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Calm and Contemplation: 'The Still Hours' at York Minster
Published: on 26th September 2008 by Martin Sheppard in Minster News
The Still Hours, a national touring exhibition of still life paintings, will be on show in York Minster from Monday 29 September until Monday 27 October, 2008.
The genre of still life has long been an important stimulus to meditation in European culture. The Still Hours expands this traditional function within a contemporary form.
The Still Hours are the work of the Cambridge based painter D.F.S. Stubbs (www.dfsstubbs.com). For this cycle of paintings, grouped into powerful polyptychs, the artist has drawn inspiration from the medieval Book of Hours where the hours of day and night were given liturgical significance. Each painting communicates different moods associated with certain periods of day or night.
To prompt reflection upon the experience of human life bounded by time, Stubbs uses the familiar European symbols of candles, skulls and empty shells alongside stones, pebbles and blocks of cast plaster. In some Asian traditions stones and rocks are understood as being symbols of the universe and also as particularly beautiful or precious in an aesthetic sense. In an age of increasing awareness of other cultures and their religious traditions, the artist thus contributes to a positive inter-cultural dialogue through the use of symbols in his painting to various Asian traditions: an attempt to reach the core of our common humanity.
Stillness is not part of contemporary life, yet Stubbs’ paintings possess an immediate ability to calm the viewer to contemplation; to give an uplifting break from the constant motion of modern life. The paintings are ‘still-lives’ and provoke reflection. They are also works of great beauty; rich in colour and finely painted in a realist manner, yet with abstract qualities in the use of light and form. They are significant works.