The Churches
How It All Started --
But the first significant commission came from a church! After graduation from the Maryland Institute, I applied for graduate work in Italy under the G.I.Bill of Rights, was accepted and eagerly looked forward to study in Europe. The Veterans Administration would cover my school and living expenses abroad, adequately if not well. But not travel expenses. I had absolutely no financial resources, had been living for four years hand-to-mouth on the modest VA monthly subsistence check; and, lacking experience at anything but war and art schools, had little prospect for employment. As weeks, then months went by, it seemed obvious I'd have to forfeit the opportunity to study abroad because I could not earn passage to get there.
I remember one day, when I'd refused to stop agonizing over the dilemma, refused to admit defeat, I left the seedy quarters I shared with other student-artists and went across town to visit my mother. To bring that good woman my laundry, get a decent meal, and check on my mail, still delivered to her home. Uncharacteristically, that irrepressibly cheerful lady greeted me with tears, did not immediately grasp the laundry or seat me at her table. She couldn't, she said, stand to see me tormenting myself any longer, persisting in pursuit of the arts which left me penniless and homeless, growing gaunt and shabby, with no promise of security for the future. "Leave it, get some kind of steady work, settle down. Art's too hard." She had never before voiced objection to my chosen studies, and I knew that genuine fear for my welfare had forced the strangled words from her quivering lips. "I can't take it anymore, watching you drive yourself crazy because you haven't passage money for a ship!" Financially strapped herself, she couldn't have helped no matter how much she wanted to. We did not argue, as she'd long ago acknowledged that her son went his own way. I expressed some lame bravado, she put a meal before me and -- typically -- got me to speak of my studies and my friends, interested as always, despite her fears, in the unconventional life her son had chosen. Eventually, she brought a few letters addressed to me. One was from an army buddy whom I hadn't seen in more than five years, but with whom I'd occasionally corresponded and who knew I attended art school. His father, he wrote, had a small business "decorating" churches in Pennsylvania, had a client who wanted an Annunciation and a Resurrection painted over the two side altars, and they'd not been able to find a painter who'd work for the modest fee offered under the church's budget. Was I interested? The fee covered, almost to the penny, the amount I needed to book passage!
So I did the two murals, high on scaffolds in St Stephen's Church, Cokesville, PA. A memorable experience, working in the quiet church, occasional visitors to the sanctuary often unaware of me high above them, most of my hours long and lone but I acutely sensitive to the undeniable Presence which kept my company. Every evening after a light supper I returned to the church, mounted the scaffolds again, and worked under floodlights. My sleep in a workmen's hotel, if sound, was filled with visions of the paintings' progress, with technical decisions, and an impatience for morning and return to the church. The work was completed in less than a week.
Life moves on. Italy for a year, return to New York for two years, marriage, the birth of a first son, relocation to New Mexico. And never a conscious thought of doing religious art. But once in Woodstock, paintings of mine exhibited in a group show caused one critic to comment that my canvases -- which most viewers had consigned to Abstractionism -- contained hidden religious symbolism. I thought he was off-base, that the forms and colors contained, symbolized nothing but what they were, shapes and hues.
Things changed in New Mexico. I was quick to embrace the Native Americans' and the Hispanics' reverence for their land -- their tierra bendita -- and to share with them traditional respect for mountains named Sangre de Cristo and Nacimiento , place names like Las Cruces and Santo Domingo , the elaborate and beautiful title of the town in which I lived -- La Villa Real de Santa Fe de San Francisco de Asis . Into my work quickly crept the influence of regional religious art, the bultos and reredos of colonial carvings and altar pieces, the petroglyphs and sand paintings which honored the Great Spirit as father "and the Earth is our mother." A series of modest ceramic tiles that I designed and produced by hand, the so-called Santo Tiles, grew from a lone San Pasqual to representations of more than 50 patron saints. Their popularity was instantaneous. They were purchased by visitors to Santa Fe from throughout the US and abroad, demand remaining so high that I was eventually forced to curtail production. As individually crafted pieces demanding much time (and selling inexpensively -- afterall, they were merely ceramic tiles), there was no way any one man could ever satisfy demand. And mass production wasn't an option. My clients expected hand-work from me, not products stamped out with decals or patterns.
Close to 20 years were to pass in Santa Fe before opportunity arose for work with building or renovation of churches. This was triggered by the arrival in town of a Dominican, non-diocesan, controversial priest, schooled in the arts, who believed that anyone with talent was obliged to place that talent at the service of the Church. He was passionately concerned with better sacred environment for public worship, with the proper liturgical use of that environment, and with sensitive, reverent implementation of all the arts. Clergy had never before so welcomed what this Dominican termed God-given gifts, demanded that they be put to spiritual, not secular, use. Artists starve for such encouragement and need, and I was soon -- and for more than a decade to follow -- closely allied with this brilliant, if difficult, man. My aptitude for art and his intuitive, masterful command of liturgical celebration, together with an inspired team of supportive artists and craftsmen, won us wide reputation as a team. We conducted workshops and seminars in this country and abroad, were consulted by national conferences on the liturgy, published articles in leading religious periodicals, served on an ad hoc Vatican Committee for Multimedia Evangelization. Inevitably, priests who'd seen our work asked if I were available for interior church design. Architects welcomed me as collaborator. A new career, well into mid-life, had dawned.
Nothing, of course, comes without hard lessons and price tags. Naively believing that every priest and church-building committee who summoned me were pious creatures from a realm more sanctified than mine, I was originally shocked at much of the dissention and pettiness I encountered. Had never before worked with committees, was new to the rivalries and power-plays which exist among most. And when personal abuse and an occasional sexual scandal broke out within our "dedicated groups," I was tempted to abandon Building Temples To The Lord. My Dominican friend and the Notebooks of Michelangelo helped assuage unrealistic sensibilities, reminding me that human frailty is common to all society, that the flesh is indeed weak, and that artists have had differences with ecclesiastical clients from time immemorial. An invaluable lesson, no matter how obsessed I was with the design and beauty of church buildings, that the Church is, foremost, people.
There have been so many churches. Different priests, different architects, numerous committees, incessant difficulties, not infrequently personal attacks, seemingly insurmountable structural and design problems. Churches in cities, in towns and the smallest of hamlets. In Texas, Colorado, Nebraska, Kansas as well as in New Mexico. All demanding close interpersonal relationships, at which so many artists, accustomed to working in solitlude, are unskilled. And when things were the roughest, I often considered renouncing the commissions, turning back exclusively to secular work, free of the professionally religious, back to the fellow "sinners" I felt I better understood. But oh -- oh -- when things go well: when priest, architect, artist, building committee and involved laity realize their vision, when the once-bleak interior of a renovated church glows with radiance, when the reverent completion of a new structure attracts larger congregations intent on better public worship, when these spaces themselves -- this interior sacred environment -- strengthens and builds Community. Oh, then, the humble gratelfulness that you've been privileged to contribute to it.
YOU CAN ORDER THESE AND ALL MY BOOKS AT
© 1997 drewbaci@santafe-newmexico.com
