About Me

"Liturgical art should be naturalistic enough to be legible, abstracted enough to be universal, and divinely idealized enough to be eschatological."  

 — Denis R. McNamara:  Catholic Church Architecture and the Spirit of the Liturgy

"We see still another form of such activity in the creation of the artists, who does not so much aim at presenting copies of reality as rather making visible and tangible in speech, sound, color, and stone, the archetypical essences of all things as he was privileged to perceive them."

— Josef Pieper:  Only the Lover Sings

"With my stick and my knife, my chalks and my brown paper, I went out on to the great downs…

I crossed one swell of living turf after another, looking for a place to sit down and draw. Do not, for heaven’s sake, imagine I was going to sketch from Nature. I was going to draw devils and seraphim, and blind old gods that men worshipped before the dawn of right, and saints in robes of angry crimson, and seas of strange green, and all the sacred or monstrous symbols that look so well in bright colours on brown paper. They are much better worth drawing than Nature; also they are much easier to draw. When a cow came slouching by in the field next to me, a mere artist might have drawn it; but I always get wrong in the hind legs of quadrupeds. So I drew the soul of a cow; which I saw there plainly walking before me in the sunlight; and the soul was all purple and silver, and had seven horns and the mystery that belongs to all beasts. "  

— G. K. Chesterton:  A Piece of Chalk

“There is scarcely a people, in however early a stage of civilization, with whom the desire for ornament is not a strong instinct.  The desire is absent in none, and it grows and increases with all in the ratio of their progress in civilization.  Man appears everywhere impressed with the beauties of Nature which surround him, and seeks to imitate to the extent of his power the works of the Creator.”

— Owen Jones:  The Grammar of Ornament