JAKE Attree never fails to be inspired by York Minster.

"I think the Minster is the city, and the city is the Minster," he says, as he reflects on his four decades of painting in York. "It looks of its time, but it also defines our time, and while other buildings in the city do that too, none does it more so than the Minster."

"It's had an enormous impact on my personal sense of scale as an artist and the Minster's presence in the city I grew up in cannot be overestimated, in that it's influenced my visual response to the world."

At 55, Jake may now live in Saltaire and work out of a studio at Dean Clough, Halifax, but he is delighted to be among the first raft of artists to contribute to a new arts programme at the York cathedral entitled Creation. "To be invited by the Minster Development Campaign to exhibit in the Minster is both a privilege and a pleasure," he says.

Together with Susan Brown and Rosemary Carruthers, Jake has been selected to each produce a painting inspired by the Minster for reproduction as posters to help raise money for the £23 million restoration of the East Front.

The paintings will be on display from July 27 to September 23 in the first in a series of exhibitions, with new poster works by different artists becoming available twice a year.

The first show also includes more work by Jake, who loves rising to the challenge of painting the Minster. "It's the sheer scale of the place, and there's the paradox that I hope I convey: you always feel you should make the painting as graceful and soaring and light as the Minster looks, despite its size," he says. "It can look as if it's floating in the distance even though it has this incredible monumentality."

Yet Jake is not daunted by the scale, just as he notes how people react to stepping inside the Minster. "I've not drawn inside as much as outside, but you do notice their expressions are benign; they don't feel threatened by its massive size. They find it a comforting building," he says.

"When I'm painting, I feel the subject in this case the Minster is no more than a pretext to making a painting, but you have to be obsessed with the subject. I want to create something that has a highly-charged emotional connection, and isn't just a formal representation.

"I suppose painting is a branch of poetry because you're reinterpreting what you see. I wouldn't want it to be merely an architectural drawing."

He remembers a quote from fellow artist Francis Bacon. "He once said that good painting needs to unlock the valves of feeling, and with all painting or pieces of writing, poetry or theatre, you hope you do that, rather than impose your view, though you always want to convey your initial impression," Jake says.

He continues to be drawn back to the Minster. "I painted it as a young boy, and as an adolescent, though in the Sixties I left it for a while when it didn't seem to fit other people's agendas, but then I thought, hey, why not follow your own agenda?' "When I was painting in New York and London, I was thinking, why not paint somewhere that has more of an emotional pull for you?' York Minster is a world-class building that I've loved since childhood," he says.

His painting style has changed through the years. "When I was applying paint more thickly, I thought maybe I was an expressionist, but now I do contemplative, meditative, compacted paintings and I feel that applies to York too," Jake says.

"The city feels as if it's been compacted, that it was once bigger and more significant. It has that dense atmosphere of a bigger past, and the Minster has been a witness to all that history."


The Creation posters go on sale in the York Minster Shop from Monday at £30. Phone 01904 557219 or email shop@yorkminster.org for details on how to buy.