BEFORE VERMEER’S CLOUDS

I had been contemplating the idea of producing a work or works using the idea of a Vision of Heaven for a number of years.  I had actually produced a couple of small pieces on separate occasions but not on a large scale.

I have long been interested in the concept of Heaven and just what it may look like, should it exist.  The question of whether, if Earth is imperfect, Heaven should be perfect and how would perfection be possible, given that classical and neo-classical attempts to perfect nature resulted in a rather stilted awkwardness.  Other considerations like the subjectivity of the ideal started to come into play.  Soon the possibility of Heaven being a singular, perfect place seemed more and more of an impossibility.  Whatever I produced as a Vision of Heaven would have to be entirely from my point of view.

What I didn’t want was either sentimentality or cynicism.   I wanted to have for once an unashamed display of affection and joy and taking things from an earthly setting and placing them together in one singular vista or vision.   I wanted different seasons.  The painting really reads from right to left, beginning with Winter, following through Spring, Summer and Autumn.  On the way we encounter a quite English landscape of fauna with the foreground having compacted snow, melting to a small stream.  Flowers thus appear as they do in nature, with gorse being the first then mayflower, broom, elderflower and so on.   The foreground heathland landscape is based very much on my encounters with such landscape in the English Lake District, where I live, and takes in memories of other places I have been very familiar with. 

One looks from this rural place toward the suburban and urban in the central area where trees and buildings are arranged as a hill town.   Here there are buildings with awnings, a modern tower, towers of a Cathedral , a gilded dome and quite prominently, and almost as a fulcrum to the whole painting, a striped conical tower, a fantasia on an Islamic tower I once think I saw but can’t be sure, because it may have been in a dream.  Is it ancient, is it modern, is it serious, is it playful?  Does it have a function, or is it merely aesthetic?   Whatever it is, it is perfect and beautiful and surely belongs in Heaven.

Other, smaller incidents within the painting are significant too. In the centre, a path descends leads away and rises to the town. This path drops down from us and enters into the light, where it runs alongside walls and buildings. Here one can just make out the glazed roof of a studio which of course is very much a personal wish - a studio in heaven.
 
There is also a small group of houses, humble cottages in fact, where a white gable end is brightly lit up. Visible in the gardens of these cottages, clean washing is blowing on lines. Here I am deliberately glorifying the simple act of the wind drying clothes and also celebrating washing on a line as a symbol of purification.

 
Beyond , there is the sky.    What could be more perfect or heavenly than the sky from Vermeer’s View of Delft.  I have long considered it to be one of those things that one supremely gifted human needed to conceive, like the music from Mozart’s hand, which John Tavener considers to be evidence of a gift from God.  

Lastly there is the gift of gold discreetly entering the picture at the bottom left.  It stands for the gift of the prophets but it is also there to make one think of our covetous desire for gold when all around us is the gift of the Earth, of blue sky, of sunlight, of oxygen, of the eco-system, of the perpetuity of nature.