By Michael Hopkins
THIRD PLACE in March Competition
It was raining steadily, and the parking in Chaldon was dreadful. He had come for a committee meeting, his shoes already wet, but he was grateful for the promise of tea in a building that looked too small for eternity. Before the kettle boiled, someone suggested they see the Doom painting.
The church was colder than he expected. The stone held the chill of centuries. To see the painting properly, he had to stand on the pew. The image rose above him, narrow and crowded, its dark red and yellow ochres still vivid against the plaster. Figures climbed a ladder toward light; others were pulled downward, limbs twisted, mouths open. Judgement was not gentle. It was decisive.
He had not known it had once been hidden. Whitewashed over, its terrors erased, some figures hacked away beyond recovery. Devils lost. Human forms broken. Only later had colour re-emerged from beneath the lime, stubborn as a bruise beneath skin, the red returning where it had no right to remain. Even then, it had needed cleaning, conserving, hands patient enough to save what remained from damp and neglect.
He stayed longer than he meant to, aware of his breath clouding faintly in the air. The lines had softened with time. Faces blurred. The certainty the painting once proclaimed had thinned, yet the image endured. Eight hundred years earlier, someone had stood where he now stood, close enough to the plaster to touch it, grinding pigment and fixing this vision of consequence onto a west wall. Others, centuries later, had believed enough to uncover it again.
When he stepped down from the pew, the meeting would begin as planned: welcome, prayer, business. The rain still tapped at the windows. But beneath the faded ladder of souls, judgement felt less like threat and more like memory; and survival, quietly, like grace.
Judge’s Comments: Great specificity. The writing felt self-assured and conveyed a sense of place, as well as capturing the process of making art and conservation.
Inspired by Doom painting mural, Church of St Peter and St Paul, Chaldon, Surrey
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