The Angel Looks Series
Paintings·Drawings·Objects
1990-1994

In 1994 an exhibition of Geoff Butler's angel paintings, The Angel Looks Series: Paintings, Drawings, Objects 1990-1994, was held at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. The text of the catalogue which accompanied the exhibition is reproduced below with the permission of the author and curator, John Murchie.

Introduction

The Angel Looks Series of paintings, drawings, and other objets d'art is a body of work intensely created during a reasonably brief period of five years. It is visually rich, imaginatively playful, and protestantly emblematic. Very often the works reverberate with a homely humour which sometimes is dark. In Geoff Butler's apperception of the world, our visual and linguistic modes of defining meaning, and of grappling toward understanding, are inseparably linked; in his art it would never make sense to entitle a painting "Untitled." A painting is a visual object but also the struggle to give intelligible representation to Butler's ideals.

His work is a form of critical social commentary, but to be limited to such a perspective is, I think, misleading and gives less than full justice to Butler's art. Many of the works, for instance, are energetically engaged in dialogue with and about art and artmaking. The painterly process of inventing an image is itself paramount in Butler's studio practice and is always appreciable in the finished work. And, finally, the best works point beyond the limitations of our social world. Butler's art is not only, and merely, pointedly critical, even when it is often humorously so, but its forms open the possibilities to something more, perhaps a better world. Essential to the full recognition of his art is, I believe, this sense of looking through and beyond the immediate representations.

And, in another respect, Butler should be appropriately viewed as a genuine contemporary folk artist who has developed his own artistic vocabulary through his own lived experience, although his art is hardly rough and rustic.

It has been a pleasure meeting and working with Geoff Butler on this exhibition. He has been direct and professional about all matters, but also open and personal. I sincerely hope my essay does some justice to his intentions and his achievements.

I would also like to thank the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia staff for their always professional support and, particularly, to thank Susan Foshay and Karen Weir. As always, Gemey Kelly's insights are important to me. And, finally, I would like to mention my friends Claire and Anne, and to remember Iain.

John Murchie
Upper Sackville, New Brunswick

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Biographical and Professional Notes

Geoff Butler lives with his wife Judi and their children Tegan, Kirsten, Leah and Sean in Granville Ferry, Nova Scotia overlooking the Annapolis River and the town of Annapolis Royal. He originally settled there in 1976 in order to work in the local public school system as a speech therapist. However, he has been painting full-time since 1980.

Butler was born in 1945 and grew up in Fogo, Newfoundland. He graduated in 1966 from Memorial University of Newfoundland with a B.A. in Psychology and in 1969 from Syracuse University in Syracuse, New York with an M.A. in Speech Pathology. He began to paint in 1969 when he attended a painting class with some friends on a lark. More than amusement, he "felt kinship" with painting and experienced a kind of "epiphany." After taking some evening and summer art courses in Nova Scotia, he attended classes in 1972-1973 at New York City's famous Art Students' League. As a novice painter he worked with the late Derek Kersley, who was an art educator at the Nova Scotia Teachers' College in Truro and who introduced Butler to the painting techniques which continue to be central to his art. He also took private classes with artists John Cook, Don Pentz, and Alan Wylie.

Since 1972 Butler has participated in some 30 showings including such thematic group exhibitions as Ars Sacra (Halifax, Technical University of Nova Scotia Art Gallery, 1984), Nova Scotian Artists on the Threat of Militarism (Halifax, Anna Leonowens Gallery, 1986), Fear of Others/Art Against Racism (Vancouver, Art In Action, 1989) and Small on the Wall, Mighty in the Mind (Antigonish, Lyghtesome Gallery, 1992).

His first solo exhibition was in 1972 at the Truro (N.S.) Public Library. In 1978 he installed an exhibition entitled Stages on Life's Way at the E.D. Fine Arts Gallery in Kingston, Ontario. In 1985 and 1986 work from his series Art of War circulated throughout the Maritime Provinces and was seen in the Owens Art Gallery, the Acadia University Art Gallery, Saint Mary's University Art Gallery, St. Francis Xavier University Art Gallery, and Charlottetown's Confederation Centre Art Gallery.

In 1990 Butler self-published his book Art of War: Painting It Out of the Picture (Granville Ferry, Nova Scotia) which culminated almost a decade of creative focus on the subject of war.

