luminosity of the carefully and prayerfully painted icon, it can appear in an instant. An illicit image; the stencil could be found on a city back street or an abandoned building or appear overnight on the outside of a church building to be scrubbed off or painted over because it’s not in the right place and the powers that be don’t have control over it.

And from this image, where the sacred is displaced beyond the protective walls of the institution, community flows. The rich and complex spectrum of humanity walks together.

PRINTS FOR SALE

A limited edition series of A3 size high quality art prints of these are available for purchase signed by the artist. All profits from the sale of prints will go towards funding the creative at 35 Chapel Walk, Sheffield.

Prices: £30 per print or £200 for the full set of 7. This is a strictly limited edition of 25 prints for each painting.

If you are interested in purchasing prints then please email me: rjstott@hotmail.co.uk

In addition the framed original paintings are for sale at £425 each.

All views on this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Methodist Church

This is the fifth in a series of 7 paintings I have made for Methodist Conference 2016, an introduction to the series can be found here.

Of all the themes I was invited to explore for this series of paintings this is the one I approached with the most trepidation. I was asked to make a painting exploring the experience of asylum seekers in the world today.

Some issues feel too big and are so overwhelming that my temptation is to turn away and do anything to distract myself from the responsibility we all share in the way our increasingly interconnected world crushes those least able to speak out.  We live at a time where 1 in every 122 people in the world is a refugee or is internally displaced and more than 3,700 refugees are thought to have died crossing the Mediterranean in 2015.

I don’t even know where to begin with this abhorrent story of our planet. This is why I’m grateful for the likes of Rachel Lampard, Vice President of the Methodist Church and her call to engage not in the sentimental manner of a hand wringing do-gooder, but with a strong, focussed and informed approach that respects all human beings as people to work alongside and not objects for us to do things to. I commend her speech to the Methodist Conference this year that you can read here.

There are cogwheels in this image, the mechanisms of injustice that I am a part of. In the way I live, in the products I buy, in my silence and inaction I am complicit in systems that oppress the poorest in our world, that lead to the displacement of humanity from their homes. I am complicit in racist systems and systems that discriminate against those who are disabled. The complex web of interconnections in the world mean that my actions and your actions have consequences that ripple across continents.

When faced with the enormity of our responsibility if we don’t succumb to the temptation to disengage and look the other way and have the courage to face the grief and pain of this world how can we avoid being overwhelmed by hopelessness? It’s too big for us.

I’ve come away from making these paintings realising that I know less than I thought I knew when I started; art is at its best when it opens up a journey into not-knowing. This is one more question I don’t know the answer to. But I suspect the answer does lie somewhere in the interplay between holiness and justice. When we find for ourselves a spirituality that sustains us and calls us to a deep embracing of the world’s grief then I sense that this gives us the wisdom, energy and (above all) love to enable us to live in such a way that the ripples we send out through the international web of interrelationships result in liberation rather than oppression.

In this image the wheels are cogs that crush and consume, we need wisdom and courage to live in such a way that we are not simply one more cog in the mechanisms of injustice but become the wedge, even the small piece of grit, which disrupts the whole machine.

PRINTS FOR SALE

A limited edition series of A3 size high quality art prints of these are available for purchase signed by the artist. All profits from the sale of prints will go towards funding the creative at 35 Chapel Walk, Sheffield.

Prices: £30 per print or £200 for the full set of 7. This is a strictly limited edition of 25 prints for each painting.

If you are interested in purchasing prints then please email me: rjstott@hotmail.co.uk

In addition the framed original paintings are for sale at £425 each.

All views on this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Methodist Church

This is the fourth in a series of 7 paintings I have made for Methodist Conference 2016, an introduction to the series can be found here.

Colour plays an important role in the way that this series of paintings work together. Viewed together the colours progress from cool blues in the outside images through progressively warmer browns and greys to this central image that blossoms with red/orange.

As a painter it’s a useful discipline to work with a limited palette, often one I find hard to keep to. As a painting progresses and I get carried away I reach for tubes of colour from across the spectrum and my initial resolve to be restrained evaporates. But, if I can keep my nerve and stick tightly to three or four initial pigments then this unifies an image and helps to convey a particular mood. You can see this in my painting Slab (2015) where I restricted my palette to Titanium white and Paynes grey, towards the end I had to grit my teeth to resist the urge of adding a few strokes of a bright colour and now I think the painting is stronger for it.

For this central image I wanted to portray Jesus, which is always tricky. The works that I have done in the past for which I have received the most challenge and criticism have been paintings where I have attempted to express my experience of Christ. Our experiences differ; that is to be expected and celebrated. In my view the Methodist Church is at her strongest when we can uphold a broad spectrum of theologies and approaches to Christ whilst also standing together; knowing that we all see and experience in part and can learn from each other as we tell our stories together.

This image, at the apex of the series of paintings, blooms with warmth and light. The gentle and playful breath of a child at once destroys the dandelion clock but in so doing the seedhead achieves its purpose. Light and nimble in the breeze, the seeds find their way at the mercy of unseen currents in the air and eventually some come to rest on fertile ground. Where they fall they grow as weeds unbidden, pushing strong through the cracks in concrete or besmirching a pristine lawn with a bright yellow circle. This is a plant that acts as a mischievous trickster it is uncontrollable and irritating and yet beautiful when seen with the right eyes.

