AT PORTSMOUTH CATHEDRAL this year, we have had Nicholas Mynheer’s Sarum Cycle on display in the nave, making the 13 paintings the theme of our Lent course. They follow the action of Holy Week and Easter, from Palm Sunday to Jesus’s recall of Peter after the resurrection (Faith feature, 17 April 2014). Mynheer includes written comments on his paintings and appropriate verses from the psalms.
They are extraordinary, and some of our visitors and congregation found them impossible. They are not representational: the figures are cartoon-like, with flat stone-like faces, eyes that often appear closed, and thick-limbed bodies. They storm through the canvas while buildings, trees, fields, and clouds heave and curl around them. Jerusalem sucks Christ in on Palm Sunday, as Zacchaeus watches from above. The Last Supper takes place on a balcony under a spreading vine. The leader of the mob on the way to the crucifixion bears an astonishing, if unintended, likeness to Donald Trump. The crucifixion is reduced to a blue pierced torso against a bloody sky.
Four of the paintings are of the dead Christ. Mynheer offers an interpretation of two conventional themes: the deposition of Christ’s body from the cross, and a moving pietà, which shows Mary cradling Christ as if he were a child. These are followed by Christ’s body being “planted” as a seed in the ground, and, my favourite, simply called The Stillness, an evocation of Holy Saturday. A stark bare tree stands in a winter landscape. A single green leaf shoots out as the shrouded Christ lies in the earth.
Mynheer has had many commissions from churches and cathedrals. The Sarum Cycle is the product of his deep Christian faith. He is currently working on a series of paintings in response to the refugee crisis. One, which I have seen, depicts the Holy Family departing for Egypt through a snowstorm.
What I love about Mynheer’s work is that he helps us to see differently. Movement and stillness, brutality and the deepest tenderness, terror and grief are all part of the Holy Week story. What surprised me was that I found the most terrifying picture in the cycle was not the cross, but Easter morning. The two angels in the tomb are not fair young men with white wings, but figures made of fire, orange and yellow, and they appear to be yelling almost angrily at the women that “He is not here.”
Contemplating a sermon for Easter morning, I realised how easy it is to be sentimental at Easter, to associate the feast chiefly with springtime and the cycle of nature. But, if the implications of Holy Week and Easter are cosmic, as Mynheer’s images suggest, we should also remember that Easter is a breakthrough of a reality beyond our experience or imagination. He is not here, but ahead of us. Always.