Butler first exhibited from his current body of work under the working title "Angel Looks" in 1991 in Halifax at the Universalist Unitarian Church and subsequently at the Annapolis Royal King's Theatre in 1992. The current exhibition at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia of 82 works is the fullest presentation of this oeuvre and will travel in the Atlantic Provinces.

Butler's reading over the years has included a wide variety of books including ones which stand out for him such as the Bible, King Arthur and His Knights, the stories of Robert Louis Stevenson, George Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984, Cervante's Don Quixote, John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, Joyce Cary's The Horse's Mouth, the works of Marshall McLuhan, and Vincent van Gogh's Letters to Theo. As well, the lyrics and music of Bob Dylan in the 1960s have had a considerable influence on Butler's creative intentions.

When asked about influences on his life and on his work, Butler stated:

Last of all (I think), in my own informal studies of artists of noted historical and contemporary reputation, was the realization that while one was justifiably lauded for some particular skill or style, another was equally lauded for something entirely different. What that realization meant to me (aside from there not being any constants) was that if I were not going to use art as personal expression, then there was really no point in going into it.

letter to the author, April 16, 1994

Geoff Butler's daily life and work today are far from the headwaters of the mainstreams of contemporary art; and, as an essentially self-taught artist coming from a distant professional background and working without any significant community of peers, he works his own territory and explores his own land - a result, no doubt, of choice and contingency.

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Old Lands, New Territories: One View

All representative art, which can be said to live, is both real and ideal; and the realism about which we quarrel is a matter purely of externals.

Robert Louis Stevenson1

Grant Wood painted his American Gothic in his hometown Cedar Rapids, Iowa in 1930. It has become one of the most recognizable images in the history of Western art, rivalling, perhaps, even Leonardo da Vinci's enigmatic Mona Lisa. Wood's image evokes the "protestant diligence on the American frontier" and is evocatively rich with historical associations: the "hair-do of a medieval madonna, a Reformation collar, a Greek cameo, a nineteenth-century pinafore" worn by the "modest Iowa farm wife" according to one observer.2 It gives representation and embodiment to the solid virtues of a particular North American past and links them to the cultural traditions of an even earlier European past.

In one of his most recent drawings, Lighten Up! (1994), Geoff Butler, as many have before him3, appropriated the image, with all of its latent and accrued meanings, and adopted it to his contemporary purposes. The setting seems to be an art gallery, maybe a national gallery, exhibiting American Gothic in one of its brightly illuminated rooms. The sole visitor is unmistakably an angel who stands slightly crouched, in seeming amazement, on the threshold of the next room which is darkly black. This visitor, who has been drawn into the gallery presumably to look at art and specifically the famous American Gothic, is attending instead to a view behind and beyond the work on the wall. Butler has rendered the scene with minimal, but realistic detail with our attention drawn between the detailed replication of the painting and the vaguely indiscipherable void. Oddly, he has also rendered the scene with a peculiarly naive perspective reminiscent of both medieval painting practice and the untutored practice of folk artists.

What on first look seems to be a reasonably simple, if quirky, drawing is, in fact, complex and subject for an array of interpretations including one which gives emphasis to it as a conceptually and visually sophisticated meditation on the relationships of art and life, and of art to other art. An understanding of the work is underscored by the commanding imperative of its title which directly addresses both viewers of art and participants in life -- it is offhanded, colloquial, humorous, but, also, demandingly serious, and, as with the spoken word, the "meaning" is largely open to interpretation based on intonation and emphasis.

A not insignificant issue in responding to Lighten Up!, as well as generally to Butler's recent work, is the matter of the angel, an image and subject which has a long history4 but is certainly not au courant today notwithstanding its recent appearance on the cover of the year- end issue of Time (December 27, 1994), where it was reported that 69% of the American public believes in the existence of angels.5 In the past four years Butler has created more than 80 paintings and drawing and objects which have angels as their subject. It seems an unlikely one for a serious contemporary artist.

Throughout much of the 1980s Butler was preoccupied with the image and meaning of war, a subject more easily comprehended and accepted as it has been the daily topic of news reportage, if not actual personal experience, during the entire 20th Century with no end in sight. The work he exhibited in those years almost exclusively focused on war including an exhibition entitled Art of War circulated by the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. This creative activity culminated with the publication of Art of War : Painting it out of the picture (1990) for which Butler not only wrote an extensive original text but also entirely produced and self-published it. Reviews of both the exhibition and book were positive and encouraging6 although viewers tended to remark "They're good, interesting. There's just too damn many of them."7 In fact, even for Butler the matter of war was such an overriding and deeply felt preoccupation that by 1990 he was exhausted by it and by such attentiveness to evil in its various guises and disguises -- in his words, "war wore me down."8 He felt the need to paint a more affirmative subject -- "something good", something with a "higher sense of being." Butler sought with his series of angel works to explore the question "if there were angels, how would they look at us?"9

Angels seldom appear in recent visual art but are far from absent in literary art. The American poet and writer Sylvia Plath (1932-1963), for instance, wrote

Miracles occur If you care to call those spasmodic Tricks of radiance miracles. The wait's begun again, The long wait for the angel. For that rare, random descent.

