Art Need Not Be Sacred to Inspire

My parish church was closed recently for repairs  and masses were held in a meeting room next door. It was a basic place without the slightest trace of spirituality. A table was quickly transformed into an altar, a cross and a plaster statue of Our Lady placed alongside and that was it. Between 20 and 30 of us crowded in and attended daily mass for a week.

However, when we returned to our elaborate baroque chapel with its lovely paintings and carvings I kept thinking of the simple place where the only artistic touches were two posters someone had put up behind the impromptu altar.  

One was van Gogh´s Wheat Field Behind Saint-Paul Hospital with a Reaper and the other was by Paul Klee although I have been unable to find out its name.

Neither painting was obviously religious but I found they harmonized perfectly with our services and I spent a lot of time examining them in detail. Sure enough I started reading religious significance into them and they became a launching pad for meditation.

The van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam has this to say about Wheat Field Behind Saint-Paul Hospital with a Reaper, “The reaper labors in the heat of the sun. The wheat, painted with thick gobs of yellow, undulates around him. For Van Gogh, wheat was a symbol of the eternal cycle of nature and the transience of life. He saw the reaper as 'the image of death . . . in this sense that humanity would be the wheat being reaped.'”

This puzzled me. If van Gogh meant to portray a sinister figure of death why did he make the painting radiate so much life? The color is so intense you feel you need sunglasses. It presents a vast golden field with the corn spread under a yellow sky and giant sun which blazes down like a host at the transubstantiation. The reaper stands alone in front of the swaying corn holding his sickle like Moses about to part the Red Sea with his rod.

I was reminded of the parable of the sower and how the crop represented the seed that fell on good soil and produced a harvest that was a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown. For me the reaper was not the image of death but God gathering in the souls of the faithful to lead them to eternal life.

The Klee painting is much more abstract but equally captivating and also set my mind wandering. The colors are more relaxing on the eye than van Gogh´s – beige, ochre, grey and cream, with symbols in green and reddish-brown. These show trees that look like the cross of Lorraine, arrows pointing downwards that could equally be plants sprouting upwards, a star above what could be a church close to what could be the moon in an eclipse.

The work looks like a cave painting, the kind our far distant ancestors made in their attempts to present the world they saw around them and understand it. There is nothing primitive or crude about it and it reflects our inner search for meaning in this world that is sometimes lit up with blinding life and at others darkened by destruction and death.

© John Brander Fitzpatrick 2025