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Roger Wagner's Visionary landscapes by Rupert Martin

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A Journal of the Arts and Religion

summer 1995 

RUPERT MARTIN

 

Roger Wagner's

Visionary Landscapes

 

THE story begins at the monastery of San Marco in Florence, where Fra

Angelico prayed and painted. Walking up the stairs you are confronted

 by an angel with multicolored wings, announcing momentous news to

Mary. Further on you come to the individual cells in which you can seclude

yourself. Each cell contains a frescoed wall painted by Fra Angelico to aid the

monks' prayers. You are alone in a landscape in which Jesus comes and goes, as

if entering the very place where you sit and contemplate. For English artist

Roger Wagner these rooms have a special place in his life as artist and Christian.

They embody an ideal space in which art and the everyday meet, where the

worlds of prayer and art overlap. At the place where they meet is the person of

Jesus, apprehended by faith at the intersection of time and eternity. Wagner's

visits to San Marco in 1973 and 1978 proved formative for his faith and his art,

and his early paintings reflected the ordered world of Fra Angelico, with its

formal clarity, translucent color and atmosphere of prayer.

 

In his recently printed work. The Book of Praises, Wagner seeks to create an

equivalent to the experience of walking from cell to cell in the monastery of San

Marco. Each page becomes a self-contained unit in which one can immerse

oneself in the text and image as in a cell. This work is characteristic of the

thoroughness with which Wagner approaches any project. He began by learning

Hebrew, translating the Psalms into a fresh idiom, and then engraving woodcuts

placed between the Hebrew and English texts, in a way that varies from page to

page. The woodcuts act as a focus for our reflections on the Psalms, and remind

Wagner of the Bibles of the Reformation with their combined use of type and

woodcuts. Wagner's work also belongs to the English tradition which includes

the woodcuts which Paul Nash carved to illustrate the book of Genesis, as well

as William Blake's woodcuts to illustrate Thornton's translation of Virgil's

Eclogues which so inspired the nineteenth-century painter Samuel Palmer.

 

Having studied at Oxford and lived there for the last twenty years, Wagner

has had ample opportunity to look closely at the jewel-like pen-and-ink

landscapes by Palmer which are displayed in Oxford University's Ashmolean

Museum, and it was entirely fitting that Wagner recently held a major exhibition

in that museum. Palmer's pastoral vision was of a world replete with fruitfulness,

a Keatsian overabundance that reflected his faith in God's providence. The

idyllic days Palmer spent at the southern English village of Shoreham fueled his

imagination to recreate its humble valley as the Valley of Vision, with its

rounded hills, ripe crops, and little shady dells glimmering with light. As we shall

see, Wagner's pastoral vision is not so idyllic, but traces of Palmer's lyrical vision

remain in the way Wagner sees landscape as the mirror of God's glory, the place

within which He works out His redemptive purposes. 

 

In Roger Wagner's work, several strands merge: the Renaissance, the pastoral,

English landscape and poetry, and Christian biblical meditation. As he has

progressed as an artist he has often interwoven these different strands and

techniques. A good example of this process is the painting entitled The Harvest

Is the End of the World and the Reapers Are Angels.

 

The image came to him when he was an Oxford undergraduate studying

English. At that time he was torn between his desire to study art and the need to

finish the course he had begun. During his final year he impulsively decided to

give up English and. begin art studies. After a week he was dissuaded and went

on to take a first class honors degree in English literature—the highest result

that one can achieve at Oxford University. It was only after he had spent the

next three years studying at the Royal Academy of Art, London, that he felt he

had acquired sufficient technical expertise to enable him to tackle the theme of

angels reaping. Even then he destroyed the first version, feeling that it was too

garish in color.

 

The key to the composition came to him after seeing a picture by Guercino

which had a very dark sky. "The more you can compose a picture, the more you

can subdue colors and the stronger the effect," Wagner says. By introducing a

dark blue sky he not only increased the sense of impending doom, but he was

also able to contain the radiance of the central harvest-field and thereby control

the light. Roger made many drawings of the angels, for some of which this

author served as a model. I remember standing for an hour in the position of a

reaper with a sickle!