"Black Rook in Rainy Weather"

And, one of the most well-known literary images since the Second World War is found in the opening lines of Allen Ginsberg's poem Howl (1956):

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
   madness, starving hysterical naked,
   dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
   looking for an angry fix,
   angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
   connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of
   the night.

For both of those poets the angelic image was seen within the ambiguous, chaotic randomness of an essentially desecrated world. Ginsberg even embodies the angelic in the social outcast and the milieu of the socially degraded. This understanding and representation of "angel" is distant from the joyous traditional one derived from rhetorical biblical expression:

And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it.

Genesis 28.12

For the modern writer the angelic still represents the possibility of other-worldly goodness in this world; but its form has been secularized and humanized. The angelic has been planted in a terrifying earthly garden which owes little to an active literary imagination and everything to a real cultural landscape. Butler's angels exist in fictive visual landscapes but gain their sustenance from his grasp of the cultural territory which has driven contemporary artists as diverse from him as Plath and Ginsberg.

Thinking about Geoff Butler's visual art with reference to literary art is not inappropriate as he cites songwriter and musician Bob Dylan as an important influence in his art career:

A second significant influence was the protest songs of the 60's, notably those of Bob Dylan; an example of an art form being a voice for social change, which by implication also meant an art form that talked about something other than itself.10 (my emphasis)

In fact, however, Butler's only overt reference to the work of another artist, aside from Lighten Up!, is his 1994 whirligig sculpture Blowin' in the wind. Butler has no predilections for quotation and appropriation of other visual art, nor is his art literary except insofar as his creative imagination is fundamentally that of a storyteller. His chosen media happen to have been the visual arts with its traditions and forms.11

Many of the elements in Butler's art - the strong colours; the graphic quality; the fairy tale settings endowed with careful detail and an often reminiscently surreal complexion; the distinctly characteristic titles; and those elements seeming to add up to aphoristic summations - all of those aspects of his art give easy opportunity to view the works as "mere" illustrations and, indeed, Butler's less successful works can be incisively criticized for not exceeding an illustrative foundation. Yet, artists never fully and always transcend the limitations of their human imaginations although it is a hollow, predominantly modern fallacy that artists possess special, shamanistic qualities which place them hierarchically beyond most people - maliciously, perhaps, even with the angels. Butler's art and the characteristic path he has chosen, however, are firmly rooted in our everyday affairs even when the subject is angels.

Fundamental to Geoff Butler's intentions as an artist is a consciousness of art as a means to an end; that the creative, artmaking process results in a product - a painting or a drawing or a whirligig - which will effect change in social structure of the world or, at least, change in individual social/moral consciousness. There is nothing new about such an attitude; it is a reasonably widely held perspective today although it was not when Butler began painting in the late 1960s nor would contemporary activist artists - working with realistic photo documentation and installation work about topical currencies such as AIDS or gay rights - subscribe to his methods and subjects but would likely understand them as atavistic and retrograde. Butler's attitude on the fundamental issue is nevertheless rigorously current although his practice is solitary, even marginalized, which, given our sensitivity to the intrinsic validity of individuated voices might be deemed unfortunate but for the fact that creative intelligence often prospers in unlikely forms and places.

Social relevancy and meaning are at the core of Geoff Butler's storytelling art. His works have the cognitive structure of a narrative and are often like small sermons illustrating good and evil. A work such as Big Game is most immediately a forthright deliberation on the voracious human capacity to kill for sport and entertainment. The scene is gruesome in its stark visual details with an easily imagined story of a setting which enabled the single, well-sighted rifle shot. Without question, the moral about hunting lies on the surface of the painting. Be an angel is similarly, but positively, exhoratory in its illusionist invitation to join the heavenly angels in another world. Because the painting steps off the wall into the actual viewing space, a viewer becomes an active participant in the injunction to "be an angel" and is enjoined to create one's own angelic story.

