Easter Flowers - Mixed media, oil on acrylic

Just when we have grown weary of winter and are longing to see the sun rise up again into summer skies, there come the daffodils. "Daffodils," wrote William Shakespeare, "that come before the swallow dares, and take the winds of March with beauty."
Narcissus bulbs came to Britain with the Romans, and being particularly hardy, frost resistant, and deer and rodent proof, they survived in the wild and spread. By the 1200s they were being cultivated in English gardens, and by Elizabethan times celebrated in poetry. "Strew me the ground with daffadowndillies," wrote Edmund Spenser, with a playful affection we recognise today. And so that is what I have done here.
Flowers are such slight creatures, so utterly inconsiderable, so useless from a utilitarian perspective, so easily discarded or ignored, so trivial seemingly in themselves, and yet somehow also awesomely capable of turning human heads and moving human hearts. At weddings, at funerals, at birthdays, at arrivals and at departures we must give them and receive them, see them and smell them. Whenever we notice them, we love them. And of all the flowers the daffodil surprises us, I think, most of all because it heralds them all. It is the Very light that signals the attack of spring, and no matter how hard the counter strokes of winter redound upon it - biting frosts , sleet, or lashing rain - it is the daffodil that wins.

Lincoln cathedral, a corner of which is seen in the background of the painting, is one of the surviving marvels of mediaeval civilisation, a curious mixture of things earthly and sublime. Victorian art critic John Ruskin called it, "the most precious piece of architecture in the British Isles." William the Conqueror ordered its construction nearly a thousand years ago, and no expense was spared. At one time the cathedral possessed the tallest spire in Europe, and lands from the Humber to the Thames. Although that sort of State Christianity, funded and imposed from above by might and power was bound to end, some of its leaders were saintly men or perhaps nothing would now survive. Lincoln's most outstanding bishop, Grosseteste, concerned himself deeply with grass-roots matters, played a major role as a peacemaker in politics, nurtured the Franciscan revival in England from its first arrival in the 1220s, and somehow found time to pursue the observational work and empirical analyses that establish his reputation as the father of modern science. Despite his love for the magnificent building he helped create, he hated idolatry of wealth and power and would have been the first to point to a daffodil to remind us that not even Solomon in all his glory was dressed like one of these. For although a building may become an empty shell, it takes life to make a flower.
Although a cathedral seems to heave its ancient flanks up in the heart of a modern city like a stranded whale, or a beached ark of a bygone age, people still love to be near them. Their grounds grant not merely shelter from traffic, but precious human space. In a mute but majestic way these great old centres of community and worship still hallow the perennial search for beauty, goodness and truth, that lies in the heart of every person. They still offer a common centre to the human scene, a place of rest, a glimpse of continuity with ancient days, and a contemplative counterpoint to the cluttered urban sprawl. They are still mysterious places, surrounded it is easy to believe by soft echoes of olden prayers and the faint chanting of invisible choirs. Most of them these days have made a smiling accommodation with tourism, but to my mind the visitors from all over the world add a wonderful depth of meaning to their original purpose. Cathedrals were built to place the universal city of man at the feet of God.


So in this picture we see a little green landscape typically found beside an old English Cathedral, poised between winter and springtime's remaking of the world. The delicate tracery of unclothed branches is echoed by the arches in the Gothic windows, so that the eye can hardly distinguish where nature ends and art begins. At the moment we might still see the trees in their winter nakedness as bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang, but change is in the air. Already a rainbow has fallen among them.


It's a warm wind the west wind, call of bird's cries;
I never hear the west wind but tears are in my eyes.
For it comes from the west lands, the old brown hills,
And April's in the west wind, and daffodils. (John Masefield)

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