 

These drawings of angels were made into woodcuts and included in his first

book of poems, entitled Fire Sonnets published by the Besalel Press in 1984.

These poems have an unearthly quality that adds to the vision of angels reaping:

 

there are trees ablaze with angelic light, the angel wrestling with Jacob in the '

dark, and Jesus stretching out his hand to Peter as he begins to walk on water.

Wagner's work constantly refers to the supernatural, and he depicts a world

ablaze with light, transfigured by the presence of God and his angels:

 

And in that summer evening's fading light

I saw his angels gather in the wheat:

Like beaten gold their beauty smote the air

And tongues of flame were streaming in their hair.

 

One hears echoes of the mystical poets Henry Vaughan and Thomas Trahern

in these poems, and also in the visual imagery of the field of wheat, which is

reminiscent of Traherne's vivid memory of childhood in his third Century.

 

The Corn was Orient and Immortal Wheat, which never

should be reaped, nor was ever sown. I thought it

had stood from Everlasting to Everlasting.

 

Wagner's field of grain is not, however, the endless vista of childhood

innocence, but the prospect of God's judgment on our completed lives. The

theme of judgment gives Wagner's pastoral painting its particular edge. Here is

no sentimentalized landscape, but one fraught with doom, the Anglo-Saxon

word for judgment. And yet it is an image of judgment far removed from art

history's many grotesque herdings of human beings into the Pit. Wagner speak

of the power of Michelangelo's Last Judgment, but says:

 

I'm never entirely happy with such pictures. The emphasis on terror

produces a terrifying picture of God, who works just by fear. Although an

aspect of fear is appropriate, the emphasis in the New Testament is on the

justice of God. Evil being destroyed is something we are encouraged to

long for.

 

The sense of judgment as something positive is reflected in the radiance oft!

field of wheat, and both the parable and the painting illustrate the possibility o

redemptive love. His harvest field is intersected by two paths that in their

shadowing reveal the cross, and the low angle of the sun causes tl ^ s'

wings to cast winged crosses onto the wheat [see front cover]. Judgment

becomes a promise, an answer to the perennial question posed in the Psalms:

 

"Why do evil men seem to succeed?"

 

Wagner has translated the classic themes of Renaissance art, redemption and

judgment, into an idiom that is true to the English pastoral tradition and to hi

image of a loving and just God. Each element in this skillful composition

contributes tc the whole: the detailed flora of the foreground, the three

sycamore trees, the stocks of cut wheat, the three angels choreographed in

different poses, the more distant angels, the intersecting paths leading the eye

inward over the radiant wheat to the splendor of the magnificent oak which

holds the composition in balance, the blue curving river, and the rising

crescendo of cumulus clouds highlighted by the setting sun against deep-blue

thunder clouds. All these elements speak of one dramatic fact of faith, the

splendor and glory of God who is creator, redeemer, and judge. A vision of such

subdety and intensity took more than ten years in the making, and combines

technical excellence with a visionary faith.

 

The influence of the Suffolk landscape near Aldeburgh, where Roger was

brought up, is evident in many of his paintings ; af which acts as a pendant

to the angels reaping. Entitled Abraham and the Angels (1989), it shows

Abraham picnicking with the angels among a group of pine trees. The gnarled

branch of a dead tree in the foreground and the looming presence of a nuclear

power plant in the background provokes thoughts of impending catastrophe,

such as God visited upon the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah immediately after

His angelic visitation with Abraham and Sarah (Gen. 18-19). One of the striking

aspects of Wagner's painting is this blend of biblical story and contemporary

iconography and landscape. His visualizing of past and present ends up

transcending particular time, creating a sense oftimelessness.

 

Watching again the film by Andrei Tarkovsky which focuses on the icon

painter Andrei Rublev, I was reminded how much an artist is called to be aware

of his times and yet to transcend them. The film records the turbulence of

fifteenth-century Russia and the cruelty of the Tartar invasions, showing the

painter wandering through the landscape witnessing these events. That suffering

is transmuted in the icons into a poignant compassion, a desire to reveal the

truth in eloquent forms, to set forth the glory of God in translucent layers of

tempera on wood. The black-and-white film ends in color as the camera dwells

lovingly on details of the icons for which Rublev is best known, including The

Trinity, which shows the three angels that visited Abraham.

