Conversations with three contemporary Catholic artists

The role that art (and beauty in general) can play in evangelization, and in our own spiritual lives, is a matter of some debate. There is also a common misconception that beautiful art is a thing of the past. A new book from dispels this misconception, and makes a case that beauty is essential, both to one’s faith and one’s everyday life.

Ignatius Press recently published Catholic Home Gallery: Eighteen Works of Art by Contemporary Catholic Artists—Removable and Suitable for Framing (2023), edited by designer and illustrator John Herreid. With a foreword by Emily Stimpson Chapman, and edited by John Herreid, the book features the work of contemporary artists, showing that beautiful art is still being made, and that such beauty can have a profound value in the lives of Catholics.

Three of the artists featured in the book – Matthew Conner, Gwyneth Thompson-Briggs, and Bernadette Carstensen – recently spoke with Catholic World Report about the importance of sacred art in the lives of Catholics.

Matthew Conner (www.Matthew-Conner.com)

Catholic World Report: Is it important for Catholics to surround ourselves with sacred art? If so, why? What good can it do?

Matthew Conner: The fathers of the Church frequently commend the reading of Sacred Scripture and the lives of the saints. For us so easily distracted by the cares and the bright lights of the world, lectio divina helps refocus us on the greater and the unseen realities of life. The great cloud of witnesses, the multi-colored assembly of the saints, show us how life can and should be lived, in pursuit of God.

Likewise, it is the constant tradition and practice of the Church to fill church buildings and even homes with sacred art; it is part of how Christians learn and do, worship and live. Surrounding oneself with sacred art, fills our vision and, Deo volente, fills our mind and heart with this remembrance of God.

CWR: When you are creating your art, is it a prayerful experience for you?

Conner: As with all life, there are times of struggle, times of dryness, times of consolation. I am terribly distracted; however, one hopes, by God’s grace, to be moving towards living in a state of prayer. St Benedict, in his Rule for Monastics, outlines a rhythm of working and praying, weaving explicit and implicit, formal and informal, discursive and still prayer throughout the day. Having regular times of explicit prayer throughout the day is quite helpful to reset one’s attention.

CWR: Do you see your art as an opportunity for you to evangelize?

Conner: One tries to keep one’s eyes on the good Lord, on loving and being obedient to Him, and leave the effects to Him. However, the opportunity to bring something into the world which silently bears witness to the eternal realities is a consolation for those who are less graced in the social, oratorial and charismatic graces. Paul plants, Apollo waters but God gives the increase…

CWR: Is there anything else you would like to add?

Conner: Please pray for me, a sinner.

Gwyneth Thompson-Briggs (GwynethThompsonBriggs.com):

Catholic World Report: Tell me a little bit about how you got into sacred art.

Gwyneth Thompson-Briggs: I always wanted to be a painter, but as I got older I became convinced that that was impractical, so I became an engineer instead. After about nine months, I realized that I was never going to be happy as an engineer, quit, and enrolled in art school. I didn’t learn anything about how to paint in art school, but I learned a lot about the darkness eating away at human hearts. That quickened my faith, which had grown lukewarm. I turned to sacred art, and realized that the highest calling of the artist is to give glory to God by lifting man’s gaze through creation to the Creator.

CWR: Is it important for Catholics to surround ourselves with sacred art? If so, why? What good can it do?

Thompson-Briggs: All beautiful things tend naturally to lift the soul through the senses to the source of beauty: God. As Americans, influenced by Rousseau and Emerson and Rachel Carson, we often think primarily of the beauty of the natural world. Certainly, this was the case for many of the people I knew growing up in Denver. I don’t disagree of course that a sunset over the Rockies can raise the mind to God. However, I am convinced that art has a much greater capacity to do so.

All the great civilizations—Greco-Roman paganism, imperial China, Christendom, pre-Meiji Japan—agree that art is superior to the wild, and in each natural goods were carefully crafted into astounding works of art that still raise the soul to God. For a Christian especially, this should come as no surprise, since we know that man is created by God to be a gardener, not a park ranger. Indeed, just about all the first-time reader of Genesis knows about God when reads that He created man in His image is that God is a Creator Who can perceive the goodness of His Creation.

In other words, by making us in His image, God has made us to create and enjoy good things. And the Fathers point out that God became man so that man could more easily perceive God. St. Athanasius puts it very clearly: “Since human beings had rejected the contemplation of God . . . and were seeking God in perceptible things . . . [God] takes to himself a body . . . and draws to himself the perceptible senses of all human beings.” So I think that when we create good art, we reveal the image of God in human beings, and in a certain sense extend the Incarnation.

