My series on new Marian images from the Sacred Art Pilgrim Ukrainian Collection comes to an end this week with an icon celebrating the Feast of Pentecost on May 28th. The Book of Acts tells how Mary was gathered with the followers of Christ when the Holy Spirit descended upon them in a mighty gust of wind with tongues…
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This week's new Marion image from the Sacred Art Pilgrim Ukrainian Collection by Ukrainian Greek Catholic Artist Hlafira Shcherbak offers a contemporary variation on the ancient Byzantine prototype of the Virgin of the Sign, where the Virgin Mary reveals the infant Jesus in her womb. The image is paired here with an icon of Christ the Ruler of All…
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The Feast of the Ascension falls this year on May 18th. The New Testament narratives of how Jesus was taken up into heaven do not mention the Virgin Mary among the eyewitnesses gathered on the Mount of Olives, but the account in the Book of Acts does include her among Christ's followers gathered in the Upper Room after the…
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This week's new Marian image from the Sacred Art Pilgrim Ukrainian Collection is a contemporary variation on the historic Byzantine iconographic prototype of the Virgin Who Shows the Way by Ivan Dashko, an artist from the new school of Ukrainian Greek Catholic icon-making in the West Ukrainian city of Lviv. Dashko parts company with fellow art-makers who are experimenting…
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May is the time of year traditionally devoted to the Virgin Mary. We return to the the West Ukrainian cultural center of Lviv for this week's image of the Mother of Christ by Ukrainian Art Educator and Icon-maker Roman Vasylyk, the first in a month-long series of new Marian art offerings from the Sacred Art Pilgrim Ukrainian Collection. Vasylyk…
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To round out the Easter season, I have an icon by Ukrainian Artist Andriy Vynnychok to present this week of Christ's first post-Resurrection appearance to Mary Magdalene, when he asks her not to touch him, since he has yet not ascended to his Father. The scene is often depicted in European art under the Italian title, Noli me tangere…
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They shall look upon me whom they have pierced, and they shall mourn for him, as one mourneth for his only son, and shall be in bitterness for him, as one that is in bitterness for his firstborn. (Zechariah 12:10, KJV)
As we enter Holy Week, I've selected an image for Good Friday of the Crucified Christ by…
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Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed. (Isaiah 53:4-5. KJV)
Indonesian Artist Martinus Sumbaji redefines Passion…
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But I am a worm, and no man; a reproach of men, and despised of the people. All they that see me laugh me to scorn: they shoot out the lip, they shake the head, saying, He trusted on the Lord that he would deliver him: let him deliver him, seeing he delighted in him. (Psalm 22:6-8, KJV)
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He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth. (Isaiah 53:7, KJV)
The Latin words, "Ecce Homo," in the title of this week's portrait of Christ by New Mexican Artist…
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He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not. (Isaiah 53:3, KJV)
Christ raises his hand to shield himself from the blows of his persecutors in this week's variation of what appears to be…
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I gave my back to the smiters, and my cheeks to them that plucked off the hair: I hid not my face from shame and spitting. (Isaiah 50:6, KJV)
This week's featured image by a painter from the new school of iconography in the West Ukrainian city of Lviv belongs to a genre of Passion portraiture known… more >>
Ash Wednesday falls this year on February 22nd. To mark the season of Lent, I'm beginning a new series this week that will continue to Easter Sunday, featuring images of Christ in his Passion by international artists in a variety of styles and mediums. These up-close-and-personal views of Jesus during his Holy Week ordeal, represent a variety of themes…
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This week's featured work on the Flight into Egypt is a mixed media painting by Brian Whelan, a London-born Irish artist now living in Connecticut. Whelan is known for his unusual renderings of biblical narratives, combining the cosmic with the comic, and his depiction of the post-Christmas story is no exception! Mary and the Baby Jesus are incidental players,…
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In a modern spin on the biblical theme of turning swords into plowshares, the ICONART Contemporary Sacred Art Gallery in Lviv, Ukraine, recently asked 20 local artists to create icons on panels taken from ammunition crates. The recycled wood pieces are now up for auction at the Icon Saves Lives-Ukraine fund-raising exhibition in support of the “Always Ukraine” Charitable…
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The terse narrative of the Flight into Egypt in the second chapter of the Gospel of Matthew was embellished down the centuries with apocryphal stories of what happened to the Holy Family on their way to the land of the Nile. Pagan idols were said to fall to the ground as they passed, and a date palm bowed down…
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This week's featured icon of the Flight into Egypt was made by Ostap Lozynsky, a Ukrainian Greek Catholic artist from the city of Lviv in West Ukraine who belonged to a new school of icon-makers, using contemporary and traditional folk art motifs to revitalize this ancient sacred art form. His version of the…
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This week's featured image of the Flight into Egypt, where we see the Holy Family taking to the road with Salome, the legendary nurse of Jesus, comes from Michael Vargas, who counts among the Hispano saint-makers of the American Southwest. They have revived a form of sacred imagery, dating back to the Spanish…