 

Tarkovsky's film also refers to the position and plight of the artist in a hostile

political climate. Roger Wagner's own art have a prophetic edge similar to

Tarkovsky's, not hesitating to deal with unfashionable themes and to issue a

searching indictment of the values which dominate our materialistic society.

Two paintings of 1989 depict the Great Storm which had recently destroyed

thousands of trees in the south of England. One is entitled See What Desolations^

refers to Psalm 46, in which the note of catastrophe is followed by a note of

hope:

 

Come and see the works of the Lord,

the desolations he has brought on the earth .

He makes wars cease to the ends of the earth;

he breaks the bow and shatters the spear,

he burns the shields with fire.

Be still and know that I am God;

I will be exalted among the nations,

I will be exalted in the earth

 

 

Wagner's paintings, for all their vigor of composition, often possess that sense

of stillness at the center of the storm, that idea of hope in the face of despair.

The light which bathes his wheat fields or is caught in the leaves of a tree has an

otherworldly quality, between day and night, and often accentuated by

gathering clouds or deep blue skies. It is the kind of light I see from my window

as I write, the low evening light of a winter afternoon revealing the greenness of

the lichen-encrusted oak trees, reflecting the whiteness of silver birches

silhouetted against a dark storm-cloud. Yet, in a Wagner painting there is a

strange stillness, as if nature is holding her breath, for that moment taken out of

time into eternity. It is the light of transfiguration which we are occasionally

privileged to glimpse on earth.

 

Trees hold a special place in Wagner's imagination: the solitary oaks or clumps

of pines in the flat Suffolk landscape, the tall black poplars arching over the river

that winds through Port Meadow near Oxford, the juniper trees of Delphi in

Greece. In landscapes that are largely unpeopled, the trees act as metaphors of

life, either destroyed by storm, or filled with light. As Gerard Manley Hopkins

wrote of the trees near Oxford in "Binsey Poplars":

 

My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,

Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,

All felled, felled, are all felled;

or in Traherne's words:

 

The Green Trees...Transported and ravished me; their

Sweetness and unusual Beauty made my heart to leap....

they were such strange and Wonderful things.

 

For Wagner, trees rustle with angels' wings and shimmer with the light of

heaven; they represent both the transcendence and the immanence of God. His '

own poetry shows how he sees the light and movement in the trees he has

depicted. 

 

Who hears the ocean roaring in a tree

That rustles like a thousand angels' wings

And feels the rising wind he cannot see,

Is seeing to the burning heart of things.

Working on blue paper, he has made a series of large single trees , '

using the same technique of pen and ink with gum arable that Samuel Palmer

used for his tree-filled landscapes. These single trees show how much the

development of Wagner's technique has helped to release his vision: they

combine a minute attention to the individual leaves with a broad sweep of

composition and light.

 

 

The trees also show how much his art emerges out of his life and observation.

Born in 1957, Roger was encouraged to appreciate and study the arts by his

father. Sir Anthony Wagner, who was an expert on heraldry and who became

Garter King of Arms at the College of Arms. Roger has inherited the meticulous

attention to detail that characterizes his father's visual work, as well as his

mother Gillian's interest in the art and culture of England. Dame Gillian Wagner

became noted for her work in the field of voluntary and social work, becoming

president of Dr. Barnado's charity for children. She has also written books,

including a biography of Dr. Barnado. The combination of this artistic and

literary background—as well as his forays into the Suffolk landscape—were

formative influences which he took with him to school at Eton College and then

Oxford University. At Eton the influence of the Robert Browning scholar and

English teacher Michael Meredith was particularly appreciated, especially during

Wagner's visits to Italy in 1973 and America in 1975.

