COMMENT: Saint Ignatius of Loyola (+ 1556)Farm Street is one of a series inspired by worship at Farm Street, a Jesuit Church in central London.

COMMENT: Art Essay.

Saint Ignatius of Loyola (+ 1556)

Sister Wendy Beckett

The Story of Painting
Dorling Kindersley London 1994 

p. 388 EPILOGUE

Robert Natkin, Farm Street, 1991

This is both an afterword and a foreword: hundreds and thousands of artists come after the disappearance of the "story line" into the maze of contemporary artistic experience and these same artists may of course be the forerunners of a new story. In the present context of the end of the century it is impossible to know which threads will lead us through the maze and which are in fact dead-ends. I can only then give a very personal, subjective sample of contemporary art and single out just three artists who I hope will endure.

 

Robert Natkin, Farm Street, 1991inspired by worship at Farm Street, a Jesuit Church in central London

One - Robert Natkin - is a senior artist and a supreme colourist who has up until recently resisted being called an abstract painter. Clearly, to Natkin every part of his canvas is vital with what he calls narrative interest. A communication is being made, visually - an experience is being enacted; but this event, so searching and enriching to the spirit, is carried out by means of shapes and colours, integrating into a wholeness. Natkin floats his colours on, denies them, deepens them, teases them into new complexities, always with a masterly elegance that is overwhelmingly beautiful. Farm Street (453) is one of a series inspired by worship at Farm Street, a Jesuit Church in central London. The picture offers the viewer an entry into worship, not just the painter's but our own.

It is a humbling and uplifting work, with its wonderful luminosities. Yet Natkin offends many critics by being too beautiful, purity being suspect in these days of dilemma.