Nathaniel (asleep under the fig tree)
Mark Cazalet (1964- )

Oil on paper

1993

Methodist Collection of Modern Christian Art, No.4

Commentary by Francis Hoyland

First, these are desirable objects: I long to pick them up and sample the delicious texture of the handmade paper with my fingers. One side would be matt, textured and dry and the other glossy, smoother and rich.

The oddly irregular regularity of the squares of paper has obviously stimulated Cazalet's sense of design and enabled him to 'see' his figures and other forms within the paper before he touched it with paint.

It seems to me that this process of 'seeing' forms and then putting lines round them and filling them with colour is a very ancient one, for isn't this just what the ice age masters were doing on the walls of their caves? They were 'releasing' something that they felt was already there.

Michaelangelo used to speak of 'releasing' a figure from a marble block and Leonardo da Vinci tells artists to look at a mouldy wall or to throw a sponge filled with ink at a wall in order to stimulate themselves into 'seeing' battles and other events.

The English watercolour artist Cozens used to start his painting by making blots of ink or water colour on paper and then 'seeing' landscapes there. Bur surely this process is more fundamental than that for when one draws from nature, one looks at the subject and then at ones paper before making a line. Indeed this ''seeing' seems fundamental to the practice of visual art.

These paintings are compact, the forms dominate the space of the area they are painted on. When I was a student of Victor Passmore he used to make me decide before I started a work whether the form dominated the space or the space dominated the form.

Here we find Mark going for form on both occasions. The delight that he finds as he applies his rich paint to his dry paper comes to me at full force as I look at these works. It is not only seeing ahead of what one does that matters but what one sees as one does it.

The doing reveals the next thing to be done, the doing is done with rich paint that has its own momentum and its richness is in a state of potentiality to the next act. The lovely chord of five nameable colours; red, pale and dark green, brown and cream sounds together with great resonance. We 'read' the picture by empathising with Mark Cazalet's acts of making.

Nathaniel lies foetus-like curled up under his tree without disguise and without deceit. Our Lord will make a great leader from this foetus! The beautifully drawn tree - had Mark slipped out to draw a real one? - is the tree from Eden and of the Cross - an image of temptation and salvation - it can go either way and remember, another fig tree which symbolised Israel was withered by God's curse.

Nathaniel still unconscious will have to choose. But this is a picture of what Jesus sees. "I saw you under the fig tree." This is a daring thing to do for Mark has seen onto his paper something Our Lord saw in his omnipotence.