Tag: working moms

“Beauty is always the right answer”: Painter and illustrator Jaclyn Warren

“I was so nervous about having the chalice and paten in my garage,” Jaclyn Warren said.

“We have too many kids and too many cats; something’s going to happen to them,” she said.

But the precious liturgical vessels survived. They were in Warren’s home, along with a priest in full vestments holding a censer billowing smoke, because she was making sketches for a series of paintings of the North American Martyrs for a high school chapel.

The project, the brainchild of Father John Brown, who commissioned the pieces for Jesuit High School in New Orleans, will show two of the martyred laymen toward the back of the church, and then some of the saints in liturgical dress worshipping along with the congregation, with their vestments becoming more splendid the closer to the altar they are. It’s a huge project, and Warren is working feverishly in between caring for her young children, who, like everyone else in the country, keep getting sick.

Warren, a Louisiana-based liturgical painter and illustrator, said what’s more overwhelming is when she remembers where her work will be displayed.

“It plays on my nerves a little bit. It’s kind of a big deal. People are going to be looking at this for I don’t know how long, maybe after I’m dead and gone, and thinking maybe that nose doesn’t look quite right,” she laughed. “But I know the mission is so important, I can’t get hung up having an artistic crisis.”

Captivating an audience

Mainly, she tries to keep her audience in mind.

“I think of all the boys that are going to be looking at [the paintings of saints]. It’s important that they see them as a source of inspiration and strength, and not just, ‘Look at all these bald guys,’” she said.

She knows from personal experience how an off-putting depiction of a saint can stick with you for years.

“I remember growing up, I had my book of saints, and Mary Magdalene was wearing this bright pink dress and green eyeshadow, and even at 10 years old I was thinking it was so dated,” she said. She also remembers the Black saints were painted so clumsily, their skin almost looked green.

That was a missed opportunity by Catholic art. Warren grew up loving the saints, but it was despite these illustrations, not because of them; and even though she wanted to be an artist herself, nothing she saw drew her in personally. It never occurred to her that she could be the one to update those unappealing pictures.

“It had already been done. The books have been illustrated; the churches have been decorated,” she remembers thinking. She didn’t see herself as someone who could step up and answer a call.

So when she did study art in high school and then at Savannah College of Art and Design, sacred art was not on her radar.

“I thought, ‘I have to do something that’s going to sustain me. I have this talent; I’ll be a portrait artist. That will make money, and I’ll be secure,’” she said.

An artist’s struggle

But when she attended a summer program at Yale, she found herself the odd man out, ostracized because of her faith and because she made figurative art that wasn’t designed mainly to shock and titillate the viewer. She also noticed that artists who chased the cutting edge of artistic fads might have their moment of fame, but then they were just as quickly forgotten.

“I had to rethink, ‘Is being famous and well-esteemed all it’s cracked up to be?’” Warren said.

Read the rest of my latest monthly artist profile for Our Sunday Visitor. 

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This is the seventh in a monthly feature on Catholic and Catholic-friendly artists I’ve been writing for Our Sunday Visitor. 
Previous artists featured in this series:
Daniel Finaldi
Gwyneth Thompson-Briggs
Chris Lewis
Kreg Yingst
Sarah Breisch
Charles Rohrbacher

If you know of (or are) a Catholic or Catholic-friendly artist you think should be featured, please drop me a line! simchafisher at gmail dot com. I’m not always excellent about responding, but I always check out every suggestion. Thanks!

A ‘very human life’ is the hallmark of Gwyneth Thompson-Briggs’ sacred art

Gwyneth Thompson-Briggs said her husband Andrew asked her after Mass, “Did you see the guy with Jesus hair?”

She did see him and had wanted to run after him, but she hesitated, and now she regrets it. He would have made a great model.

It was one leap she didn’t take, but only one.

Four years ago, she and her husband took a chance, and now she supports the family full-time with their home business, Gwyneth Thompson-Briggs Sacred Art. She mostly paints commissions and also teaches painting in person.

As a working mother and breadwinner, she’s something of an oddity in her community.

“In my parish, many of the mothers stay home full time, and the husband works. I try to explain to people we chose to have this small business of making sacred art because it allows us to live the liturgical year more fully,” she said.

As fulfilling as this life often is, it wasn’t easy to land there.

“To take that leap, God sort of had to put us in a situation where we lost a different job and we didn’t know what else to do. It didn’t seem prudent to try to raise a family on being an artist, but God knew we didn’t have the courage to do it without taking away the other options,” she said.

Thompson-Briggs said she looks to the medieval model of a family workshop, including apprentices who were part of the household.

“It seems like a very human life to live, that my children see their father throughout the day, and we’re always switching off with childcare and homeschooling and business duties. It’s a model I love, but it has been rare. It may be coming back, since everyone’s been working at home,” she said.

That “very human life” is a hallmark of Thompson-Briggs’ approach to art. Many of her live models, like the one with the Jesus hair who got away, are not professionals, but fellow parishioners at the church down the street from her studio.

“I will snag them and say, ‘Are you available to linger for an hour next Tuesday after Mass?’ and surprisingly, most people are amenable. I’ve gotten to have so many wonderful conversations. You meet so many people you think you know because you see the back of their head for months, and then you start to talk to them, and you’re always surprised,” she said.

The in-person conversation and time together give her visual insight an artist can’t attain by working from a photograph.

“When you’re working from a photo, you can get caught up in the detail. [But] when you work from life, you introduce the element of time. What’s the most natural way their head would tilt or that drape would fall?” she said.

