Rectory notes – Colour! Exeter St David’s station waiting room, as I discovered whilst waiting for a train home to Feniton this week, is joyfully coloured at present. Children from Exwick Heights Primary School have made art to ‘Brighten Up Blue January’ for travellers. Colours splatter the display board. Uplifting words too – ‘Smile!’, ‘Be kind’, ‘Donut worry’.
Children aren’t the only ones who can do this. In a residential patch of Reading, round the corner from where we lived before moving to Devon and when recently visiting old friends, is vibrant street-art. Telephone junction-box art, even. Love and Joy throw themselves at passers-by. Graffiti can be good. Nearby is a brilliant Banksy picture of a prison escapee lowering himself down the wall of the former Reading gaol.
Nature joins the free art display too. A rainbow – featured in some of the Exwick children’s inspirations – is surely the original multi-coloured canvas. Splayed across the sky, it shouts Colour! Joy! Beauty! Surprise! Love, even! Needed so much by Noah and crew, as they emerged from the trauma and tragedy of a flood, to begin the hard task of recovery. So needed by us all.
Thank you to all artists – young and old, God too. You bring life that only you can, to brighten up a blue January or February or any time. May we encourage our own young people in their art, and those older too who perhaps had art bashed out of them when young – maybe even yourself. And may we each value the unique painting that is our own heart, that Love and Joy may flow in us.
