MEG LAWRENCE AND HER WORK

Meg Lawrence, best known for her stained-glass windows, is now also working in egg-tempera and gilding on wood. She was born in Kent in 1953 and, for the last twenty-five years, has devoted herself to the study of sacred art. Whilst her work is strikingly original and compelling, she is unusual amongst present-day ecclesiastical artists in her passionate adherence to Christian iconography and figurative images and her dependence on sound drawing technique. In her work, she makes use, throughout, of studies fom the life-model, drapery and foliage and she incorporates symbolism, decorative motifs and architectural details taking inspiration from the long tradition of Christian art.

Meg's most recent commissions include The Parable of the Lost Coin and The Parable of the Lost Sheep for Ormesby, Norfolk, in 2002 and The Angels and Women at the Tomb for Eastbourne, Sussex in 2003. The egg-tempera and gilded painting Christ with Saints and Archangels for All Saints' Church, Poplar was completed in 2004. She is currently employed on windows for churches in Shepherd's Bush, London and Ballybay, County Monaghan and also for a little drovers' church in the Sussex Downs.

It is fashionable within the Church to talk of the need for artefacts or music to be of our time. Meg believes that this stems from an embarrassment in facing up to the opposite concept, that of timelessness. She has a great admiration for the painter John Ward, who once said in an interview, "if art is not timeless, it is worthless". She feels that, in recent years, the case is being convincingly argued for the importance of academic drawing skills and faultless craftsmanship.

One of her prime motivations is her love and respect for Parish Church architecture and traditional liturgy. She has said that she hopes to be able to contribute to, and in a small way to become a part of, the great tradition of expressing belief through Christian iconography.

Whilst at Canterbury, the Cathedral and its architecture, stained glass, music and pattern of worship were to become important influences on her life and her work. In 1998, the invitation to carry out a prolonged programme of conservation on the scheme of Pugin windows at St. Paul's Church, Brighton introduced her to the rich traditions of the Anglo-Catholic church and its art and liturgy.

Since moving from Canterbury in 1995, she has lived, together with her husband and three children, in a remote farmhouse set in the beautiful hills of Radnorshire. A fast-running brook flows through oak woodland right alongside her studio. There, she is in daily contact with the awesome landscape in all its moods and with its abundance of birds and animals. In these surroundings of utter peace and quiet, in the extremes of Welsh weather or beneath clear starlit skies, she is able to indulge and develop her other great love that of closeness to the created world and all of this is central in enabling her to paint.

Amongst the other conscious influences on Meg's work is her deep respect for the creativity of the architects, designers, cartoonists, glass painters and muralists of the Gothic Revival and their scholarly approach to iconography. Alongside her commissions for original work, she also, until five years ago, had the discipline of working in stained glass conservation and thereby gained an unparalleled knowledge of the styles of work of many of the great stained-glass artists of the past one-hundred-and-fifty years. Her most dramatic achievement in this area was in 1990/92, when she took on the unprecedented challenge of recreating, in an archaeologically correct style, the large West window of 1850, by Pugin, at St. Paul's Church, Brighton. This had been deliberately mutilated in the 1950s, retaining only the figures of the Saints and destroying Pugin's minutely-detailed decorative backgrounds. Due to the large number of commissions for new work, she now no longer undertakes conservation.

Another era of ecclesiastical art in which Meg is greatly interested is the Arts & Crafts movement both in London and Dublin, but she feels little sympathy with most of the developments since that time, feeling ill-at-ease with abstraction, with consciously primitive drawing, experimental techniques, passing fashions and any form of commercialism.

Meg Lawrence is acutely aware that a work of ecclesiastical art must not be conceived as a picture at an exhibition. She attends closely to its architectural function, its religious function, its liturgical location within the church and its role as a spiritual image. The key to her approach is a standpoint of essential humility and discipline, an adherence to precedents and a belief that any self-expression is to be strictly circumscribed. In this way she hopes that there will be the possibility for profound qualities to be distilled into the work of art and for these qualities to be communicated to the beholder, the worshipper or the church visitor.

An eight-page illustrated article about Meg's work was published in the Winter 2001/2 number of the Quarterly of the Stained Glass Association of America. A picture of one of her windows also appeared on the front cover. The article was written by Dr. Nicola Gordon Bowe, the leading art-historian and biographer of Harry Clarke. For more information on this, visit www.stainedglass.org.