About the Artist and the Work

Studio Louis presents the religious art and studio practice of Glenn Louis Francis Lowcock sfo.

About the Artist

My childhood years were spent in Wharfedale, a picturesque valley in Yorkshire with small towns bordered by hills of broad open moorland. Growing up in such a place formed in me a real and close connection with the natural world and landscape especially has been a source of inspiration ever since.

I always wanted to be a painter and while still in my teens I also became very interested in the materials and techniques of painting. I then went to study at The Central School of Art and Design in London and after completing a degree in Fine-Art Painting, the work continued to develop in my ongoing practice. Interests changed and moved from painting to the photographic and printmaking then back again. It has been broadly exhibited, from private galleries to the Royal Festival Hall in London, as well as in a range of European galleries.

I am very fortunate indeed that I now live and work amid the beauty of the rural landscape of East Sussex. I find the seasonal colours never fail to inspire and always bring a fresh new life to my art.

My work includes unique printmaking, drawing, experimental photographic printing, and painting in oils as displayed on this site. I have also taught Painting and Drawing in Adult Education in Sussex.

It will be apparent from the work displayed that the subject matter chosen is faith based and religious in type. I am a Roman Catholic and a Franciscan, belonging to the Secular Franciscan Order. In other words, a Franciscan who seeks to live the Gospel life, not within a religious community but in a secular state and a framework of Franciscan Fraternity.

St Francis is, I believe, the example of how to live our lives today. It is a way of love and praise for our Creator as encountered in all living things. To be a Franciscan is to have taken a vocational promise to do what each of us are able to help build the Kingdom of God here in this world. As St Francis exhorts us, “I have done what was mine to do, may Christ teach you what you are to do”.

In some small way I trust that by offering these works for use in private or public devotion, we may be brought closer to the heart of our ever living, ever loving God.

About the Work

Being interested in art as well as the history of art I always try to visit galleries wherever I travel. Galleries provide a wonderful opportunity to view some of the best artworks in the world and are available to everyone. They display art that was formerly the prerogative of only the wealthy, yet for the price of an entrance ticket we can all look upon truly great paintings.

This is not however, the whole story. Paintings once belonging to stately living are but one strand in the history of art: far more important are the works produced for the glory of God of which so many have until recently been part of everyone’s lives, displayed in the churches and cathedrals of Europe. Now these too are largely to be found in our galleries and museums and so no longer function as intended: to deepen personal and communal faith. Churches remain and the faithful remain but for its own safe keeping visual art is largely absent.

Churches and believers today have little choice but to rely on paper reproductions of the great works of Christian Faith while the paintings themselves languish in our galleries, presented to the visitor as a series of valuable artefacts from a bygone age.

But today as ever before, art and faith remain intrinsically linked. In Christ God was made man. … And each of us are made in the image of God. God entered into the world in which we live and the world was graced.¹ We hear and see and feel the presence of our Lord through the means we have been given to receive Him: ears, eyes, and heart.² Christianity and imagery are partners in Faith, and the place of religious art is to embody, display and disseminate that Faith.³

Art has a clear parallel to the written word. Visual art shows the Word of God as being physically present in the world and helps us see the divine and the worldly as but differing faces of the same cosmic pattern.⁴

This is the tradition in which the work displayed here is presented. Each painting closely follows the pattern of an existing iconic work in a way that the dignity of the original is preserved. The intention is not to slavishly copy but to transcribe and re-present the source from Christian Tradition in order that new and old are combined and will speak again to people alive in their Faith today.

In this way it is distinct from most contemporary art. It does not seek the new or the ‘never seen before’ but looks instead to traditional forms as the known and certain repositories of God’s Spirit given visual form. This practice which has been the heart of religious art for centuries and dates back to before the 8th century, when St John of Damascus produced his defence of sacred imagery during the age of Iconoclasm. For St John art is created within a language of Church Tradition⁵ and is an effective tool by which the revealed Spirit of God is conveyed within a context of faith. While the artist is asked to create something personal the work is to be made in the spirit of a humble copyist. It is for the artist to make himself available in the process of ‘making new again’.

The originals upon which these paintings have been based all belong to that body of historical and heartfelt images that in some way we already ’know’ yet, galleries apart, we no longer live amongst. They properly belong at home both in the sacred buildings we visit and in the places of our everyday lives.

This is the understanding behind the work shown here. As a violinist is the vital link between composer and listener, playing a piece to the best of his creative ability, so I look to be one small part in the long lineage of painters whose task is to convey these sacred images to generations of audiences.