Like a preacher, Butler seeks to alter our consciousness, and, more importantly, our behaviour. He is vitally concerned that the painting have meaning and relevancy beyond itself as an objet d'art - that the work effect the viewer more than aesthetically - and most viewers will, perhaps, respond quickly to this intention as it is readily apparent. Butler may have become an artist because of a powerful internal need to describe the world and change it; he is an artist because he embodies his descriptions in specific media which have their own histories. As he put it, "no matter how noble a conception, (it) has to work as a painting."12

Yet, Butler's painting practice is indeed foreign to the varied currents of generally recognized contemporary art in Nova Scotia. Foremost, the work is not impeccably representational in detailing a realistic world in the manner of an Alex Colville (1920 - ) or a Tom Forrestall (1936 - ). Whereas they denote particular features within geometries of space, Butler tends to give connotation to the world within the geometries of his imagination. He is no less precise in the execution of a painting than the two more famous painters, but his precision bears an only rough correspondence to an actual world. Nor does Butler paint in a grander, more monumental, scale as do, for instance, Alex Livingston (1958 - ), Nyna Cropas (1949 - ), and Suzanne Gauthier (1948 - ). His work tends to be intimate, quiet and subdued, requiring close viewing. It seems to be conceived more with the thought of a home setting rather than the institutional setting of a gallery with high walls and longer viewing vantages. In many respects Butler's art seems closest to that of several Nova Scotia artists included in the recent exhibition Uses of the Vernacular in Contemporary Nova Scotian Art - Kyle Jackson (1960 - ), Janice Leonard (1952 - ), or Eric Walker (1957 - ) - but he is never self-consciously untutored in his handling of the formal, practical elements of making a painting or other art object. He is best thought of, I believe, as a "folk artist", yet his attentiveness to historic traditions of painting practice and his considered handling of paint places him well outside the boundaries of recognized Nova Scotian folk artists ranging from Francis Silver (1941 - 1920) to Joe Sleep (1914 - 1978) and beyond. The only contemporary artist whose practice bears resemblance to Butler's is that of Nancy Edell (1942 - ) whose ongoing Art Nuns series of paintings, hooked rugs, prints and constructions is similarly ambiguous in its idiosyncratic amalgamation of sophistication and naivete, of formal and conceptual emphasis, and of imaginatively fictive storytelling.13

Butler's paintings are carefully constructed, highly finished products although his painting practice begins initially with "that of applying paint randomly and seeing what takes shape."14 The shape may at times be controlled by an initial linguistic formulation - "from the horse's mouth," "objects in the mirror are closer than they appear," "touch wood" - or, on the other hand, the emerging shape may offer a correlated verbal expression. From there Butler prudently paints the scene which has formed in his imagination. The image may come to fruition in its "final" representation as did Soul Music - an angel in a canoe where both are reflected in the water -- only to be significantly altered months later -- in this case Butler painted the reflection of the angel out of the picture. His images, that is, are not fully conceived and then painted. He works pragmatically and inductively.

Typically, Butler constructs an image and scene through a multitude of accumulated small brush strokes. With few exceptions -- most notably the painting Angel Fossil - the painted surface is smooth and glossy with only an indication of the artist's brushstroke in the discrete diffusions of colour. The impression is never of broad expanses of colour which by implication delineate solid objects and abstract aesthetic recognition. Rather, Butler's small, individuated dots of colour imply an absence of metaphysical solidarity as though the human world is a randomly changing collection of atoms which only momentarily coalesce and is accessible visually and intellectually only through imaginative creation. In that respect Butler's paintings are finely integrated, formally and substantively, and eclipse their underpinnings as illustrative stories.

As simple, straightforward a painting as License, which incidentally gives recollection to the structural and subject motifs in other contemporary paintings ranging from works of Newfoundland's Christopher Pratt (1935 - ) to Alberta's Jeffrey Spalding (1951 - ), alludes to both the meaninglessly institutionalized hubris of vanity license plates, and to the rural practice of displaying superseded plates on barn walls. The parody is compounded by the "fact" that the plates once belonged on an angel's automobile. The painting itself is meticulously but superficially realistic. As an aesthetic object it is purely fabrication. The precise shadowing directly alludes to natural realities and the objects, the license and the cedar shingled wall, to cultural realities; yet the manner in which Butler has painted the scene yields an image both painterly and visually fractious. The hundreds of small swirls of paint colouration deny the independent existential stability to the wall. It is seen, and therefore is, only because at the moment it is seen. The story in such an image is not really in the painting but beyond it - or behind, above, and in front of it. The painting, like a modern icon, is only a mediation between the viewer and another reality:

