Brian Whelan Artist Talk

  Posted on February 13, 2024  by admin  No comments

A Pilgrimage of Sight: Behold the Holy City.
A Speech given by Brian Whelan at the reception at St Paul’s on the Green on the 10th of February 2024

My thanks go to Rev. Daniel Simons for inviting me to show here and to Marsha Dunn and Audrey Cozzarin who helped organize the exhibition along with the hospitality team. Also, my wife Wendy who is always the engine behind all of my exhibitions. I would also like to thank everyone for coming here this afternoon.
Putting this show together posed some questions. What to call the show? What would be the title painting? How would this exhibition appear set against what happened and is happening in the Middle East? We chose Holy Ground for our theme and Holy City with Eclipse for our title painting, one of many imagined Holy Cities I have painted – a place where the idea of peace and harmony reigning supreme, may appear naïve. Child-like even. So I thought these paintings, need some explanation.

The “Holy Cities” that I have painted, I hope – speak to that which pilgrims have always sought – a place where one’s soul can find refuge and rest. These Holy City paintings provide a “pilgrimage of sight” and compel the viewer, to find their place, their access point, their moment within that sacred place. A place the human spirit so fervently desires, but which the human race, has not achieved.
The story that led me to what is now a whole collection of paintings, is in – and of itself, a pilgrim’s tale. Thirty years ago, eight elderly students were gathered together when I asked them if anyone had ever been to the “Holy City.” There was one who had, but this very one who could offer a description, preferred not to be reminded of it! So alas, seven students, a teacher, (that is myself), and one abstainer, used the afternoon to create the Holy City, not as remembered but as it was imagined!
Freed from the encumbrance of memory we were able to create a city which was vibrant in every manner of diversity. Church nestled into the side of mosque, contrary shapes yielding to one another, colors bright and radiant, walls impossible and eccentric as no building committee would have ever allowed; all flowed from the pilgrims’ hands as we playfully built our city on the foundation of paper, paint, glue,
scissors and the candy wrappers, taken from the chocolates we were eating at the time.
The abstainer in the group looked upon our glorious city and pronounced it as nothing like that which she had ever seen —  and so prophetically and innocently, proclaimed the very essence of what still draws me into the countless versions of the holy cities which I have painted. A city in which there is room for a myriad of expressions, coexisting with one another without apology, or the need to sacrifice those things which are distinctive and unique. Here is a city which is more organic than organized, living walls, breathing stones, animated structures which grow like the seed which has found the good soil. It is urban and conspicuously human, welcoming the stranger, yet has the feeling of a great forest which reaching toward heaven, begs for the pilgrim to come inside and explore what is concealed beneath its boughs.
For those of you who do not already know, much of my work, including the many houses of worship depicted in the holy city paintings, are “in part” created from the wrappers of various sweets and chocolates from around the world. Not only does this give the paintings luminosity, but it invites the pilgrim to understand that the structures themselves are merely a shell, inviting the pilgrim to move beyond the surface exterior – the foil wrappers of silvers, golds, blues and reds and to discover
the treasure which lies inside – a far more sensuous experience with the divine. The Holy City is more than Jerusalem, or Mecca, or Rome or Lhasa. The Holy City is the dream of humanity, and it is at the “heart of religious identity” to find those ‘thin places’ and thus confirm what we have always suspected, that there is more, that this life is but the wrapper, but only the wrapper of something much more.
We have to give ourselves permission to seek again the Holy City and to realize that it is nothing like that which we have seen. It is the destination for those pilgrims who still believe in the wonders of those things unseen, but which are not ‘un’ known to the human heart.
I have painted Holy Cities for all who dare to dream that there is hope, that there is more to life than just conflict and enemies and for those who still walk the ancient pilgrims’ path.