‘Innovation is not enough’: meet visionary English painter Roger Wagner

In the side chapel of the church of St Giles’, at the northern apex of the historic Oxford thoroughfare, hangs a remarkable painting. ‘Menorah’ (1993) depicts the (now demolished) Didcot power station with its six massive cooling towers and central chimney stack as the setting for the crucifixion; Christ and the two thieves are set against the minatory bulk of the huge industrial buildings while other figures, lamenting and covering their faces, occupy the foreground. It is haunting and profound, an appalling vision but also a beautifully realised one – the work of a master of his craft.

For Wagner, art should never be ‘one person thick’. He believes in ideas handed down through the centuries

Roger Wagner, who painted it, is an Oxford man; he was educated at Lincoln College and has lived in the city ever since and the inspiration for the painting will be easily understood by anyone who ever travelled on the Oxford to Paddington line. Didcot power station used to be a familiar landmark on the way (until the drive for net zero did for it) and, as he tells it, he was on the train with his sketchbook one day when a particularly dramatic cloud formation framed the power station. ‘I think on paper,’ he tells me. ‘When I first saw Didcot power station through the window of the train… the smoke belching from the central chimney reminded me more of a crematorium than a symbol of God’s presence. And yet having said that, the astonishing sky behind the towers looked like the arch of some great cathedral, while something in the scale of the cooling towers themselves, with the light moving across them and the steam slowly, elegiacally, drifting away, created the impression that they were somehow the backdrop of a great religious drama. Both these ideas remained in my mind for many years, and developed in a series of paintings and sketches.’