The [traditional Byzantine] icon is intended to be an image of the invisible and even the presence of the Invisible One.... On the first level of meaning, we can define the image as simply the bearer of information...In fact, the image depicts a person or an event. It reminds us of the individual in the image and thus becomes a link between the person represented and the person looking at the image. All this, however, remains on the conscious, intelligible level. But it is precisely this level that the icon transcends. What is intelligible and touches the conscious mind is only the exterior surface of the icon. Its essence though is to be a point of contact, a place where we meet with a presence. Even though the presence is different from the being of the subject represented , it cannot be reduced to a simple souvenir which stirs our memory. 15

While there is no reason to believe that Butler, consciously or unconsciously, conceives of his paintings as icons, the methods and intentions of the icon makers are profitable guides to understanding the full extent of the territory Butler explores with the angel paintings.

Other aspects of Butler's work could be usefully discussed at length. There is protestant desire for classic art and art forms throughout his current work especially his fondness for rendering draped clothing and the more substantive allusions to classic body forms in such paintings as Tarred and Feathered, In Tandem, and Big Game. A painting such as Walking Light is reminiscent in tone and scene to the urban social realists of the 1930s both in the United States and in Canada. Although many of the paintings have a distinctly surreal quality, In Tandem bears distinctive resemblance to Alex Colville's painting Skater (1964) which is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art.16 The paintings Night Cleaner and Open Heart, on the other hand, suggest the lesser known American George Tooker (1920 - ), whose paintings and prints give expression to a profound alienation from reality.17 Butler's paintings look similar to Tooker's in style and subject but with diametrically different implications. There is also the issue of Butler's intelligently pragmatic use of the shaped picture frame which is always integral to the image and never seems a gimmick. And, again, as well as the useful validity of generally viewing Butler's art as an example of genuine contemporary folk art, individual works are clearly most accessible as folk art variants, particularly the child-like In hand, the whirligig Blowin' in the wind, and the object/painting Mantle/Mantel.

What is significant about references such as those is not to relate Butler to the contemporary art strategies of quotation and appropriation as that would be to misapprehend the naive basis of his artistic sophistication. He does not quote even when he directly uses other art as in Lighten Up!. Butler is merely well aware of an art historical past upon which he works. That past is not a burden to be overcome by bastardizing it. Rather, he accepts those achievements as a part of the living present to be enjoyed, and to be reflected upon without being programmatically academic. His seriousness as an artist is more like that of a North Atlantic fisherman at sea where issues of life and death are constantly at hand. A prerequisite attribute is a handy sense of humour - sometimes profound, often witty, a little dark, but always immediate. Without it, life, and art, might be a bit boring and, possibly, unbearable.

