Sandham Memorial Chapel: paintings by Stanley Spencer

Sandham Memorial Chapel. Although I am a big Stanley Spencer fan I haven’t seen this before. It is a long way to drive and quite small but the pictures are full of love. They must have been Spencer’s way of coping with his memories of WWI. Although it is ostensibly a memorial to a chap called Sandham who died of disease after fighting in the Macedonian campaign, it doesn't show Sandham's experiences as Spencer could really show only his own memories: he had been a medical orderly in the UK (in Beaufort hospital near Bristol) and then? in Macedonia.

In this picture the orderlies are washing the wooden lockers (open shelves) in the baths and Spencer shows himself finding a moment of peace and calm between the baths, which were magenta in colour, and he liked them.

 He shows views of orderlies making beds, fetching tea urns, sorting the laundry, tending to frostbitten feet – and he shows the soldiers resting on the ground, getting water from a stream and filling their bottles, putting up tents, shaving under mosquito nets. And this being Spencer, there’s also a big picture of the Resurrection of the Soldiers. The soldiers get up and see their plain white crosses and some of them hand them back to Jesus, some just heap them up, the mules (that did all the heavy work) come back to life too, and the soldiers start to roll up their puttees (canvas bandages around their lower legs). For some people, the Great War destroyed their faith (how could a good God allow it to happen?) and for Spencer it was the other way (God must have more in store for us than this mess!)

The pictures of his hospital orderly experiences seem the most calming and organized. He had tried to see his menial daily tasks as a devotion to God and his faith was such that he remembered the time as very spiritual, mentioning “the progress of my soul” in these surroundings. It was very hard work and the shifts were long, between 10 and 14 hours, and he was at the hospital (in Bristol) for three years and was not able to paint in all that time. Obviously, he was unhappy, frustrated and lonely, but he was helped by his religious desire to please God by performing these menial tasks with love.  With Spencer the compositions are very complicated. Individual figures are simplified into curves and straight lines, but the design as a whole is difficult to see, with the eye being led all about the picture.

Stanley Spencer: Oh, how I could paint this feeling I have in me if only there was no war, the feeling of that corridor, the sergeant-major and his dog - anything so long as it gave me the feeling and the circumstance gave me! If I was Deborah, the lunatic who doesn't know there is a war on, I could do it. I envied him the mental agony of being cut off completely from my soul. I thought in agony how marvellously I could paint this moment in the corridor now. And I will paint it, with all the conviction I feel now, in a belief in peace being the essential need for creative work, not a peace that is merely the accidental lapse between wars, but a peace that whether war is on or not is the imperturbable and right state of the human soul.

This picture is called Ablutions. It shows the patients washing themselves and in the middle there's an orderly (prob a self-portrait), with an apron that ties up at the back, painting a man's wounds with iodine. It looks a little like a scene from Christ's life in renaissance painting - the man with the towel could be wearing a toga. The man at the back is pulling up his braces - something most men today have never done. 

In his Beaufort days Stanley had not yet formulated his ideas on the meaning of what he came to know as love, nor were the inspiring mental transformations he later experienced possible in his circumstances then. His current inability to master the significance of the atmospheres he was meeting or to discern the connections in them so vital to his creativity not only alarmed him but turned eventually into a source of desperation for him.
He was so disconnected that he became convinced in later life that the war had damaged beyond repair the cherished pre-war Cookham-feelings which had sourced the pristine glory of his early work. 

the above quotation is from a well-researched website with plenty of interesting thoughts about Stanley Spencer.

In this picture Spencer is on the right front, scraping dead skin off the feet of the man who is suffering from frostbitten feet. Another orderly has round slop pails over his shoulders making him look a little like an angel. There are eggs in nests all over the wallpaper, and this is probably something Spencer remembered as he liked to be precise about details.It is unlikely to be a conscious allusion to sex as this was something Spencer tried not to think about. There is a rare female presence in this picture: the sister right at the back through the doorway.

Stanley Spencer: I would like to explain what was at the back of my mind when I began to want to do these pictures. Well, when I first enlisted I began to feel I was dying of starvation, spiritual starvation, and this feeling intensified my desire for spiritual life, and then suddenly I began to see and catch hold of little particles of this life in the scrubbing of a floor or the making of a bed; and so everything I did meant a spiritual revelation to me. Everything at the hospital became a key to my conception of spiritual life, and so it came about at last that tea urns, bathrooms, beds etc all became symbols of my spiritual thoughts, things sacred to me by association.

when I am seeking the Kingdom of Heaven I shall tell God to take into consideration the number of men I have cleaned and the number of floors I have scrubbed, as well as the excellence of my pictures, so as to let me in.

A good day - London

Stan was at a loose end yesterday and I thought we should go and do something. So we agreed to go to London. Caught train easily, walked over the Hungerford bridge, down escalators to Villiers Street. I really like Villiers street. Went into Gordon's Wine bar which is in a cellar and sells nothing but wine. Obviously I really wanted beer but behind the bar, instead of a range of drinks, there are 4 large barrels of sherry. I do love sherry. We had a glass of water and a schooner of amontillado, which we shared, it was not any more expensive than wine and was really lovely. We sat in a candlelit thieves' den and listened to the trains rumbling. This cellar is quite an institution; Hillaire Belloc and GK Chesterton also drank there. This fact is kind of wasted on Stan as he knows nothing about literature: but he likes looking at people and is brilliant at sizing them up.

For food we went to the Pret near St Martin in the Fields. Then to the National Portrait Gall for the annual portrait exhibition. This is so interesting - so many styles of portraiture - I liked the mass portrait of Yorkshire Hell's angels, the triple portrait of the magician (Drummond Money-Coutts, whose stage presence came across, and the movements of his hands)  and some of the more classically-styled portraits. The winning picture was plain boring. The second placed one was better but not particularly memorable. The one on the poster was brilliant - a man looking in a series of mirrors.

Walked a very strange route to the Tate on Millbank which is being "done up". A good selection of pictures is still on view and we just enjoyed having a good appreciation and discussion of the pictures that took our attention. I tend to be interested most in our wonderful history of crazy artists, and their remarkable visions, e.g. Blake, Dadd, and Spencer. I particularly love Spencer's conviction that heaven is actually Cookham. I sometimes think so myself.

Probably Heaven

Cain and Abel

Dadd, fairyland

Stanley Spencer - the resurrection in Cookham churchyard

A strange film installation was in the main rooms with the most bizarre creepy noises as the soundtrack. Apparently the creepy noises were made by the motor of the camera with which the piece was filmed. It was very interesting. Stan was riveted as he loves film.

He said: "can we go to that little DVD shop?" he meant the shop in the British film Institute. The cinemas and bars and restaurant seemed to have escaped his notice. I like the BFI and one day I will go there and see everything I have missed.

On the way back we tried to take some artistic pictures with Stan's phone, as after looking at art everything looks like art, even the paint on the road.