Column

Awe and wonder

Creed

Film & TV

Re-enchanting

4 March 2025

4 min read

The great pie mystery

Some unusual graffiti give insight into reality’s mysteries.

Jonathan Rowlands

Jonathan is a theology lecturer and Liverpool FC fan.

A green bridge spans a motorway, on its side is graffiti that reads 'PIES'

The view on the M6.

drgillybean, Creative Commons.

Do you have a favourite piece of graffiti? I used to.

If you're travelling on the M6 around Cheshire, at some point you’ll come to one of those green motorway bridges. And on the side of it, overlooking the tarmac, you'll see in massive writing the word “PIES”.

When I was a kid, I used to be fascinated by this. It raises so many questions. Who wrote the graffiti? How did they do it? Was this person in favour of pies or against them? Was it about all pies or just some pies? What had happened in this person's life to make them have such strong opinions about pastry?

And it was just me. For nearly 30 years, people were left nonplussed about the graffiti as more and more instances of it began to crop up across the North-West of England.

And then, in 2016, the mystery was solved. Apparently, it wasn't really to do with pies at all. It was all the result of a Liverpool band called The Pies trying to promote their music. After getting stuck on the motorway one day, they decided to write the name of their band on the side of the motorway bridge because, well, what else are you going to do when you’re broken down?

It's fair to say, I was a little bit gutted to learn about the origins of the graffiti.

What was once an intriguing mystery that kept me up at night and haunted my every thought (okay, perhaps a slight exaggeration) was revealed to be something so … boring. With hindsight, I wish I'd never learnt the truth about what happened. I thought wanted to know the origins of the pastry-based vandalism but, as they say, ignorance sometimes is bliss.

You see, we sometimes need a little bit of mystery in life.

Peel back the world in Lost or Westworld and you see there’s actually only a thin layer of reality masking a great chasm of nothingness.

This is evident in lots of different ways, but perhaps most apparent when it comes to entertainment and art. TV series Lost, for example, was a huge hit when it first came out. Why did the plane crash? What is the island? What is the smoke monster? Viewers were hooked and demanded answers.

But then answers came and everyone was upset. As Lost went through series after series, and explained more and more about what was happening, the audience slowly became more and more disenchanted with the program. The finale – where the programme’s biggest mysteries were finally revealed – was almost universally panned.

The same to be said of the recent HBO hit Westworld. Its first series was by far and away its best. But season two and three trailed off significantly as there was simply no mystery left in the programme after its spectacular first series. I wonder if this is precisely why the works of the late David Lynch were as compelling as they were? The still-incredible Twin Peaks holds up so well precisely because it categorically refuses to explain itself.

Elsewhere there is a growing tendency in video games, for example, for the narrative of the story to be hidden away, shrouded in mystery and atmosphere. Think of From Software games like Dark Souls and Elden Ring, massively successful in part because they are so mysterious. In both instances, it’s entirely possible to complete the game and have no clue whatsoever that there was even a story in the game, let alone to understand it. The player becomes captured by the mysteries of the worlds they find themselves in, and it’s these mysteries, rather than any answers, than compel them forwards.

The reason why programmes like Lost and Westworld begin to lose their allure as they explain more and more about their world is that this jars with the reality of the world around us. Peel back the world in Lost or Westworld and you see there’s actually only a thin layer of reality masking a great chasm of nothingness.

Peel back the world around us, however, and reality goes all the way down. And this is precisely what we would expect from a world created by a God, who is infinitely Infinite. Reality is not paper thin; goes all the way down. It is mysterious, unfathomable, and resists easy answers.

And so, when we get disappointing explanations about a plane crash in a TV programme, or the origins of our favourite graffiti, it rightly leaves us feeling unsatisfied. Because we are made to be at home in a world that is deeply real. We are made to be at home in a world where the reality has unfathomable, unimaginable depth to it. A world that cannot simply be explained away.

And this is why mystery is so important in our life. In the post-Enlightenment culture in which we find ourselves, a culture that demands every question be answered and every Scooby-Doo villain be unmasked, the notion of boundless mystery might seem somewhat disquieting.

But we are made for mystery. And this is why the best works of art trade more on the mysteries they introduce, rather than the answers that might be behind them. And this is why mystery can be found all around us. Even in a pie.

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Review

Art

Awe and wonder

Culture

13 February 2025

5 min read

Stanley Spencer’s seen and unseen world

The artist’s child-like sense of wonder saw heaven everywhere.

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A woman dressed in dark Victorian clothes sits on a street among angels.

Detail: Sarah Tubb and the Heavenly Visitors.

Stanley Spencer Gallery

The seen and the unseen are keys to the work of Stanley Spencer but, while imagination is required to bring them together, they are not real and imaginary, rather they are real and real.