John Murchie
Upper Sackville, New Brunswick

1 July 1994

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endnotes

1. Robert Louis Stevenson, "A Note on Realism," in his Essays, Literary and Critical: Tusitala Edition, Vol.xxviii (London, William Heinemann, n.d.), p. 70.
2. Guy Davenport, "The Geography of the Imagination," in his The Geography of the Imagination (San Francisco, North Point Press, 1981), p. 15, 13.
3. See Wanda M. Corn, Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1983), p. 128-142.
4. See, for instance, Gustav Davidson, A Dictionary of Angels including the fallen angels (New York, The Free Press, 1967) which provides a detailed synopsis of the history of angels as well as an account of their representation in art.
5. To illustrate the cover story "The New Age of Angels," Time had to go back in history to an 1889 painting by the largely forgotten American artist Abbott Handerson Thayer; and although the highlighted story was on angels, the important content of the issue was the "Images '93 Pictures of the Year," grim photographs which ranged entirely from scenes of Sarajevo burial grounds to starvation in the Southern Sudan with the sole exception of the image of an unworldly royal wedding in Japan.
6. See, for instance, Jean Weir's book review "The Spectacle of War" (Atlantic Provinces Book Review, Nov/Dec. 1990), Elaine Harrison's exhibition review "Geoff Butler: The Art of War" (New Maritimes, March 1986), Laura Brandon's review (Vanguard, April/May 1986 or Richard Lemm's extensive essay "Geoff Butler: "War Artist" (Arts Atlantic, Winter 1986) for some indication of the positive critical reception of Butler's earlier work on the subject of war.
7. Quoted by Ellison Robertson in his book review, "A Much-Needed Tonic," New Maritimes (July/August 1991), p. 27.
8. Conversation with the artist at his studio in Granville Ferry, Nova Scotia on 4 April 1994.
9. Conversation with the artist 4 April 1994.
10. Correspondence with the author dated 16 April 1994.
11. Although like the American painter Marsden Hartley (1877-1943) and, for that matter, many artists throughout history, Butler is often compelled to express his thought through the written word, in poetry and, most notably, in his book Art of War.
12. Conversation with the artist, 4 April 1994.
13. See, for further information on these artists: David Burnett's Colville (Toronto, McClelland and Stewart, 1983); Virgil Hammock's forthcoming monograph of Thomas DeVany Forrestall; Robin Metcalfe's Subject/Matter: Contemporary Painting and Sculpture in Nova Scotia (Halifax, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, 1992); Susan Gibson Garvey's and Cliff Eyland's Uses of the Vernacular in Contemporary Nova Scotian Art (Halifax, Dalhousie Art Gallery, 1994); the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia's Francis Silver 1841-1920 (Halifax, 1982); and Bruce Ferguson's Joe Sleep: Retrospective (Halifax, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, 1981).
14. Correspondence with the author dated 16 April 1994.
15. Egon Sendler, The Icon: Image of the Invisible, Elements of Theology, Aesthetics and Technique (Redondo Beach, California, Oakwood Publications, 1988), p. 39.
16. Op.cit. Burnett, p. 114 for a reproduction of Skater.
17. Ibid., p. 112-113, for a discussion by Burnett of Tooker's realist paintings in the context of Colville's early painting.

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definitions and quotes

Angel. (ME., a. O.F. - ele , repl. OE. engel: - *angil -, Com. Teut. loan, a. L. ANGELUS, Gr. aggelos messenger.) 1. A ministering spirit or divine messenger; one of an order of spiritual beings superior to man in power and intelligence, who are attendants and messengers of the deity OE.; hence b. one of the fallen spirits, who rebelled against God OE; c. a guardian or attendant spirit ( lit. and rhet.) [ME]; d. fig. a person who resembles an angel in attributes or actions 1592. 2. Any messenger of God, as a prophet or preacher (a Hellenism) ME; a pastor or minister of a Church ME.; POET. a messenger [ME] ; fig. in ANGEL OF DEATH 1574. 3. TRANSF. A conventional figure with wings 1536. 4. An old Eng. gold coin, orig. called ANGEL-NOBLE, having as its device the archangel Michael and the dragon. Its value varied from 6s.8d. to 10s. 1488. 5. attrib. = ANGELIC 1611.
1. Thou hast maad hym a litil lesse than aungels WYCIF Ps viii.6. Angels are bright still, though the brightest fell MACB. iv.iii.22. b. The deuill and his angels Matt xxv 41. c. There is no euill Angell but Loue L.L.L.I.i. 78. d. O, speake againe, bright Angell Rom & Jul II.ii.26. 2. To the aungel of the chirche of Smyrna, wrijte thou WYCLIF Rev. ii.8. The dear good a. of the spring, The nightingale B.JONS. 4. His stripes washed off With oil of angels MASSINGER.

The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles

Be not forgetful to entertain strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.

Hebrews. XIII. 2

But men must know, that in this theatre of man's life it is reserved only for God and the angels to be lookers on.

Francis Bacon

For God will deign / To visit oft the dwellings of just men / Delighted, and with frequent intercourse / Thither will send his winged messangers / On errants of supernal grace.

John Milton

Superior beings above us, who enjoy perfect happiness, are more steadily determined in their choice of good than we, and yet they are not less happy or less free than we.

John Locke

Men would be angels, angels would be gods.

Alexander Pope

The cherish pity, lest you drive an angel from your door.

William Blake

What is the question now placed before society with the glib assurance which tone is most astonishing? That questions is this: Is man an ape or an angel? I, my lord, I am on the side of the angels. I repudiate with indignation and abhorrence those new fangled theories.

Benjamin Disraeli

In heaven an angel is nobody in particular.

George Bernard Shaw

There was a pause - just long enough for an angel to pass, flying slowly.

Ronald Firbank

But all God's angels come to us disguised; / Sorrow and sickness, poverty and death, / One after other lift their frowning masks, / And we behold the Seraph's face beneath, / All radiant with the glory and the calm / Of having looked upon the front of God.

Robert Lowell

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