Mother Joanna osb. Mural Unveiled at Buckfast Abbey, Devon

COMMENT:

The  enthralling article was interesting to the family and friends. Sr. Mary, (at present in Poland), and Abbess Joanna (Monica) were together in the years of Holyrood school and in the Guides.

Frank, was the one to pass on the issue of the Scottish Daily Mail, and he remembers of photographing at Stanbrook.

Andy is enlightening from remembering different Church associations.

  

M. Joanna OSB  New Stanbrook  2006

Scottish Daily Mail, Saturday , May, 3, 2004

New horizon: Mother Joanna Jamieson’s  art work is now in high command.

 With thanks to the author, Emma Cowing; for the fine article, and
 acknowledgment to the Scottish Daily Mail.
See:  www.stanbrookabbey.org.uk    
STANBROOK BENEDICTINES -NEWSLETER

How  Mother Joanna broke the

Habit of a lifetime at art school.

by Emma Cowing

MOTHER Joanna Jamieson remembers clearly the moment she realised the world had moved on without her. It was the summer of'2007, and aged 72, she was sitting on the top deck of a London bus for the very first time in her life.

'I looked at all these people down 'on the street and everybody was dressed in: black,' she-say.   'They were all carrying a mobile phone in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other and every­one had a frown on their face and they were just dashing everywhere. It was extraordinary. Really weird.'

She laughs. 'I just sat there and thought what's this all about?'

For 51 years Mother Joanna lived in seclusion, far away from mobile phones and takeaway coffee - although not, in truth, from people dressed in black. In 1956, at the age of 21, she turned her back on the modern world and her Glasgow family to become a postulant Benedictine nun at Stanbrook Abbey in Worcestershire.

There, time stood still. Contact with outsiders was limited to brief conversations through monastic grilles and the coarse black nun's habits had remained the same since 1625.

For over half a century, life on the outside trundled on without her. The Beatles, Thatcherism, devolution, 9/11, all of these things failed to penetrate Mother Joanna's quiet lifE;! of devotion and prayer.           .

Yet at the age of 72, when most women would be winding down any professional aspirations, she made an extraordinary decision: She would leave the monastery and go to art school, completing an ambition that had started more than half a century earlier, when she graduated from Glasgow School of Art with a degree in mural painting.

Now 79, Mother Joanna has come full circle. Last 'autumn, she completed a spectacular 6ft by 18ft painted mural on the walls of Buckfast Abbey in Devon - the same monastery that makes the dubious tonic wine. A large-scale modernist painting commemorating the rebuilding of the Abbey in 1909, it was revealed to the public last month to breathless admiration.

'I was very nervous at the unveiling,' she says. 'It was pretty scary. There was always the possibility that it may not fit on the wall or it may be awkward in some way. But it's fine.'

One art critic was less circumspect. 'It is a stupendous work,' wrote Robin Simon of the British Art Journal. 'Accomplished, confident, beautifully planned and executed.'

NOW, as she faces down her eightieth year, the artist is based at a small studio at Stan brook, the tight-knit order of nuns she has lived with for nearly 60 years.

Much to her amazement, she has found herself feted by the art world with the same gusto as the likes of Damien Hirst and fellow Glasgow School of Art alumnus Peter Howson.

Inundated with commissions and with more work than she can physically paint, she is highly in demand. For someone who until seven years ago had barely painted a brushstroke since the Suez crisis, it is a remarkable flowering.

'It very satisfying,' she says. 'There is such joy to be found in painting even if it is really hard work.'

Art, she says, has always been a part of her life. Growing up in Crosshill in Glasgow's south-side in a middle class Catholic family, she knew early on that she wanted to become a professional painter.

'Art discovered me,' she says. 'I was in my third year at Holyrood secondary school and my art teacher ,drew me aside one day and told me he was going to put my work in a' special folder to show the inspector. I immediately thought "how bad can it be?" Then it dawned on me that this was a good thing. He encouraged me from then on, and suggested that I think about art school.'