Over the painting I lay a stencil taken from a detail of an icon of the sacred heart of Christ. A heart offered with open hands that bleeds and suffers whilst radiating love.

Painting is for me a way to pray and the work that emerges is a sacrament* of my time in that quiet, sacred place. As I step back from the finished piece I realise that I set out to create a picture of Jesus and I do see Christ here: in the child, in the breath, in the disintegrating seedhead, and in the open hands offering a wounded heart.

*A sacrament is a physical outward sign of an inner, intangible experience.

PRINTS FOR SALE

A limited edition series of A3 size high quality art prints of these are available for purchase signed by the artist. All profits from the sale of prints will go towards funding the creative at 35 Chapel Walk, Sheffield.

Prices: £30 per print or £200 for the full set of 7. This is a strictly limited edition of 25 prints for each painting.

If you are interested in purchasing prints then please email me: rjstott@hotmail.co.uk

In addition the framed original paintings are for sale at £425 each.

All views on this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Methodist Church

This is the third in a series of 7 paintings I have made for Methodist Conference 2016, an introduction to the series can be found here.

The ideas within many paintings grow and develop over time, the process is so often key to working out where this journey of pigment on paper will lead. But just occasionally an image appears fully formed in my mind. Sometimes in the half awake moments at dawn as the imagination roams free from constraints a picture rises up fully formed from wherever these things come from. This is one such image:

I was asked to make this piece on the theme ‘Holy Ground’ and from there the image of a burning car came to mind. Then, over that I wanted to put a picture of Moses at the burning bush. I’m still not sure what this means. Oftentimes it’s only in retrospect after a few weeks or months the meaning of an image starts to become clearer to me. Conversations with other people reacting to the painting help that process.

A burning car always stands in the wake of a moment of destruction: a drone strike, a hidden bomb or an act of vandalism. There is nothing positive in this, it is a symbol of the will to death and chaos.

Years ago, one bonfire night, I awoke at 3am to a bang and a strange orange light pulsing through the bedroom curtains. Looking out I saw a car aflame on the road outside. Shocked wide awake I ran out, half naked into the November night. The brakes of the car had burnt through and it had rolled in flames slowly down the road to touch my neighbour’s car. I hammered on his door, urgent and alive, shouting to move his vehicle before the fire spread. The fire brigade were called as neighbours congregated on the street in dressing gowns and pyjamas, drawn by the macabre fascination of gazing upon wanton destruction. Glowing warm on our faces, it was a beautiful anarchy.

And Moses shields his eyes from the bush that is ablaze but not consumed by fire. His sandals cast aside because he is on holy ground, a most sacred moment as he hears the voice of God.

A car on fire: is Holy Ground possible in the midst of destruction? I don’t know, I really don’t.

PRINTS FOR SALE

A limited edition series of A3 size high quality art prints of these are available for purchase signed by the artist. All profits from the sale of prints will go towards funding the creative at 35 Chapel Walk, Sheffield.

Prices: £30 per print or £200 for the full set of 7. This is a strictly limited edition of 25 prints for each painting.

If you are interested in purchasing prints then please email me: rjstott@hotmail.co.uk

In addition the framed original paintings are for sale at £425 each.

All views on this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Methodist Church

This is the second in a series of 7 paintings I have made for Methodist Conference 2016, an introduction to the series can be found here.

Most of the paintings in this series were hard to make. Either because of their weighty subject matter or technical issues in making the images work together but this piece was a genuine joy to create. In all painting there needs to be room for playfulness and I had fun with this one: painting an astronaut would rank alongside dinosaurs as one of the most popular subjects of children’s drawings I’m sure.

I love the red lifeline, looping like an umbilical cord through the vacuum and the manner in which the paint drips and flows. There is a balancing act in the process between allowing the paint the freedom to work its own little wonders whilst keeping control of the image as a whole. And when it works there are few things more joyous for me than seeing bright pigments bloom and mingle on the white. Each colour has its own character, not only in the feeling that it evokes but also in the manner in which it interacts with the water and the paper. Some pigments granulate and settle into the texture of the paper, forming lakes, ponds and whole landscapes in a microcosm others feel lighter and bleed with tiny tendrils across the damp substrate. In time we can learn to navigate and negotiate the different ways the paint behaves but still it maintains the capacity to surprise or frustrate.

In this image I sought to explore an experience of awe. Floating high in the expanse of the universe, so small, is perhaps an obvious choice to evoke wonder but well worth it for a chance to paint an astronaut. Then I wanted to overlay another image that worked in tension with the inconceivably large. The symbols, at first glance seem like an alien language but look for a moment and we find they are much closer to home. A small thing, the most mundane and routine thing.

Every painting is an experiment and in this experiment I wanted to see what happens when these two extremes are brought together. And as I contemplate the image that emerges I wonder whether awe can be found in the utterly ordinary.

PRINTS FOR SALE

A limited edition series of A3 size high quality art prints of these are available for purchase signed by the artist. All profits from the sale of prints will go towards funding the creative at 35 Chapel Walk, Sheffield.

Prices: £30 per print or £200 for the full set of 7. This is a strictly limited edition of 25 prints for each painting.

If you are interested in purchasing prints then please email me: rjstott@hotmail.co.uk

In addition the framed original paintings are for sale at £425 each.

All views on this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Methodist Church