Skating, Stanley Spencer and Perceptions of Heaven and Hell

The Christmas tree lights were twinkling and the skaters were already skating at Somerset House when Gillian and I arrived to take a look at the surreal, intricate canvases created by Stanley Spencer for Sandham

Sandham Memorial Chapel

Memorial Chapel to honour the dead.

Inspired by his experience on the Salonica Front and here as a hospital worker caring for the wounded in an asylum used as a hospital, the paintings chart Spencer’s inner and an outer journey mapping the experience of soldiers under fire and in the asylum where the wounded may make their journey of recovery.

I recommend to you the Somerset House Website which gives a good account of this exhibition.  

 As for me I tried to make sense of the profound experience of Spencer’s indosyncratic vision as I sat drinking coffe and  underlining phrases that jumped out at me from the modest clearly written introduction to the exhibition.

Putting these phrases together now I seem to have a ‘found poem’ which more clearly expresses my impression of the exhibition than some immodest critique.

In the exhibition, entitled The Heaven and Hell of War, Spencer’s paintings treat  us to images from the Macedonian Front and a home-front camp and Asylum where the wounded and the mentally ill live  separately but side by side. This seems to me to be a tidy comment on the confusion and pain of war. The underlying meaning of the paintings can apply equally to the soldiers and the insane.

So, with apologies, my ‘found poem’ inspired by Stanley Spencer:

Routine chores.

Tweseldown, the camp near Farnham

The hospital serve a  dual purpose during this war

A bus forces its way through rhododendron bushes and

a newly arrived convoy of soldiers settles in a bleak courtyard

The keys connect the painting to its location

Soldiers struggle to flatten out blankets. They live

repetitive insular lives. This one obsessively scrubs the floor,

sorting through blankets and spotted red handkerchiefs

dreaming of respite from unwelcome chores

painting Iodine onto a wound and

painting different materials and surfaces

The lives of mental patients -

they were all padlocked

Young Stanley. Self Portrait

A small figure - someone filling

urns with tea for one of the asylum wards -

in two different worlds.

A scene on the Macedonian front:

‘Stand to Order!’ The officer is camouflaged

with fern fronds. Piles of barbed wired appear

like black thunder clouds,

The resurrection of the soldiers -

each cross serving as an object of devotion

In a mesh of white crosses,

a soldier emerges from a grave

a cross serving to frame

his bewildered face