Stoke Newington artist Jeff Gibbons exhibits in Oxhey and Watford (From St Albans & Harpenden Review)

Stoke Newington artist Jeff Gibbons exhibits in Oxhey and Watford

4:42pm Thursday 11th March 2010 in

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Adornments inside our churches went out with Henry VIII so, save for some spectacular stained glass windows, our Christian places of worship have few embellishments. Perhaps this leads to a more contemplative frame of mind, but when every Italian church from the most humble shrine to the Sistine Chapel is so beautifully decorated, you can’t help but wonder if we’re missing out.

Stoke Newington artist Jeff Gibbons has been addressing this problem through a series of walk-in devotional paintings. To date, his major works include A Resurrection in St Michael’s and All Angels in Stoke Newington, Room Paintings, depicting the stations of the cross in Gloucester Cathedral and his latest exhibition, The Annunciation, which arrives in Oxhey at St Matthews Church next Thursday. The show marks a new departure for the church, which has never shown modern art before.

Jeff worked out of a barn in Tring called The Piggeries for eight years before moving to the back room of his local church.

Being mostly in excess of 13ft high and 6ft wide, Jeff’s paintings lend themselves to the lofty dimensions of churches but he points out their content is “not necessarily religious, the most important thing is trying to understand what’s intangible, not knowable.”

The paradox of Christianity is the craving to seek certainty from uncertainty

Jeff Gibbons

Jeff is exploring art in the wider context of its relationship to belief.

“I’m very interested in theology and how it has a relationship with painting”, explains Jeff. “Christianity is so ingrained in western culture that you can’t mistake its influence. It has had such a long relationship with painting, it seems inevitable to connect it but the paradox of Christianity is the craving to seek certainty from uncertainty.”

Perhaps in response to this uncertainty, there have been many depictions of The Annunciation – which shows the angel Gabriel announcing to Mary that she will be the mother of the child, Jesus.

“The Annunciation is the communication between the angel and Mary and you can see and feel it going on. Donatello’s relief sculpture of The Annunciation in Santa Croce, is an extraordinarily beautiful, scary piece that has a fairy tale element to it.”

Jeff’s Annunciation takes the form of 26 letters, written in the kind of easy to read script you’d find in a children’s nursery. It echoes tradition of huge wall paintings, sometimes with almost cartoon-like images and with words that could be easily read, that existed throughout the English church until the Reformation. Through the work, which is on such a large scale it can’t be taken in all at once, Jeff challenges our habit of making quick assumptions about works of art.

Using words as well as images, Jeff asks questions through his pictures. “Is painting alive or dead?”, he queries in a piece emblazoned with the words Past Painting, in red, Still Alive, in black, while the title Jeff Gibbons is dead... is scrawled in pencil in the corner.

Since he uses words so much, I wonder which comes first for him? The word or the image?

“The idea comes first,” says Jeff. “I do drawings and write in notebooks. It would be much better if I were a poet as I could just write it all down in a book.”

The exhibition runs from March 18-30, 10.30am to 4.30pm daily. Late nights: March 18, 6pm-8pm and March 25, 7pm-9pm at St Matthews Church, Eastbury Road, Oxhey (just behind Bushey Station). www.stmatthewsoxhey.org.uk

A selection of smaller works by Jeff are also on display in the foyer at Watford Museum until March 27. Open: Thursday-Saturday, 10am-5pm.