 

During the years that I have known him, Roger has shown a single-minded

dedication and integrity in his life and work. I recall one example of this

integrity, when we were staying on the Greek island ofNaxos in 1977. He had

spent hours painting a landscape, seated on a barren hillside in the heat of the

day, but for various reasons he became dissatisfied with the picture and simply

abandoned it c : hillside. Later that day we entered the local butcher's shop,

where the butcher said that he had seen Roger painting, and asked whether it

would be possible to buy the painting. Roger said that, unfortunately, it wasn't

good enough, and even refused to let me go back and retrieve it from the

hillside, so that we could supplement our dwindling resources!

 

Roger Wagner is a painter of place as well as of visions, and he often chooses

to locate biblical stories in familiar settings, placing the story of the burning fiery

furnace from the book of Daniel in Lucy's iron smelting works in Oxford. Not

all his subjects are religious: "God created the hippopotamus as well as the

angels," he comments. "I want to be free to paint every aspect of Creation." For

that reason he has not ignored the industrial landscape, seeing in it scope for

metaphor and transformation.

 

In 1988 he published a book of poems and engravings called In a Strange

Land^ which includes images of the des ; - docklands of London seen in the

context of Psalm 137 . Before they underwent their recent

redevelopment, the London docklands were indeed a strange, almost surreal

place: derelict warehouses bordering little creeks, rusting cranes lying idle, empty

piers that used to bustle with imperial trade. All of these things

compose a stark geometry, empty of people and activity, and reminiscent ofde

Chirico's metaphysical paintings of empty piazzas and colonnaded buildings.

The paintings on blue paper, in gouache, ink and watercolor mixed with gum

 

 

 

arabic, combine geometry and mystery, accurate observation with a sense of

spiritual desolation, echoing the words of Psalm 137:

 

By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept...

How can we sing the songs of the Lord in a strange land?

 

The docklands become a metaphor for the spiritual bankruptcy of a whole

nation, for empty promises of materialism, and for the blight that affects the

grandest of human schemes, in the light of God's eternal plans. And yet there is

a poignant sense of elegy in these works, a transforming light that gives some

sense of hope—as if nothing is wasted—a sense that everything is beautiful in its

own time and in its own way.

 

An elegiac note is also struck in one of Wagner's earliest compositions,

entitled Ash Wednesday . In it, he has translated an enigmatic section

from T. S. Eliot's Ash-Wednesday into pictorial form. The section begins:

 

Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree

In the cool of the day, having fed to satiety

On my legs my heart my liver and that which had been contained

In the hollow round of my skull. And God said

Shall these bones live?

 

As with many of his paintings, this one is a visual jigsaw, pieced together from

different places and visual experiences. The juniper tree was discovered at

Delphi, and the broken columns drawn from a photograph which I took on the

island ofDelos, during our 1977 visit to Greece. The leopards were drawn from

life during several visit to London Zoo, the wheeling birds come from the

Suffolk landscape, and the skeleton from a Renaissance painting by Vittore

Carpaccio. The painting gives the effect of a heightened reality verging on the

surreal. The theme of the painting, as of Eliot's poem, concerns the hope of

resurrection, even when confronted with the fact of death.

 

This concept of hope coming out of despair, of beauty in the apparently ugly,

of the majesty of ordinary things—whether natural or architectural, man-made

or God-made—is central to an epic series of paintings which Wagner embarked

on in the 1990s. As with the harvest paintings, there was a long period of

gestation and several versions of the painting entitled Menorah.

 

The painting could be said to begin with the train journey from Oxford to

London, which passes through Didcot. From the train the six-massive cooling

towers of the Didcot Power Station dwarf everything else. On one journey, the

artist saw the smoke and steam pouring from these towers against an

extraordinary sky. He made a sketch while on the train and then amplified it at

home. on another occasion, when we were visiting two hilltop clumps of beech

trees called Wittenham Clumps, which inspired some of Paul Nash's late

paintings, I remember Roger turning his back on the beautiful trees to make a

watercolor of the power station with its great plumes of smoke shadowing the

plain below. Wagner has acknowledged the influence of Paul Nash, especially his

stylized landscapes. In this case the influence of Nash's war paintings with their

devastated woods and elegiac fury may have contributed to the vast, impersonal

forces symbolized by Wagner's painting of the power station.