Her family was supportive of her ambitions and in 1952, at the age of 18, she arrived at Glasgow School of Art where her contemporaries included the architect Isi Metzstein and the figurative painter Alexander Goudie. Alasdair Gray, who also studied mural painting and was in the year below her, was a friend.

'I was very happy there,' she says. 'I just loved it, the training, the friendship, the painting. It had a reputation for being bohemian but when you are part of it you don't really see it that way. They were very happy years.'

During her degree she painted a mural of the life of St Mungo at the University of Glasgow's chaplaincy building, and a mural in a Glasgow cinema, both sadly long gone.

By the time she started a postgraduate course, she felt ready to embark on the life of a painter. Although her work often had a religious flavour, devoting herself full time to her faith was the last thing on her mind.

'I never thought about being a nun,' she says. 'Unlike a lot of Catholic girls, who go through a stage of thinking about it, it was never something I wanted to do. The few nuns I knew growing up I didn't really like. They wore funny clothes and talked pious language - I used to avoid them. If I saw one coming I'd cross to the other side of the road.’

Yet while she was at art school she shared a studio with a monk who had come to Glasgow to study stained glass. He suggested she might find some inspiration at an Abbey in England where there was a nun who also produced religious paintings.

'So I came down to Stanbrook to see her with absolutely no intentions, nothing on my mind at all,' Mother Joanna says.

'But while I was praying in the chapel in the monastery - well it's difficult to say but I just felt there was another reason for me being here. That God wanted me to join the community. And I thought that was a dreadful idea. It absolutely horrified me. But I couldn't get away from it. I couldn't ignore it.’

Mother Joanna is remarkably no nonsense and direct. You sense that if she set her mind to something, -it would be very difficult to persuade her to change it. Yet her family, religious but not fervent, did try. They were horrified at the thought of their daughter joining a holy order.

'They were very shocked and surprised,' she says. 'It's pretty normal with families that when it comes to a family member entering a monastery, they realise it's a radical step and for most people a mysterious one as well. It seems very negative from the outside. It meant that obviously I couldn't get married, couldn't have grandchildren - you know, all the good human things of life had to be sacrificed."

What about her? Did she feel it was a sacrifice?

'Oh yes,' she says. 'When you're 21 and your career is just opening up and relationships are developing, it all just seems so negative. That's why I fought it. I was to discover in fact that I was going to get much more than I gave, but it doesn't seem like that in the beginning.'

And so she embarked on the strict life inside the closed order of nuns. She got up at five every day, spent hours in solitary prayer, worked in the monastery gardens and all but abandoned her painting.

'I would paint in my spare time, if I had any,' she says. 'I found that very difficult at first, from working full time on my painting to being so restricted. It seemed very frustrating. But after my final vows I always seemed to end up with some kind of big community job. I ended up being creative in very different ways to what I had imagined.'

Those 'big community jobs' clearly suited her. She became first novice mistress and then, in 1983, Mother Joanna, Abbess of Stanbrook, where her job was to steer this traditional Benedictine order gently into the 21st century.

Yet she never forgot her first love of painting and when, in 2007, she stood down as Abbess of Stanbrook after 25 years, she was presented with a unique opportunity.

Acclaim: Mother Joanna's mural at Buckfast Abbey, above. Right: The nun at work on mural panels In her studio. She designed and painted the piece between two bouts of hip surgery

Scottish Daily Mail

'Right before my term of office was ended I was approached by Buckfast about the possibility of painting something and I said "well, in theory yes I could, but it's absolutely out of the question until I retire, and even then I would have to do a refresher course".

'After 50 years I couldn't just go straight back into it.'

Mother Joanna applied for and was accepted onto a one year course at the Prince of Wales Drawing School in Kensington, London.

Her re-entry into the world was not without its problems.

