Matthew Alderman has a surprising weakness for neon haloes, the kind you might find lighting up the heads of stone saints in 1,000-year-old Italian churches.
“It can be quaint. I will take old, interesting kitsch over ’60s clip art,” he said. “At least it has honesty.”
But when Alderman works on church design, he tries to aim a little higher than honesty. Clients, weary of bland and barren sacred art and architecture, are ready for more.
“They want something transcendent that speaks to a higher order,” he said.
Alderman, 41, is a popular illustrator and heraldry expert, but his day job is with the venerable church architecture firm Cram and Ferguson, where he is the day-to-day design manager, working together with several other team members. The firm is known for its role in spearheading the revival of Gothic and other traditional styles. Its hallmark style provides a lively relief from the dreary errors of the past several decades. So much modern design is cold and sterile, bleak or banal.
But Alderman never wants to make a mere copy, or return to the past simply for the sake of returning. At the same time, he will never reject a design merely because it comes from a certain era, even a modern one.
“The artists who produced (church buildings) in the ’50s and ’60s did have a classical education,” he said.
There was a reason they made the design choices they did, even if the results come across as ugly, theologically dubious, or distasteful. But the generations that followed them were not necessarily educated or thoughtful, and the churches that came next were “copies of copies of copies.”
“They do not speak to us,” Alderman said. “It feels narrow and inauthentic.”
As he and his co-workers at the firm collaborate with painters, wood carvers, sculptors and the clients who commissioned it all, Alderman strives to see what can be learned from the past, and figures out how to make it work for the present. Rather than straining for design so artistically pure it becomes almost legalistic, or merely attempting to copy the work of great architects like Borromini or Gaudi, he tries to get inside their heads, identifying the essential principles that guided them. He asks himself how they would solve whatever problem is bedeviling him now.
“I have this particular style I’m trying to learn from, get behind it, think about what are the ideals, the first principles. It’s a wonderful challenge,” he said.
Alderman didn’t invent the idea of taking ancient principles of design and applying them in new ways. In the 19th century, portrait sculptors of great statesmen wanted to give their subjects the grandeur and nobility of emperors of the past, but they couldn’t show them wearing togas.
“They figured it out: Suits with overcoats wrapped around them,” Alderman said.
He mused that a contemporary artist could do something similar with images of modern holy men and women, like the soon-to-be-canonized Carlo Acutis.
“You have to find an ideal balance between producing something so contemporary it becomes distracting, and something not recognizable as a saint,” he said.
Hoodies have a nice drape to them, or perhaps you could show Acutis wearing the hospital gown he died in.
“The problem with images of modern saints is that we’re going off photographs,” he said, which tempts artists to slavishly recreate the exact details on record.
“They should look like them, but they shouldn’t be the only thing we’re using to recognize them by,” he said.
He’s seen a few portrayals of Acutis holding a laptop, which is a tool he used for evangelization, but he’s not sure if it works.
“Maybe the decoration on the border could look like circuit boards,” he said. “There are so many ways to attack this.”
He takes similar problems under consideration in architecture, trying to find a balance between the wisdom of the past and the actual requirements of the present. Some elements of church architecture are immutable: The overall design should always focus attention on the most important things, the crucifix, the tabernacle, the altar.
“It should be building to that crescendo,” he said.
But while you achieve that goal, there is endless room for variation. The relative newness of the Church in America is fertile ground for creativity, even playfulness — and even a chance to right some wrongs of the past…Read the rest of my latest for Our Sunday Visitor. This article can also be found in the most recent print edition of OSV.
Image: St. Paul Catholic University Center, photo by Father James Bradley. (Courtesy of Matthew Alderman)
