Sister Wendy Beckett: A Tolkien connection and a hero of mine in the arts

The lives of great women and men sometimes seem to me like pebbles dropped into ponds; circles emanate out from them bringing new light and beauty to the world. The bright rings spreading outwards from J.R.R. Tolkien seem almost endless once you start looking into the water.

There is, of course, the famous case of C.S. Lewis, who credited his friend with assisting his conversion to Christianity, without which, we would never have gone through the wardrobe. Lesser known, though, is Tolkien's connection with Sister Wendy Beckett who attended Oxford and admired the professor who conducted her Viva Voce examination. Here, in this simple watercolor portrait of Sister Wendy Beckett, I am celebrating those ripples of genius that connect individuals and make life better for so many.

Sister Wendy at her caravan in the book Joy Lasts.

Sister Wendy was highly intelligent, and could have pursued a career as an academic, like Tolkien. Somewhere, in a resource I can no longer find, I read that Tolkien encouraged her to pursue this path, seeing her fine mind. If anyone can point me to this source, I would be extremely grateful. However, Sister chose her own path and became a consecrated Catholic hermit, living in a little trailer for decades on the property of a Carmelite monastery in Norfolk. Her life mainly consisted of silence and prayer, and she spent many years translating Medieval Latin manuscripts before she turned to the study of art.

For Sister Wendy, true joy was found in her life as a contemplative, but in a gesture of love and hope for the world, she made the sacrifice of leaving her cloister to begin sharing her art commentary with the world. I was a very young artist when her fabulous television program, The Story of Painting, aired on my local public TV station. She was so observant, humorous, opinionated, educated, surprising, and sincere. So many years later, I can see how Sister Wendy's work has influenced my own.

Artists can be funny people. We tend to see things in our own way, but what I learned from Sister was to see how other people can respond with such feeling to paintings. This helped me move from a place of only thinking of what I was doing in the own small world of my mind, to thinking about how my art might give happiness or fresh ideas or other good things to other people. Sister Wendy reacted with such exuberance and delight to art of all kinds and I found this inspiring. Often, when I have painted something, I have imagined how she might describe it if she saw it. This encourages me not just to paint, but to share what I am painting. I'm very grateful to her for the art history lessons, of course, but also for the added perspective that art sparks communication amongst people and can bring them together. I've had the most wonderful conversations with fellow Tolkien readers and received messages of great value to me from viewers of my work from around the world.

Sister Wendy and Professor Tolkien had several things in common. Both were born in South Africa. Both were clearly interested in Medievalism. Both belonged to the Catholic minority of England. I think they would have had plenty to say to one another.

And here is a final Tolkien connection. I've painted Sister standing in front of one of the Monet water lily masterpieces at the Orangerie in Paris. She loved these huge painted panels and said they made her feel like she was swimming in them. While Monet worked and worked on his water lilies at Giverny in the midst of the perils of WWI and his son was off fighting in battles like Verdun, J.R.R. Tolkien was just a few miles away, fighting in the battle of the Somme. Monet expressed his feelings of dismay that he should be focusing on painting light and color amid the horrors of war, but somehow, he felt that he must work at these scenes of peace. It was a kind of act of hope in hard times. Almost beyond hope, Tolkien survived the war and came home, and gave us Goldberry living in peace amid her water lilies with his own artistic gifts. If you look long enough at Monet's water lily canvases, perhaps you can see into Goldberry's realm.

If only the world were guided by artists and art-lovers who want nothing more than peace. I highly recommend looking on YouTube for Sister Wendy's Story of Painting videos and other programmes, especially if you are feeling fatigued from AI-generated imagery. You will see the work of the masters, hear their stories, and come away with a sense of the irreplaceable role of human genius and feeling in the history of the arts, whether we are talking about Monet's Waterlilies or Tolkien's fairy-stories. People are required!