Recently recovering from an illness, I came across a fascinating British artist while watching some BBC programs with Philip Mould, in one of which he showed a rather startling painting, inspiring me to further research its artist.
He is known for placing Biblical themes within unusual, seemingly unrelated, modern scenes. He jars us out of our complacency- we all know the Crucifixion, but how to we relate it in our world today- with so much suffering?
Born in 1957 in London, ROGER WAGNERwon an open scholarship to read English Literature at Lincoln College Oxford in 1975. While a student he attended classes at the Ruskin School of Drawing, where he now teaches, and in 1977 edited The Oxford Art Journal, the forerunner of the present academic journal that began the following year. From 1978 to 1981 he studied at The Royal Academy Schools under Peter Greenham, and subsequently returned to Oxford where he now lives and works.
In 1985 he had his first exhibition with Anthony Mould who has represented him ever since. Alongside the paintings were wood-engravings from his first book of illustrated poems Fire Sonnets. An exhibition in 1988, In a Strange Land, included a book of that title which included poems and a translation of psalm 137 illustrated with wood-engravings of the London docklands.Several more recent exhibitions have included successive volumes of The Book of Praises: an illustrated translation of the psalms, the first volume of which appeared in 1994.
In 2012 he made his first stained glass window, opposite John Piper’s window in St Mary’s Iffley, followed by a font cover made in collaboration with Nicholas Mynheer. Both were nominated for the ACE prize for art in a sacred context. In 2014 he painted the first portrait of the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, which now hangs alongside Thomas Lawrence’s portraits in Auckland Castle.
(Above painting- Dartmoor Crucifixion- is perhaps my favorite. The sheep in the night field and the starry sky remind one of the Birth of Christ- the field of shepherds- and yet there are the 3 crosses of the crucifixion, using telephone poles.
Roger Wagner’s work has been described as ‘totally unlike any other modern artist’. In 1988 the poet Peter Levi wrote of his second exhibition that ‘Nothing could be less expected than his paintings; they are completely careless of fashion. In some ways they are very old fashioned indeed, but in the most important way modern. He has the power to create a myth’.
An early influence was the painting of Giorgio de Chirico whom he met in Venice in 1973. Chirico described his own style as ‘metaphysical’ and though very different, the same term could be applied to Wagner’s work. This has been described as ‘imbued with Fra Angelico, Blake, Palmer and Traherne’, but also often imbued with what Samuel Johnson described as a characteristic of the metaphysical poets in which ‘the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together’.Thus Rowan Williams has described Roger’s ‘fusion of Jewish and Christian symbols with the cooling towers of Didcot power station – Jewish victims of the Shoah wandering in the neighborhood of a distantly seen, conventionally depicted crucifixion, the background dominated by the immense towers arranged in the pattern of the ceremonial candlestick, the menorah that gives this 1993 painting its title.’, as this is ‘very dense imagining indeed, but it manages a representation of the creatively and theologically uncanny that is haunting’.
About the 2nd picture-Menorah- the artist said: when I first saw Didcot power station through the window of a train from Oxford to Paddington, the smoke belching from the central chimney reminded me more of a crematorium than a symbol of God's presence. And yet having said that, the astonishing sky behind the towers looked like the arch of some great cathedral, while something in the scale of the cooling towers themselves, with the light moving across them and the steam slowly, elegiacally, drifting away, created the impression that they were somehow the backdrop of a great religious drama. Both these ideas remained in my mind for many years, and developed in a series of paintings and sketches. On the one hand the crematorium-like chimney and the inhuman scale of the buildings brought associations with the industrial genocide of the twentieth century and the blank inhumanity of so much in human existence while on the other hand within the strange beauty of the scene was the insistent sense of some great redemptive moment. It wasn't until I realised at the towers, from the angle I had seen them, had lined up to form the shape of the Menorah, that I realised how these two impressions could be united, and realised that the drama to which they were the backdrop must be the drama of the crucifixion. In no other religious event is the absence of God so closely linked with his presence, or the tragedy of human life so intimately linked with its redemption. The extraordinary Jewish prophecies which see in the mysterious servant of the Lord, a figure apparently 'smitten by God and afflicted'but in reality 'pierced for our transgressions', say of him 'surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows'. Likewise the disciples of Jesus who see the crucifixion as the fulfillment of these prophecies, describe him both as a man crying out 'my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?', and as one who, even before his birth was named by the angel as 'Immanuel, that is 'God with us'