This is especially the case with sacred art, which is properly destined for prayer—whether public (i.e., the liturgy) or private. In prayer we raise our minds to God, and this is just what good art does naturally, so we would be foolish not to avail ourselves of it. Good sacred art helps us to pray.

CWR: When you are creating your art, is it a prayerful experience for you?

Thompson-Briggs: Yes, though there is usually nothing particularly mystical about it. My general intention is always to make God more visible in this valley of tears, but my thoughts are usually preoccupied with all sorts of practical problems. However, I am finding that the more one practices an art, the more one seems to leap from perception to imitation, as though without the intermediary step of figuring out how to translate what one perceives into artistic form. In fact, the translation still occurs, but in those moments it has become second-nature, so that one does not experience it subjectively. Those moments feel quasi-mystical, as though I have been granted the grace to create after the fashion of God, realizing an idea perfectly and without effort.

CWR: Do you see your art as an opportunity for you to evangelize?

Thompson-Briggs: Art has the capacity to move the heart directly through the senses. So even if someone has set up intellectual defenses to the truth, beauty can still pierce him. This capacity is something the Baroque artists and preachers very much exploited. The great Baroque thinker, Pascal, gets to the heart of the matter when he writes in his Pensées: “the heart has its reasons that reason knows nothing of.”

One proof of the diabolical power acting through the structures of the Church since the mid-20^th century has been the attempt to impose an aesthetics at odds with human nature, one in which the senses are either ignored or subjected to ugliness and triviality. Perceiving ugliness at church or stopping up the senses altogether like Oedipus tends naturally to obscure God. It is no wonder that most Christians lost the Faith.

So I am trying to do my little part to make God visible again. 1517, 1789, 1870, 1914, 1939, 1945, 1963, 1968, 1969, 2013, 2020: choose your date, the destruction of Christendom continues apace, but there are also little signs of hope everywhere, little epiphanies of beauty to keep at bay the human temptation to despair, and even—to elaborate an image from Waugh’s Brideshead—to hook souls far out at sea and draw them to harbor.

CWR: Is there anything else you would like to add?

Thompson-Briggs: Books like the Catholic Home Gallery have great value in that they can introduce unfamiliar artists and artworks to a wider audience. If you like what you see, and you have the means, seek out original works by the artists. There is no substitute for original art. Prints introduce a digital or mechanical intermediary between the artist and the perceiver. I would much rather have a hastily drawn sketch from a master than even the highest quality print of a masterpiece. The drawing itself is beautiful, whereas the print only points to the beautiful thing.

By way of analogy, consider the difference between watching a Pontifical Solemn High Mass sung by a brilliant schola on your computer and hearing a quiet Low Mass in person. Commissioning a painting is not within everyone’s budget, but purchasing a humble original sketch very well may be.

Bernadette Carstensen (BernadetteCarstensen.com):

Catholic World Report: Tell me a little bit about how you got into sacred art.

Bernadette Carstensen: I became focused on creating sacred art in 2013 after a dear family friend happened to send me information about the “Apocalypse Prize”, an art competition to illustrate the book of Revelation.  Through reading and researching the final cryptic book in the Bible, my faith was revitalized and I was able to paint my triptych titled “St. John’s Revelation”.

It felt very natural then to continue to work in that style and look for opportunities to create more catholic art.

CWR: Is it important for Catholics to surround ourselves with sacred art? If so, why? What good can it do?

Carstensen: I would say Sacred Art is important, necessary, indispensable, vital!  We can’t do without it! Humans need beauty the same way we need truth and goodness.

I believe our age is cursed by ugliness in many forms, including the ugly concept of subjective beauty.  Beauty may not be easily defined, but you know it when you see it.  We need to see beautiful depictions of Jesus, Mary and heavenly things to guide our minds when we pray.

My home is full of Catholic art, works that depict spiritual realities, lives of the saints, pictures that endear Jesus and Mary and make them solid, really, real people in your imagination.

CWR: When you are creating your art, is it a prayerful experience for you?

Carstensen: Yes and no.  Sometimes it’s a grind when there’s a deadline and I am staying up late every night and working after the kids go to bed.

But often there are times during a project when it is very prayerful.  For example, when I was working on the image of St Joseph for Fr. Calloway.  I was drawing St. Joseph’s face and it was like trying to imagine someone I know and love, but who I’ve never seen before.  I like to sketch on tracing paper and I will draw a face over and over, each time tracing over my own sketch, getting more detailed and lifelike.  I knew when I finally got St. Joseph right because I recognized him from my mind’s eye and it did move me to tears.

CWR: Do you see your art as an opportunity for you to evangelize?

Carstensen: Yes I do, my hope is that I am making worthy art that will aid people in their devotions and honor the Lord.