The catalogue for Seeing the Unseen: Reality and Imagination in the Art of Stanley Spencer begins with a quote from Spencer’s writings:

“Everything has a sort of double meaning for me, there’s the ordinary, everyday meaning of things, and the imaginary meaning about it all, and I wanted to bring these things together.”

Writing as he does, Spencer draws on the thinking of William Blake and Samuel Taylor Coleridge who, as Malcolm Guite has shown, viewed the imagination as not only shaping and putting things together, as Spencer describes, but also removing the dull film of familiarity that we put over everything, to see it with freshness once again. That freshness being primarily, the innocent view of a child.

This exhibition brings together stunning examples of Spencer’s realistic works – his portraits and landscapes – which he often viewed as “potboilers” that merely paid the rent, and his biblical or symbolic works which had his heart and which, in his mind, formed a vast exhibition in a “church-house”. The curators, through their apt juxtapositions, compellingly demonstrate how Spencer brought together the seen and unseen in his work.

View from Cookham Bridge (1936) is a realistic work that shows us beautifully a summer’s day in an area of great meaning to Spencer. He set his magnificent but unfinished Christ Preaching at Cookham Regatta, which is permanently on show at the Gallery and towers above everything else in the exhibition, just downstream of Cookham Bridge. Christ Preaching at Cookham Regatta teems with people and incident while, in View from Cookham Bridge, there are no people to be seen. Yet, in this painting, Spencer enables us to feel their presence – hearing the ducks and splash of oars, the chatter of people – thereby leading us to visualise the unseen.

Spencer’s biblical and symbolic images are primarily set within Cookham, as the village itself suggested settings for specific scenes to him. The Betrayal is set at the end of Spencer’s own garden where the distinctive buildings of the maltings can be seen in the background. The Last Supper is then set in those same maltings, while Sarah Tubb and the Heavenly Visitors is set in the garden of Sarah Tubb’s home on Cookham High Street. Through this means Spencer emphasises both the universality and particularity of the Bible’s stories, in that they can be reimagined or reenacted anywhere and in the humblest of settings.

Heaven in ordinary is a particular response to the incarnation – God moving into our neighbourhood – and is one that Spencer pushed to particular lengths, as is shown here through images from his Beatitudes of Love series. The Beatitudes are where Jesus turns our expectations of worldly success and achievement upside down by teaching that it is the meek and humble, the persecuted and those grieving who are blessed in God’s eyes and kingdom. In his Beatitudes of Love, Spencer demonstrates God’s acceptance of all by turning our expectations of beauty upside down and deliberately giving us characters who seem grotesque as those we are asked to admire and love.

In doing so, he is also showing his retention of a child-like vision of the world as, from the perspective of a child, all adults are large, lumpy and disproportioned. Unlike a later great religious artist, Albert Herbert, who escaped from the limitations of adult vision by deliberately painting in a child-like manner, Spencer painted with a child-like vision. This can be seen in Christ Preaching at Cookham Regatta where his child-like Christ is both rotund but wonderfully energetic as he leans forcefully forwards from his wicker chair to engage with a group of children who are responding in the range of ways that children do, from attention and captivation to distraction and disinterest.

His child-like vision and understanding are perhaps most clearly seen here in one of a series of pen and ink drawings undertaken for an almanack published by Chatto and Windus. These were domestic scenes illustrating the months of the year. The image for July is of his first wife Hilda smelling a flower. This is not an image of refined woman delicately savouring a pleasant odour, instead Hilda’s face is buried in the daisy, nose against pistil, as a child gaining the fullest experience possible.

Blake was eight years old when he first saw angels in trees on Peckham Rye. Similarly, Spencer developed his sense of Cookham as a village in heaven in childhood. He never lost that child-like vision, although at times he questioned whether it had been successfully retained. Despite many poor choices and challenging life experiences, the works shown here reveal that Spencer carried a child-like sense of wonder through his life and work and, as a result, left as his legacy the deepest and broadest vision of heaven in ordinary that any artist has been able to gift to us.

While his dream of a literal church-house in which to house his complete oeuvre was never a realisable aim, his works, taken as a whole, provide a key with which open a door allowing us to see what church and home, heaven and village, are together. Although small in size and therefore able to only show a minimal percentage of Spencer’s work at any one time, the Stanley Spencer Gallery, housed as it is in a former Wesleyan Chapel, creatively operates as a diminutive church-house for Stanley’s works, taking us deeper into his unique achievement one exhibition at a time.

SEEING THE UNSEEN: Reality and Imagination in the Art of Stanley Spencer, Stanley Spencer Gallery, Cookham, 7 November 2024 – 30 March 2025