 

The sense of human vulnerability in the face of these mechanistic forces led to

the idea of placing a Crucifixion scene in the foreground. The first version was a

deposition with the figures who attend to and mourn for Christ dressed in the

striped uniform of the Death Camps and carrying the yellow Star of David. The

plowed field is raked by the evening light, and the three crosses set at an angle to

the six cooling-towers belching steam and the central taller chimney emitting

smoke.

 

The chimney immediately brings to mind the crematoria chimneys of

Auschwitz, but it was only later that the artist saw, in the six towers and one

chimney, the symmetrical appearance of the seven-branched candelabrum, the

menorah, which is a central Jewish symbol of God's presence. This early version

was entitled Servant Song IV: Surely He Has Borne Our Griefs, referring to the

messianic prophecy of Isaiah 53. The connection of the Suffering Servant with

the suffering of the Jews in the concentration camps is a startling one, and raises

the central question in any attempt at theodicy: how can a God of Love allow

such suffering? The question occurred in Auschwitz itself, as Elie Wiesel, an

Auschwitz survivor, describes in his book Night.

 

The SS hanged two Jewish men and a youth in front of the whole camp.

The men died quickly, but the death throes of the youth lasted for half an

hour. "Where is God? Where is he?" someone asked behind me. As the

youth still hung in torment in the noose after a long time, I heard the man

call again, "Where is God now?" And I heard a voice in myself answer:

"Where is he? He is here. He is hanging there on the gallows."

 

Although seen by Elie Wiesel in the context of Judaism and of the humiliation

of God in going with Israel into exile and suffering, for Christians this moving

story has a striking resonance. God was indeed there on the gallows, because

Jesus had gone through the same kind of gratuitous, cruel and prejudiced death

on the cross, not at the hands of Jews, but because of the sin of mankind as a

whole. The cross becomes the only answer we can give to the inescapable

problem of suffering, and it is not so much an answer as a demonstration of

God's love in suffering. As the German theologian Jiirgen Moltmann wrote in

The Crucified God: "The Son suffers dying, the Father suffers the death of the

Son."

 

The suffering of God, his identification with our suffering through the death

of his Son, helps us to bear the terrible suffering which this century has

witnessed. Wagner is courageous enough as an artist and as a Christian to

confront this manifestation of evil and yet to see the possibility of hope in the

stark landscape of grief.

 

The elegy of the first version gives way to a more tragic vision of crucifixion in

the second version, painted in 1993 [see Plate 5]. Jesus is naked on the cross,

the thieves on either side. The plowed field is flooded, reflecting the cooling

towers which loom even closer than before, in a more sinister way. The

onlookers, dressed in Hasidic clothes, gather and drift, seeking comfort,

pointing in silent witness, or simply standing, desolate, inconsolable in their

isolated grief.

 

The composition of some of the figures has a revealing source: a photograph

taken by Dmitri Baltemants in the Crimea in 1942, which shows women

looking for their loved ones among the bodies which lie strewn across a bleak,

smoke-filled landscape. This haunting photograph of grief shows one woman

stooped in despair as she searches, and another with arms flung out in a gesture

of despair. The words of Jesus on the cross ec'; i ; abandonment: "My God,

my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" And that cry was made by a Jew to the

God of the Jews.

 

Emotions are stirred by such iconography, because the Jewish people suffered

persecution in an ostensibly Christian culture. Christian anti-Semitism should

lead to Christian repentance. And yet there is a glimmer of hope in the fragile,

vulnerable body stretched upon the cross; as Christopher Miller has written in

his introduction to Wagner's retrospective exhibition at the Ashmolean

Museum:

 

The Jewish Christians at the foot of the cross lament the loss of all their

hope; the intervention of God in their lives is apparently annihilated in

Christ's death. The smoke that the Jews watch sweeping up into the clouds

""o^s the ashes carried by the wind over the bleak Polish plains. And a

parallel is established. We are in the presence of the cross, but the six

cooling towers and the central chimney make up the seven branches of the

menorah, the ritual candlestick which defines the holiness of the Jewish

holy place and thus marks the presence of God. For Jews and Christians

alike, the face of desolation wears another aspect, that of the presence and

providence of God.

