JOHN DEMPSTER: Return the gaze of God to become truly alive
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“I begin with the eyes,” portrait painter William Mather describes how he vividly reproduces people’s personalities on paper.
“Once you see someone’s eyes looking back at you from the page, you know you’re connecting with them.”
He was speaking recently at Rosemarkie Church on the Black Isle about his work which, besides portraiture, includes landscapes, scenes from nature and explicitly religious art. He has been drawing since he was a child, though his art was “on the back burner” for 30 years while he was a church minister. Art, he tells us, is a way of seeing.
As a very young man in the 1960s he studied art in Paris. Culturally, he felt in another world. “The hippy era was beginning,” he tells us, “and I felt uncomfortable with the prevailing atheist, humanist thinking.”
He adds: “I had nothing to say,” meaning both that he felt nothing in common with the others, and that he had no message to convey through his art.
He began asking questions – “What’s it all about?”, “There must be something more?”
Some years later, as he puts it, “I found meaning in Jesus.”
Faith in Jesus Christ, he believes, gives him both a place to stand and a way of seeing. Everything he creates is an expression of faith.
Those beach scenes with the distant background hills express the joy of life and the beauty of creation. That painting of Ben Eighe, six years in the making, reminds us that the God who formed the mountains is our helper.
Those pictures from East Africa, where William once worked, capture both the zest, the colour, the harmony of life and also the poverty and pain.
Those religious paintings such as “Through the Curtain”, a curtain of grey sky torn in two to reveal a radiant Christian cross infusing the cityscape with light.
Those portraits, expressing his conviction that each individual is special, made in God’s image. Does God look at us, as William does, and exclaim: “Wonderful face! Wonderful mouth! Sparkly eyes!”
Art, William tells us, is also a language, a way of communication. He continues to study the grammar of tone, composition, depth, colour. He hopes God will open our ears and eyes as we look at a painting: that it may become an icon, a sacred place where God and the viewer meet.
William Mather reminded us of a phrase from the Bible: “We are God’s poem – or artwork.” God the artist longs for us to fix our eyes on the divine eyes, yet often we look the other way. But as William discovered after his Paris struggles, it is only when we look into the eyes of God that we become truly alive.