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The plight of refugees in Ukraine has been much on my mind as we begin the New Year. The Holy Family also had to take to the road as refugees in a grim postlude to the Christmas story, when an angel warned Joseph in a dream to flee with Mary and the Baby Jesus to Egypt and escape the…
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Happy New Year! My first art offering in 2023 closes out the holiday season with a poster from Puerto Rico celebrating the visit of the Magi to the Christ Child. The Three Kings play a prominant role in New Year festivities in the Hispanic world, since gifts are traditionally given on January 6th, El Dia des Reyes (The Day…
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My survey of arts and crafts pieces in the Sacred Art Pilgrim Collection by international artisans comes to a close one week before Christmas Day with a whimsical new addition to the Nativity Sets and Scenes page by a woodcarver from Mozambique. In Nativity in Tete, Camordino Mustafa Jetha ("Dino") offers us an…
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Hark! The herald angels play the trumpet to announce the birth of Christ in this festive metal sculpture from Haiti. The delightful heavenly being with embossed wings and spiralling dreadlocks is the creation of an unknown metalworker from the Noailles district of Croix-des-Bouquets, where artisans hammer used oil drums from the harbor of the Haitian capital of Port-du-Prince into…
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As we enter the holiday season, this week's featured work of textile art is a reverse applique stitched cotton panel with a Nativity scene by an unknown artist from the Kuna People who live in the San Blas Archipelago off the northeastern coast of Panama. These embroidered pieces, intertwining brilliantly colored geometric patterns with imagery drawn from nature, native…
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We stay in the Americas this week, moving from Mexico to the Andes region to look at an arpillera cloth art piece (Spanish for “burlap.") The coarse fibered fabric serves as the backing for these elaborately embroidered, story-telling panels in cloth of many colors that bear its name, stitched together with bits of…
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The last featured ceramic piece in my series on folk art in the Sacred Art Pilgrim Collection takes us back to the Americas--a holy water basin molded out of clay by Mexican Potter Moises Rodriguez from the ceramic-making center of Tonala, near Guadalajara. Rodriguez is known for his “burnished” pottery pieces. He uses a stone to polish and smooth…
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My featured artwork this week is a ceramic tile from a European nation famed for its fine porcelain ware: The Netherlands. Founded in 1635, the Royal Delft (De Porceleyne Fles) factory has been known down the centuries for its blue-and-white pottery and smooth-surfaced glazed tiles, often on biblical themes, used as decorative borders. In the first decades of the…
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We move from works on glass to ceramic art objects this week, traveling to the Holy Land to see a quartet of tiles on biblical themes from the Jerusalem Pottery workshop of the Karakashian family. They are descendants of Armenian ceramic artists who were invited to Palestine when the British controlled the region in 1918 to restore tiles in…
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There is one more sacred folk art treasure to be found in Eastern Europe before we move on to other parts of the globe. We have looked, so far, at artisan pieces on wood, leather, and various types of paper. This week's featured work from the Sacred Art Pilgrim Collection is an icon painted on a sheet of glass…
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We travel to Russia this week to view a folk art piece of serene beauty at odds with the savagery of that country's war with Ukraine. It is a reproduction of Russia's much revered icon of the Vladimir Mother of God with a surface appearance of highly polished wood, made from lacquered layers of compressed paper by an artisan…
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We travel north from the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains in Ukraine to the Lublin region of Poland to find this week's example of wooden art, now on view on the East European Wood Carvings page in the Schools of Sacred Art Section. The painted carved wood sculpture, Jesus Proclaims the Kingdom of… more >>
In my survey of art objects made from wood in the Sacred Art Pilgrim Collection, we turn now to a traditional example of woodcarving, one of the oldest forms of folk art, created by an unknown artisan from the Hutsul people, a Slavic ethnic group who mostly live on the southern slopes of the eastern Carpathian mountains in what…
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My survey of arts and crafts in the on-line Sacred Art Pilgrim collection has looked at folk art made with paper and leather. This week, we view the first of several pieces in my listings made from wood. We journey to La Palma, a town in the mountainous north of the Central American nation of El Salvador, famed since…
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We turn this week from art on paper to art on leather, traveling to Ethiopia, one of the oldest Christian civilizations in the world, where a unique form of sacred art developed down the centuries influenced by African, Arabic-Islamic, Byzantine, and European culture. My featured painting in tempera on a tanned animal skin by an unknown Ethiopian artisan shows…
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We travel from Mexico to Cuba this week for a look at the last type of paper art in my Collection--a handcrafted book of verse from the Ediciones Vigia publishing house in Matanzas, a center of Cuban culture 90 km. east of Havana. This collective of writers and artists has been gathering since 1985 to make books, magazines, leaflets,…
