DAVID SOMERVILLE

Stations of the Cross

St Mary Aldermary, London – Exhibition

 

This series of paintings took twenty-nine years to complete, from 1997 to 2026. It reimagines the traditional Stations of the Cross and culminates with a final, vital image: the Resurrection. The works are displayed at St Mary Aldermary, a church with a layered history that mirrors the paintings’ reworked surfaces.

 

I am a Black British artist of Caribbean heritage based in London. I began the Stations in 1997 and completed them in 2026—a twenty-nine-year journey of painting, erasing, and reworking each canvas. The series portrays Christ’s journey from condemnation to burial and beyond, with fifteen stations instead of the usual fourteen, culminating in the Resurrection. Each piece is a palimpsest:layers of questions, changes, and memories revealed. My primary concern is what occurs in the space between what we see and what we remember—the gap between a clear figure and its fade into colour and gesture. My Christian faith quietly underpins this exploration, guiding the work over time.

 

The Stations of the Cross originated from medieval devotional practices and pilgrimage routes that allowed believers to follow Christ’s Passion without travelling to Jerusalem. By the eighteenth century, they had mainly been standardised into fourteen stations, from condemnation to burial, with a customary stop at the tomb. In the late twentieth century, some communities began adding a fifteenth station, the Resurrection, recognising that the story moves from death to transformation and hope. My fifteen-station series reflects this expanded Scriptural understanding, progressing from suffering to the risen Christ.

 

The project was initiated with the aim of allowing people to experience the Passion rather than just observe its representation. Influences include Henri Matisse’s Chapel of the Rosary in Vence – its light, simplicity, and spiritual strength that go beyond mere visual impact – and Catholic chapels in London, notably Notre-Dame de France near Leicester Square, whose Stations of the Cross I photographed and sketched to understand the narrative rhythm. The work also engages with artists such as Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, whose incorporation of Christian imagery within Modernism and Postmodernism – and Basquiat’s strong Black cultural perspective – illustrates how faith, history, and contemporary culture can intersect.

 

For this series, I limited the colour palette to a few shades to ensure that colour holds emotional and spiritual significance. The painting process is inspired by Chinese calligraphy, involving the addition and removal of marks to reveal multiple layers. These are not literal depictions of each station but fragments of experience – glimpses of suffering, compassion, vulnerability, and hope. Over time, the series shifted towards abstraction, then returned to figuration, repeatedly revisiting the Crucifixion and eventually expanding into larger Crucifixion paintings.

 

The setting at St Mary Aldermary is crucial to the work. On Thursday, 5 February 2026, I believed the fourteen stations were complete and was still uncertain about a fifteenth. I met Revd Paul Kennedy, the priest in charge at St Mary Aldermary in Bow Lane, who invited me to exhibit in this remarkable church. St Mary Aldermary is often described as the only one of Sir Christopher Wren’s City churches rebuilt in a predominantly Gothic style after the Great Fire of 1666. In an unusual move, Wren preserved and reinterpreted the medieval Perpendicular Gothic character rather than adopting his more familiar Baroque style. The church blends medieval devotion with Enlightenment reconstruction – a building bridging two eras.

 

During this project, the church also hosted a Moldovan Orthodox congregation. In their area, I observed a small altar featuring an image of Jesus with raised arms, flanked by angels. Humble and simple, this image moved me profoundly and marked the final missing station: the Resurrection.That moment in this ecumenical space – Anglican and Orthodox, ancient and modern – provided the last image the series needed.

 

The Resurrection painting emerging from this encounter features complementary colours—red, green, white, and black—with yellow, green, red, and white suggesting uplift. A white sun appearson a black mixed-shape square, while splashes of blue on a yellow ground evoke sunlight. The style echoes Matisse’s figures in Vence. This fifteenth station revisits my earliest ideas for the project and concludes the journey from darkness into light.

 

Completing this series after twenty-nine years feels like a true conclusion. Wren’s Gothic reconstruction at St Mary Aldermary offers an ideal setting for the work. It honours what came before while introducing something new – just as my canvases hold earlier layers beneath their surfaces. The presence of the Moldovan Orthodox community adds another visual and liturgical dimension of faith. A small Orthodox icon of the risen Christ reminded me why I started: not to make grand theological statements, but to find a visual language for faith, doubt, suffering, and hope together.

 

Other encounters along the way confirmed I was not working in isolation. A fifteenth-century altarpiece linked to Pesellino and Lippi, which I later saw in the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery, reflects many of the same formal and spiritual questions. Hidden churches in the city, such as St Mary Moorfields, offered pockets of tranquillity within commercial London, balancing public visibility with private devotion.

 

These works reside at a boundary: between abstraction and figuration, between pure sensation and recognisable form. In this liminal space, painting can evoke a spiritual experience – where what we see, remember, know, and feel begin to overlap. The series encourages viewers to pause and reflect on their own journeys of faith, doubt, loss, and hope reflected in these images.

 

David Somerville,London,2026

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