'I felt like Rip Van Winkle,' she says. 'In the 50 years that had passed without me being involved in that world at all, everything had totally changed.'

There were practical things like taking the bus ('so complicated'), and why everyone had headphones in their ears ('bewildering'), and what to wear to class.

She decided not to wear her habit ('long black skirts, veils and long sleeves aren't practical for drawing' she remarks drily), and donned trousers, shirt and comfortable trainers: 'I wanted to be on equal terms with fellow students. The last thing I wanted to be was conspicu­ous and different. I just wanted to be one of the crowd.' .

In class she mucked in, taking the life models and youth-orientated chatter in her stride, even though she found, to her embarrassment, that many of the more modern art­ists being discussed were names she had never heard of.

'It was hard work,' she says. 'Really hard work. If you draw from 10am to 5pm that's very tiring.'

Her voice takes on the faintest wistful tone. 'I just wished I was maybe 20 years younger.'

Mother Joanna lived in digs with two nuns who worked in a parish in Hackney, and she would still rise at 5am every morning in order to attend mass. But even that was miles apart from the quiet, serene world of Stanbrook.

When it was all over she went back to Stanbrook, equipped with a new armoury of drawing skills and enthusiasm. The order was finding property maintenance and utility bills a problem, so the nuns were in the midst of relocating from their towering Victorian spires in Worcestershire to a more modest, and modern building in Yorkshire. Mother Joanna had to put the Buckfast mural on the back burner during the move.

Inspirational story of a nun's new dawn as the desire to paint coaxed her out of her convent after over 50 years

Stanbrook Benedictines - Newsletter

 THE number of nuns entering holy orders has diminished rapidly in recent years. While the population of Stanbrook's nuns has shrunk from 81 at its peak to only 21 today (New members still come, thank God, they just come slowly,' she says), there have been upsides.

The new, smaller Stanbrook, where she now has her studio, is the world's first environmentally friendly nunnery. It has solar panels, a woodchip boiler, and rainwater harvesting system. 'It's a modern little monastery,' she says. 'It's appropriate for today's world.'

She started work on the Buckfast mural in 2010. The Abbey wanted an image of the reconstruction of the building at the turn of the century as part of its millennial celebra­tions in 2018. Mother Joanna beat the deadline by over four years.

'Buckfast were very good clients,' she says, with all the savvy of a City trader. 'They didn't hassle me at all and left it entirely up to me.'

During the process she spent time in the Abbey's archives, peering at old photographs of the reconstruction of Buckfast, which took place in 1909.

She also spent a couple of days in the stonemasons' yard at York Minster, watching the masons at work, so she could represent their movements accurately.

It was important to her to infuse the image - which is actually made up of 20 separate panels - with as much reality as she could, while making it feel light and ethereal-like a stained glass window.

Mother Joanna worked six days a week, and during the three years it took her, she underwent two bouts of hip surgery. She would paint in the mornings, after prayers. 'By the time you get to work you've already done five hours of praying. And believe it or not, praying is actually quite hard work, too,' she says.

Yet Mother Joanna does not sound bitter, or in any way regretful about her choices.

Her adventure into what most of us call 'the real world' has given her a unique perspective on modern life, and she counts herself extraordinarily lucky.

At 79, as she embarks on a new commission, a painting for a London based order of nuns, she is infused not just with wisdom, but also a girlish passion for her work.

'So many people in the world are just rushing, rushing, rushing,' she says. 'People are under tremendous stress because of the pace of life and the bureaucracy that cripples everything. Life can get a bit smoth­ered sometimes, I think.

'People feel they want to break out of it all. Painting is, for me, part of that reflective process.'

And with that, she heads back to her studio.

http://www.stanbrookabbey.org.uk/upload/files/JN38306_A5%20Newsletter%20File%20Copy.pdf

Devon, Buckfast Abbey Church - Building the North Porch in the 1910's - with stone masons at work