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We leave the papyri painters of Egypt behind this week to look at a paper folk art form linked to an ancient civilization of the Americas--the amate paper art of Mexico. "Amate" comes from the Aztec (Nahuatl) word for paper and at the height of the Aztec empire thousands of sheets made from tree bark were used by scribes…
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In my survey of new arts and crafts pieces in the Sacred Art Pilgrim Collection, we have looked at woodblock prints, serigraphs, and posters. This week's featured work by an unknown Egyptian artist is an example of another kind of art on paper, where the type of paper used defines the folk art genre--in this case, papyrus painting. The…
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We travel this week to Poland, renowned for the school of poster art that developed in the postwar Communist era, when artists with no access to a commercial art market took on official commissions for promotional signs. Given their country’s centuries-old Roman Catholic heritage, Polish graphic artists, working under official censorship, often turned to Christian symbols to evoke universal…
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We look at two new artworks about artisans this week from Puerto Rico, where the Caribbean island's Economic Development Administration commissioned serigraphs from noted print-makers in the 1980s celebrating local arts and crafts. A poster from Jose Luis Gonzalez de Rosabel shows Felicita Padilla crafting rosary beads, praising her as "the woman artisan--the soul of village art." In a…
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Starting this week, I will be showcasing pieces by artists and artisans represented in the Schools of Sacred Art section in a series taking us to the end of the year. The works to be presented are in a variety of mediums from paintings on handmade paper, ceramics, leather and glass to embroidered cloth, wood carvings, and embossed metal…
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Before beginning a new summer series, I want to return to the French sacred art scene this week to showcase a Georges Rouault painting just added to the on-line Sacred Art Pilgrim Collection. Paysage biblique (recontre) depicts the meeting of Mary Magdalene and the Risen Christ outside the garden tomb on Easter morning in an oil, ink, and gouache…
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Raphael Drouart is the last featured art-maker in my series on new works in the on-line Sacred Art Pilgrim Collection from the artistic circle of Maurice Denis, the Early Modern master of French sacred art. Denis was Drouart's instructor in a Parisian art school and took him on as his assistant in a prestigious mural painting project. The future…
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The founding of Les Ateliers d’Art Sacre in Paris in 1919 is an overlooked landmark in the history of contemporary sacred art. In the aftermath of World War I, French Artist Maurice Denis helped launch the Studios of Sacred Art with the bold mission of creating a new kind of religious art for peacetime Europe. more >>
Jacques Beltrand, the subject of a profile added this week to the Sacred Artists section, played a pivotal role in the 20th century revival of the art of the woodcut in France. He was especially gifted in converting images from other art mediums into woodblock prints for book illustrations and formed a close…
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The French celebrate Bastille Day in July, and we will be looking this month at the legacy of Maurice Denis, the painter, printmaker, art historian, and theorist who was no less a revolutionary in freeing French sacred art from the saccharine sentimentalism of late 19th century Realism to bring it into the modern…
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My final image in the series on artworks of David and Goliath in the Sacred Art Pilgrim Collection is a small-format etching of the famous biblical duel from Russian-Ukrainian Graphic Artist Konstantin Kalynovych. He is known for highly-detailed, surrealistic bookplates that are rich in symbols, imitative of great masters of European art like…
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My survey of new images of David and Goliath in the Sacred Art Pilgrim Collection takes us this week to Nicaragua, where Folk Artist Jose Ignacio Fletes Cruz sets the killing of the giant in a Central American landscape with flowering fields and volcanic mountain peaks. Fletes Cruz belonged to a utopian Christian community, founded in the mid 1960s…
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In my series on imagery of David and Goliath in the on-line Sacred Art Pilgrim Collection, a new work on this famous duel from the Hebrew Scriptures has just been added to the extensive gallery of biblical illustrations on the biosketch page of Visionary Mississippi Folk Artist Carl Dixon. While a carrion crow…
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Thus David bested the Philistine with sling and stone; he struck him down and killed him. David had no sword. (I Samuel 17: 50, JSB)
The Bible story of the battle of David the shepherd boy with Goliath the giant has been much on my mind these past few weeks, watching the Ukrainians struggle to hold back invading…
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The Virgin Mary appears with the Christ Child amid sunflowers, wheat stalks, and wild herbs in the last of my featured Marian images from Poland in the Sacred Art Pilgrim Collection. This painted wooden sculpture is the work of Andrzej Wojtczak, one of three wood carvers who founded a school of folk art linked to the village of Kutno…
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The Feast of the Ascension falls this year on May 18th. The Gospel narratives about how Jesus was taken up into heaven do not specifically mention the Virgin Mary being with the disciples who looked on when Christ disappeared from their sight, but we know from the account in the Book of Acts she was among the followers of…
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