The case for… Charity shop art

All that is good in art,” wrote John Ruskin, “is the expression of one soul talking to another.” By this metric, my weekly trip to the local Salvation Army shop is a veritable Chatham House of unlikely and unsung artistic voices. For there, tucked among the teetering pyramids of baby shoes never worn and jigsaws breezily advertising themselves as “mostly intact”, are some of my favourite artworks on planet earth.

When asked what all his decades of studying the natural world might have told him about God, the biologist JBS Haldane is said to have replied, “only that He has an inordinate fondness for beetles”. If asked about the artists whose works adorn the window, floor and backrooms of Forest Road’s Sally Army branch, he might have switched that to cats. Or beaches. Or diffident, prim watercolours of cricket matches taking place in small English towns. Wan and faded portraits of subjects in stiff-backed chairs, their faces lumpen and angry, captured forever in the pose of someone who agreed to be painted by their nephew’s roommate, but really did not think it would take this long.

My own skills as an aesthete, let alone an artist, are negligible. But, for those of us with neither a palette nor a palate worth shouting about, great pleasure can still be found in placing ourselves near the works of those who may have been similarly untouched by the brush of genius, but still had a go.

Pausing as I pass, all sneering falls away. Each stroke of paint, each physiognomy-stretching render of a feline eye, each wonky flower or gloriously tilted windmill in these artists’ minds, finding its way into 3D space, in a soaring affirmation of the human condition, a refusal to keep their art, their passion, inside them. I sat silent while they set their souls to talking. And I intend to listen.