Heaven in Ordinary, By Malcolm Doney

In December 2024 we unveiled the painting ‘Red Herring’ at St Luke’s, a work commissioned in honour of the Rev Tim Pigrem who was vicar of the parish of St Luke’s West Holloway for more than twenty years until the early 1990’s.

We also invited Malcolm Doney, the painter of Red Herring, to speak in our morning service.

My very good friend Martin Wroe and I have spent many hours working together. I am in awe of him. He is my writing wife, husband, companion . . . whatever. But we’re very different. For a start, he’s big and I’m little. And that also goes for how we think and write, and how I paint. Martin’s like Aaron Sorkin, who wrote The West Wing, The Newsroom and A Few Good Men. He thinks expansive, global, blue sky. I’m Alan Bennett: domestic, small-scale.

But there are benefits in being a short-arse: in having a limited perspective. I’ve discovered – by instinct rather than by intention – the richness, the sacredness even, of the everyday. I’m not saying Martin hasn’t, by the way. It’s just that’s it’s become my thing.

This was helped by Meryl and my decision 15 years ago to move to the East Coast. There, we’re surrounded by different forms of landscape and seascape: heath, woodland, marsh, wetland, foreshore, but – being a townie – I didn’t really know what I was looking at. This ignorance of the natural world isn’t uncommon, says the nature writer Robert Macfarlane: “The terrain beyond the city fringe has become progressively more known in terms of larger generic units (‘field’, ‘hill’, ‘valley’, ‘wood’). It has become a blandscape.”

My general ignorance prompted me to pay more attention to the particular. What was in front of me. Not just the landscape, but also the particularities of everyday life. I began to see things differently. Thing is, I’d spent my entire childhood drawing, and went to art school at the age of 16. Ended up studying painting at St Martin’s school of Art, (now Central St Martin’s). But I lost my way (that’s a story for another time). 

I ended up as a writer, because I was better at explaining things rather than doing them. Art took a back seat, but haunted me the whole time. It was the bit of me that was missing. It was the heart which was the other side to my head.

Moving to the country, and making a studio, dovetailed with something else. This was a growing recognition which had broken surface back when I was here in Holloway, and that was that God was not some distant, separate, interventionist almighty who had a plan and purpose for my life., but rather a presence who was somehow interwoven in the warp and weft of the universe. There are lots of theological words for this but, in essence, we’re talking about a sense of sacredness or divinity which is at the very heart of everything – right from the itsy-bitsy-ness of the sub-atomic to the vast expanse of the multiverse.

Whoever wrote Psalm 19 got this: ‘The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.” But this message isn’t explicit, or spelt-out. He or she puts it beautifully: “There is no speech, nor are there words; their voice is not heard. yet their voice goes out through all the earth”.

You can’t pin down, you can’t contain, you can’t be forensic about the voice or nature of God, the sacred. It’s like an undercurrent, a tang, a loose thread. And it reveals itself to us in a sense of wonder, a distant melody.

When I returned to painting, I felt the need start with what was looking at me. But not the big Suffolk skies, the roiling waves, the sweep of the reeds. They were too daunting, too ‘other’. I started with things that were more domestic: a frying pan or a colander, a tin shed, a chicken hut.

By instinct, by accident, I found a kind of holiness in these things. It arrived in the iridescence of a fish’s scales, in the rust on a corrugated iron roof, in the flaking paint of a weathered caravan This morning, walking down Corporation Street with Doris the dog, I came across a large, galvanised rubbish bin on wheels. It inspired me. The metaphysical poet and priest George Herbert had a term for this. He called it “heaven in ordinary”. This is credal for me.

One of my favourite words is vernacular. It’s about the everyday, the quotidian. It’s become the seam that I mine. I do a lot of what might be called ‘still lifes’: objects on a table. The French have a terrible term for this, they call the genre Nature Morte: dead nature. Nothing could be further from the truth. These items are infused with life, they are enchanted.

I like to take things which are undervalued, and make them the centre of attention. The humble lifted high, as the Magnificat phrases it. Seamus Heaney does this much better than I could, in that poem Mint.

Mint is: “Unverdant ever, almost beneath notice”, he writes:

My last things will be first things slipping from me.

Yet let all things go free that have survived.

Let the smells of mint go heady and defenceless

Like inmates liberated in that yard.

Like the disregarded ones we turned against

Because we’d failed them by our disregard.

I recently came across Bengali ‘widow cuisine’. Traditionally in patriarchal Bengali culture, widows were marginalised, non-people, and forbidden to use certain, richer ingredients, and were restricted to vegetarian niramish dishes. But, inevitably, they found creative ways of making use of the discarded: roots, shoots, stems and peelings to make dishes that are now prized for their flavour.

Herring, for years, was the food of the poor. Great shoals of them could be caught off Great Yarmouth, near where I come from, until over-fishing destroyed their populations. Silver darlings they were called. A red herring was one that was cured, or smoked, which took it out of the ordinary, gave it a piquancy, a kick.

It delights me that there’s something so right, so biblical, about the essence of the vernacular. Jesus of Nazareth made a habit of saying that the last would be first, that the stone rejected by the builder would be the very one that held the building together. This is at the heart of his deep-rooted love and compassion for the poor and the outcast.

The older I get; the more I learn about living, the more I realise that this world is a magical, enchanted, mysterious place, bursting with consciousness and energy at every level. Here we are, in the season of Advent when we think of embodiment, incarnation, of ‘God with us’. The holy is right under our noses. In the shed, in the kitchen, under the sea.