 

The promise of God's presence through suffering is sufficient. Political

solutions are no answer to the Final Solution. Moreover, the systematic

destruction of Jewish life and culture has been repeated in the horrors of Pol Po

and the genocide of Rwanda. Wagner is proposing not a human, political

 

solution, but something that Christopher Miller has vividly described as a

"politics of transcendence":

 

In the gloomy forms that preside in the painting's background, the colossal

mechanisms of the state themselves achieve a status like that of destiny.

Christ was crucified, if not at the state's behest, by the state.

 

Our wildest dreams of horror have been eclipsed by the functioning of

an industrial society which used its technology and organization to

administer a systematic death. Capitalist considerations played their part in

the functioning of Nazi and Stalinist death camps. The considerations

which should determine conduct towards other humans were overlooked.

These are not simple implications, but they suggest how Wagner is able to

bring to bear upon lives lived under the light of the electric filament a

politics of transcendence.

 

Wagner has the ability to bring together disparate elements of his experience

into an aesthetic whole, and to deal with profound themes in a fresh,

challenging way. To set a biblical scene in a contemporary landscape is not in

itself unusual; it is a technique employed by other artists such as Stanley Spencer.

But grappling with the meaning of suffering by bringing together images of

crucifixion and holocaust shocks us out of our complacency. It takes courage

and integrity to make such connections. It also takes faith to present the hope

that Wagner has, while not looking for easy answers.

 

His is also a visual solution: how to paint shadows, how to represent grief

through gesture. His large compositions evolve slowly, as disparate elements

come together and as the paintings grow in complexity. "Scale comes from the

strength of the idea and the composition," Wagner says. "Too many large

paintings are just inflated small ones." This is why he rarely works o; ' ge

scale, preferring the intimacy and immediacy of small paintings on board, the

sketch, or the woodcut. At the same time, he does not shy away from the

challenge of scale.

 

Roger Wagner's most recent work consists of a series often paintings on the

theme of Job's encounter with the God of Creation. The plan is to exhibit these

in the Bartlemas Chapel in South Oxford, which is all that remains of a medieval

leper colony. As he explains:

 

Job is the nearest the Old Testament comes to answering the question of

suffering. And the answer isn't in propositions. God doesn't explain but

shows Job; he gives him a guided tour of Creation, at the end of which Job

says that he has seen God—and that for him is the answer, that is enough.

 

For Wagner, Creation represents God's glory, and Job's suffering is

transcended by seeing God and experiencing his love. As someone whose faith

 

was nurtured within the context or a charismatic, evangelical Anglican church in

London, and who now worships in a Vineyard church in Oxford, Roger's

experience is of "a God who is like the God we discover in the Bible, who does

intervene in his world and who does miraculous and extraordinary things." But

his faith is also mature enough not to rely on the sensational—mature enough to

look for God's working in the small things and incidents of everyday life. His

paintings embody that search for God in the simple fabric of Creation: ears of

corn, the trembling of leaves, the shimmer of water, as well as the simple

relationships shown in a tender touch. A particularly poignant little painting that

he keeps in his attic studio in Oxford is of his late father, blind at the time of the

painting, tenderly holding his granddaughter in his arms.

 

Wagner is not afraid to grapple with issues of judgment and suffering, but his

theology is based on the all-sufficient love of God. Wagner's art embodies a

theology of grace as well as a theology of the cross. It's always interesting to see

what painters choose to put on their walls. Alongside reproductions of Piero

della Francesca's The Resurrection of Christ, Botti Primavera and a

Japanese woodcut, Wagner's study features Rembrandt's Prodigal Son. In this

painting the touch of the Father, the poignant moment of reconciliation,

expresses all that Wagner believes and tries to embody in his art: the love flowing

from God the Father being more than sufficient for the world we live in.

 

Roger Wagner's version of the pastoral tradition contains the threat of danger,

but also the all-revealing light of love. Light is what ultimately reveals God's love

both literally and figuratively, whether it is the light flooding the plains of

Oxford, or streaming over the wheat fields of Suffolk, or filling the trees with

angels, or turning the London docklands into a vast theater set. That light

embodies the glory of God and his redeeming love.