STANLEY SPENCER’s is an affirmative, inclusive, and reconciliatory art. He described it well in a statement that has provided the theme for the latest exhibition of his work at the Stanley Spencer Gallery in his home village of Cookham: “Everything has a sort of double meaning for me, there’s the ordinary, everyday meaning of things, and the imaginary meaning about it all, and I wanted to bring these things together.”

The attention that he paid to the ordinary, everyday meaning of things can be seen firstly in the Pre-Raphaelite-like detail of his portraits and landscapes. Two images relating to Englefield House on the outskirts of Cookham reveal both the beauty that he saw and the beauty that his painterly skills enabled him to share. He described the garden at Englefield House as “just Heaven”, going on to write that he “could get some fine notions in this garden”, demonstrating how the atmosphere of the places to which he responded inspired his imaginary work.

Patricia at Cockmarsh Hill, a painting that has been described as “not so much a portrait as an evocation”, takes us further into the merging of people, settings, and emotions which is key to Spencer’s reconciliatory art. Here, Spencer fuses his feelings of desire for Patricia Preece with his love for the landscape of Cookham, painting Preece in a contorted fashion that is both indicative of ecstasy and a mirroring of the forms found behind her in the Cookham countryside.

His most well-known mergers of the spiritual and the material are his biblical images set within Cookham. Here we have, among others, The Betrayal and The Last Supper. One of the most interesting aspects of this exhibition is the opportunity to see preparatory sketches alongside finished works or works from the same series. The preparatory sketch for The Betrayal included here has great energy and dynamism, more so almost than the finished work, where, in his desire to create an equivalent to early Italian painting as typified by Giotto, the sense of aggressive movement is somewhat stilled. The Last Supper, though, is full of energy and vim, particularly in the row of central crossed legs leading the eye to the central act of Jesus tearing bread in two.

Just as the unorthodox pose of these relaxed disciples is accepted and included, so too are the studied grotesqueries of the couples depicted in his Beatitudes of Love series. These deliberately challenge our understanding of and expectations in regard to beauty, just as Jesus, in his Beatitudes, turned our understanding of achievement and ambition upside down. Although they appear distorted to many, Spencer paints these couples contemplating each other with a depth of love, and calls us to view them in the same way, as we are all beautiful in the eyes of God.

His compassionate concern for all is perhaps most captivatingly shown in Sarah Tubb and the Heavenly Visitors, in which Sarah is so concerned by the sight of the Northern Lights in the sky that she takes to her garden to pray, believing that the end of the world is nigh. In painting this story, which he heard from his father, Spencer did not like Sarah’s sense of alarm, and provided comfort to her in the form of visitors who present her with “emblems of what she is like, and what she would like”. Her heavenly visitors are her Cookham neighbours, and the result of their actions is that she prays in ecstasy rather than alarm. By depicting compassion in this way, Spencer shows us heaven in ordinary life.

While the naïvety of some of Spencer’s imagery and ideas can lead to a dismissal of his work as a whole, his affirmative, inclusive, and reconciliatory impulses and images are surely close to the compassionate heart of the incarnation. For all his personal fallibilities and the shortcomings of some images, it is hard to think of many other modern artists in whose work the compassionate heart of Christ beats as steadily and fully, and for that we should be profoundly grateful.

“Seeing the Unseen: Reality and Imagination in the Art of Stanley Spencer” is at Stanley Spencer Gallery, 16 High Street, Cookham, Berkshire, until 30 March. Phone 01628 531092. stanleyspencer.org.uk