As her model settles in and gets comfortable, her eyes also discern more breadth of color, more depth in shadow, and more atmosphere.

Her favorite models are good conversationalists, and she also acknowledges that talking helps keep them awake. Her studio heats up tremendously in the summer, and fans can only do so much when a model is draped in layers of wool.

Even their discomfort can be a revealing part of the artistic process, though.

“If you’re carrying something heavy in one arm, it’s going to affect the angle of the hips, or something,” she said.

But because she is making sacred art, she is not trying to paint a recognizable portrait, but to assist the viewer in prayer; and so to portray a beloved saint, or Mary, or the Sacred Heart, she often uses three or four models, combining select elements from their various faces and bodies, hands and hair.

“Using multiple models allows me to approach the idealization of the saint who is a distinct personality, who is separate from all the reference models. Sometimes, I will transform someone, make them older or younger; other times, it’s a rare person who has really beautiful hands,” she said…Read the rest of my latest artist profile for Our Sunday Visitor.

Image: Detail of St. Martin de Porres by Gwyneth Thompson-Briggs

Linocuts or laundry? Sarah Breisch speaks about art, faith, and family life

Sarah Breisch doesn’t really draw what she wants. Not yet. Breisch, 40, is the mother of eight children, ranging in ages from 17 to 4, and she only recently started showing and selling her work. It’s been a long time getting to this point.

Her artwork — primarily watercolors and lively linocuts of birds and other animals — is vigorous and arresting and sometimes comical. A frazzled mother bird approaches a tangled feathery nest stuffed full of fat, ravenous chicks, in a posture that somehow conveys both love and exasperation. A fox slinks under the moon, casting a knowing, uneasy eye directly at the viewer. A thrush grips a branch between its thorns and sings his tiny heart out into the darkness. They are just animals, but they all seem like someone particular, familiar and very alive.

But Breisch would like to do more. A demanding critic of her own work, she considers her pieces to be mainly decorative, and calls them illustrations without stories. She would like to make art that tells stories, because she has a lot to say.

Breisch had very little in the way of formal art training. Homeschooled from fourth grade through high school, she was free to pursue her own interest in art and artists, and taught herself through museum trips, by leafing through numerous art books inherited from her grandmother, and by using the miscellaneous art supplies she found in her house.

“At that time, art was intensely personal,” Breisch said.

So personal, in fact, that she could hardly stand to show what she had made to other people. And so, although her father, a skilled carpenter with an artistic bent of his own, encouraged her to go to art school when she finished high school, she chose instead to pursue other academic interests and entered the Thomas More College of Liberal Arts in New Hampshire.

Inspiration in the Church

It was in the college’s chapel that she first encountered the beauty of the Catholic Church: the beauty of its theology and also of its physical art.

“In the churches I grew up in, art had no place, beauty had little place. Sentimentality and kitsch, what [founder and then-president] Dr. [Peter] Sampo called ‘the banality of received ideas,’ had a huge place. I never set foot in a Catholic church until I went to college, and the moment I did, I was overcome with a sense that this was what I was looking for. And it specifically had to do with the architecture and the art,” she said.

She recalls that the chapel was “not even anything fabulous,” but what there was looked like it had meaning and belonged.

Then the class spent a semester in Rome.

“I came home exploding with joy and inspiration,” she said.

Talents that glorify God

Breisch, whose mother is ethnically Jewish, said, “I knew more than your average kid did about tabernacles and the Holy of Holies and those sorts of things. So when I saw the baldacchino [the ornate bronze canopy-like structure built over the altar at St. Peter’s Basilica], I thought, ‘I know what that is.’”

She thought her father might be open to hearing what she had discovered. But he was not able to.

“He suffered from that sort of mental divide of Protestants [in that] he was artistic and creative, but also an iconoclast, and somehow it felt wrong of him to marry the two,” she said.

As for herself, Breisch had never felt that her faith and her artistic drive were at odds.

“I thought, ‘I glorify my creator through my God-given ability by trying to imitate what I see in nature, because I think it’s wonderful.’ Because it was so private, it was almost like a private meditation,” she said.

Finding time to make art

It was obvious to her that art and faith belonged together — less obvious that what resulted was something that should be shared with other people, even after she decided to join the Catholic Church.

And soon enough, the decision about how to approach her art was taken out of her hands. Shortly after college, Breisch went through RCIA, married and began having children. Over the course of the next several years, she was simply too busy to draw, and too overwhelmed, and didn’t have the money to spend on art supplies. She would make flashcards for her children, or make materials for curriculum when she worked as a teacher, but it was always something utilitarian….Read the rest of this article, the second in a monthly series for OSV featuring Catholic artists. 

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If you have a suggestion for a Catholic visual artist (including yourself!) you think should be featured, please drop me a line at simchafisher at gmail dot com with “Catholic artist feature” in the subject line. I am interested in all styles of art.

Netflix, Microsoft, and the Working Mom

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Certainly Netflix and Microsoft are thinking of their bottom line, but they also seem to realize that their employees are people, not just cogs. Women (and men, of course) are capable of giving real attention both to work and to their children — but work and children can both be done better if working moms feel less torn, less rushed, less guilty, and less like every aspect of her life is getting short shrift. These are not impossible goals.

Women can’t have it all, and neither can men. Working and raising a family means making sacrifices — but, if employers are willing to be more flexible and imaginative, those sacrifices don’t need to be intolerable. The goal of making life easier for working moms is a very pro-life goal.

Read the rest at the Register. 

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