Page 10 - For the purpose of this essay when I refer to ‘spirit’ ‘devine’ or ‘spirituality’ I am referring

and therefore evidence of the power of God. Turner was striving for expression of
spirituality in his works, rather than responding just to what he saw. The significance of
light in Turners later works in particular was the emanation of God's spirit. This is why
his objects became less solid and more atmospheric (Fig–5). As a regular visitor to the

annual Turner exhibition in the National Gallery, Dublin, I’ve seen first hand the power
of Turners work and although some are tiny in scale they command attention, capturing
the atmospheric and ethereal qualities of landscape. Despite their scale or indeed
perhaps because of it there is a precious, jewel like quality to his works, one senses
passion and veneration when viewing his work. It’s also obvious from seeing Turners
work that large scale paintings are by no means a prerequisite for capturing the vastness
and spirit of the landscape.
Julian Bell suggests this shift in emphasis in his book ‘What is Painting?
th
Representation and Modern Art’ that during the 18 century that emphasis gathered a
different conceptual weight, with a prominence towards the mental as opposed to the
external. Leading to a development of the philosophy of ‘aesthetics’ with theories
formulated about the specific experience of seeing painting, he writes, ‘Such
speculation led Romantic theorists to conceive of artists as bringing into being a realm
of ideal beauty – whether as agents of the divine, or out of their own ‘genius’. Beauty
was the good that art offered humanity, an experience of the truths of form that was
perfectly shaped and attuned to its mental and spiritual nature. Art thus tended to
become equivalent to the divine an end in itself’ (1999, p174).
Vincent Van Gogh spoke of this divine influence and the importance of ‘God’
within his and other great works of art, he also spoke of the higher self in the creative
process, of something greater outside of himself, but an intrinsic part of him, that
worked through him when he painted. Mark Roskill quotes Van Gogh in ‘The Letters
of Vincent Van Gogh’ (1993, p123-4) July 1880. ‘I think that everything that is really
good and beautiful, the inner,
moral, spiritual and sublime
beauty in men and their works,
comes from God’.....‘try to
grasp the essence of what the
great artists, the serious
masters, say in their
masterpieces, and you will
again find God in them’.
In exploring the
depiction of divinity or
spirituality in painting I
believe it is essential to
recognize and study the work
of Mark Rothko. His later
works recurrently consist of
floating rectangles of
shimmering colour on large Fig – 6. Rothko. The Chapel Series. Houston, Texas. (1971)
canvases that manage to simultaneously convey a deep sensuality and a profound
spirituality. ‘For art to me is an anecdote of the spirit, and the only means of making

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