BEATS OF LOVE
113. Reflection on the Crucifixion of Our Lord, Jesus Christ by John Littleford
WE SKIPPED film class to attend this talk in my local church community hall. It's fascinating to learn about the other life of people and even more fascinating when they turn you onto their art.
John's crucifixion series took inspiration from Matthias Grünewald's Isenheim Altarpiece with its Triptych design and contemporary theme, but moved toward abstraction. I'm not really into moving towards something, but thankfully the last work he displayed was more figurative and, thanks to the massive success of Oppenheimer, more now. Inevitably, physical texture is less dramatic when mixed-media art get photographed, so I came away wanting to see the actual works.
His Great War figures, sympathetically painted, are climbing over the trenches to meet their fate. This he only alludes to, more mindful of today's more meditative viewer, who could easily assess graphic war imagery. Grünewald was fearless in depicting a plague infected Christ as a figure of empathy. The site of the commission being a hospice where plague doctors walked about in the protective masks that influenced the beak like creations of Hieronymus Bosch. Inflicted patients desperately needed hope. The intended site for John's is a modern day unimpressive parish church. Possibly ours. Yet we, too, still need hope.
Depicting the second atomic bomb because its cloud lends itself to encasing Christ better is odd, but that's the problem with schematic figurative art, I guess. Thumbing through the delightful draughtsman ship of John's sketch-books is fascinating coz you see how reworked his Christ was before he arrived at the Gauguinesque figure. A figure dwarfed by the famous sentence of reconciliation 'Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.' These words of God still have great global force. The 20th century made horror inescapable while introducing collective shock and mass spectacle into society. The 21st century, with its Millennium dome, the first building in history to put a gun to its own head and pull the trigger, summarizes this state of overkill we now live through.
It's why when this series escapes John's attic and bubble wrap, it will be important. Important for the church when it finally becomes more radical in defence of social justice, which it must, to offer people an antidote to their feelings of intense hopelessness. 
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