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An Interview With The ArtistCan you tell us how your interest in art developed?It began quite early as my mother tells me. I can remember wanting to do nothing else but to draw when I was a child. It was as if I could only experience something if I could draw it. It's something that has never left. As I grew, drawing extended to painting and painting into sculpture. Why have you chosen to devote so much of your talent to religious art?I should say it's the other way around. After years of being rejected from every public art commission possible, it seems religious art chose me. However, when I was a young artist I thought of nothing else but to make religious art. But then again, that was through my naiveté as I thought all art was religious. It wasn't until I went to college that I realized what secular art was. During art college, between Vatican II and the Sixties, it was hard to maintain a sense of the sacred in my work as I witnessed it being pulled down around me. I had pretty much given up on the idea of being able to have any career as a liturgical artist. It didn't seem that the Church was calling on artists anymore or artists were making religious art. So, I unsuccessfully pursued the public art route with disastrous results. Then in 1980 the commission to do the Stations of the Cross for Old St. Joseph National Shrine came out of the blue and changed everything. Can you say something to us about art as an expression of spirituality?As humans, I think we all look for a God that we can realize and experience on different levels whether it is through thought, word, or deed; a God that isn't so incomprehensible that our own beliefs alienate us from the God we seek. As Catholics, I think we have a genuine response to visual art because of our fundamental belief in the Incarnation. As Catholics, it's not a question of anthropomorphism since the Mystery entered its own creation and took on its created flesh. Along with that we realize that not all things are verbally understood or to be explained by word alone. We leave room for the silent homily of sculpture and painting. We are blest with a way and means to express our beliefs in so many ways. We have seen religious art and architecture change lives. Is there some way in which you find yourself personally influenced by the persons you depict?Always. There is not a commission that doesn't inspire me to do something that I would otherwise not have done. It's like pulling a thread. You don't know what it will unravel for you as saint leads you to another. It seems one saint leads to another. In doing a model for a sculpture of St. Therese of Liseux and reading her letters. She makes reference to a certain missionary named Theophane Venard who was beheaded in Hanoi in 1861. Visiting his place in Paris inspired me translate his letters from prison and to write a play on his life which I hope can be produced one day. Are there any insights into the person or message of Saint Rita, which you can share precisely as an artist?I think she is the Saint for everyone as she was a wife, a mother, a mother who suffered child loss at that, a widow, and a religious. There's something for everyone there whether artist or not. But I do believe all art suffers if you don't believe what you make. St. Rita brought me the unexpected, something I thought was impossible during all the years of civic rejection letters. That is, she is my first life size bronze statue. She always surprises me. I think she teaches us that it is only through accepting ones circumstances in life that working with your circumstances of life that you then become able to model them into something quite unique, something that would have been impossible without those circumstances. Maybe that's why she's called that Saint of the Impossible. Interview by Fr. Michael di Gregorio, |
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