In an English cathedral, an artistic workshop is alive with creativity – it could almost be a scene from the Quattrocento

Chichester Cathedral is a tough gig for the modern-day artist. Its Romanesque foundations, fifteenth-century cloisters and George Gilbert Scott’s restored spire are all spectacular. Add to that the extraordinary Lazarus reliefs, the Tudor mural by Lambert Barnard and a host of major modern works including pieces by John Piper and Graham Sutherland and you wonder: how can anyone follow that?

But artists James Blackstone and Martin Earle, whom I meet in the cathedral’s north transept, seem unfazed. The earlier greats, Earle tells me, were in a different kind of business. “They were invited in from the secular art world, but we’re approaching things the other way around,” he says. Where Sutherland and Piper brought modern materials and sensibilities to their religious subjects, Blackstone and Earle begin with the theology, and their ­methods and style originate in centuries of debate about how the mysteries of Christianity can be visually depicted. Both artists use ­tempera painting, water gilding and hand-cut mosaic – the traditional techniques that produced the medieval art and architecture which now surrounds them.

Since early January, the pair have been working in a studio inside the cathedral, part of a project called “The Art of Worship”. It’s a residency designed to display their skills to visitors and to bring the production of religious art back into a building which houses so much of it. The hope is, this is the exploratory step towards the establishment of a school of ­religious arts in Chichester. “Liturgical art is a living tradition,” says Blackstone, and what could be an anodyne phrase has real meaning spoken by a man in a splattered apron who’s about to demonstrate how he cuts mosaic glass.