My Artistic Inspiration

I began drawing boats in grade school, a relentless activity that filled slow hours in the classroom. That was long before I ever started doing photography—taking black and white images in Belize in the early 70s when I was a young Jesuit in my first teaching assignment. Photography was very physical back then, developing film in the stuffy space of a non-air-conditioned dark room in the tropics and processing photo paper in large trays of chemicals. Patterns of light and shade attracted me to black and white photography.

Image making remained a practical activity as I moved into graphic design and began producing publications. Black and white gave way to color, and the budgets gradually increased as I moved into medium format and bought a used Hasselblad. Photographic highlights included the 1991 anniversary calendar celebrating the 500th anniversary of the birth of St. Ignatius and the photography I did for a major museum exhibit on the 1840s encounter of the early Jesuit missionaries and the people of the Plateau in what is now Idaho and Montana. I still remember the trips I took visiting that mountainous area in all four seasons to capture medium format color photographs of the landscapes.

Eventually film gave way to digital capture, and the physical smell of fresh printing ink yielded to the drier, more abstract world of web design. Photoshop and the Mac gave me ultimate control over color and I could adjust images as much as I wanted, although they tended to get smaller and smaller so that they would load quickly in web browsers.

During my graduate studies in design, I took drawing and illustration classes, and I spent most of one summer visiting the great art museums of Europe, entering them in the morning and staying until the guards kicked me out in the late afternoon. After a few hours my eyes would glaze over, and I would grab a notebook and start drawing some detail of a painting. That was the beginning of a dialogue that opened up the paintings in a way I had never understood when a professor just talked about them in a classroom. I also began to think, “I could do this.”

Fifteen years later I had a full year’s sabbatical in Denver and finally acted on that desire. Even though I knew a lot about design and had rudimentary training in oil painting, the beginning of the year was slow and frustrating. I had good teachers, especially my uncle, a professional landscape painter. 

I continued painting after I moved to Rome to work in the Jesuit headquarters there. My job as Secretary for Communication led me to travel the globe visiting Jesuits who work in radio, video production, and magazine and book production. I always took a sketch book along and kept drawing and gathering reference for my paintings.

The painter has a different freedom than a photographer. You decide on the moment and choose the color palette. You can pick and choose from visual reference, and you can filter out unimportant details to get just the image you want. You can do multiple studies in drawings and small paintings. You can do things over, although the sure touch of a Joachin Sorolla or a John Singer Sargent remains a goal. When I get a painting mark just right the first time, I feel a bit like a musician who gets to join in with masters: "Yeah, I know that tune."

I find myself more and more attracted to Sorolla and Sargent, painters from a century ago who balanced a realistic and accurate image of time and place with a seemingly casual touch that was the product of an amazing skill. After all the years as a photographer, I am too interested in the concrete world around me to want to turn away from it to do abstract works. But I don’t want to do the same thing in painting I would as a photographer.

Painting is like prayer. I love the feel of a paint brush in hand, the smell of oil paint squeezed from a tube, the physicality of a painting gesture. Painting is real in a very different way than digital creativity. 

I also like continuing the conversation with the masters who challenge me to do the best I can. I visited Venice a few years ago and saw an exhibit of Sargent paintings that he made during his visits there. It was a bit daunting afterwards to go out along a canal and open my own French easel and start painting. The works that resulted don’t look like his, nor should they. They are mine, part of my own 40-year dialogue of self-reflection: what do I find interesting and worth attention? Where do I find God’s beauty?

Gerard Manley Hopkins was another Jesuit who sought God’s beauty in creation, and my own painting harmonizes with his tradition. “The glory of Hopkin’s poetry is in its momentary mysteries, which are lost when pinned down, like the life of a butterfly. Hopkins tries to show us that all things are both related and discrete, that all things have material and spiritual value (or inscape) at once. Holding that simultaneity in mind is a momentary grace.” [Gale Swignitkowski, “Mystery Man”  (America, Vol 199, No. 16, Nov. 17, 2008, p 22-23).]

My interest in photography came to focus on those magic moments which reveal a beauty and inner identity in nature or even cityscapes that we normally miss. The same instinct continues in my painting which connects to Hopkins’ twin sense of material and spiritual values in what he wrote about. As a person of faith, I cannot just see a mute world but perceive hints of the Creator who constantly remakes the beauty before me. Painting then becomes an act of faith, not so much in directly imaging God as in responding to his fingerprints all around and re-presenting what I see in a way that selects and heightens that reality. Light and color are essential to this goal and they are primary concerns in my painting.

“What matters in the end is that because he deeply loved the natural world as God’s creation and despised the way man was heedlessly abusing it, Hopkins sought to help us to see the inscape, the spiritual value of each thing, as an introduction to God: ‘I do not think I have ever seen anything more beautiful than the bluebell I have been looking at. I know the beauty of our Lord by it.’”