On the eve of one of the most important presidential elections in U.S. history, I am presenting a new charcoal sketch from Filipino-American Artist Wayne Forte of a modern-day prophet willing to speak truth to power. Messengers of God have never had it easy in calling people to repent. At a time when…
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We look this week at a "speaker-of-truth-to-power" of the modern era, whose assassination in March 1980 was a chilling replay of the 12th century martyrdom of Thomas Becket. Like the medieval “meddlesome priest," Oscar Romero, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of San Salvador, set himself on a collision course with El Salvador’s right-wing military junta by issuing calls in weekly…
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In our continuing survey of art about prophets in the Sacred Art Pilgrim Collection, we travel this week from biblical times to the Christian era to view a contemporary print of a 12th century English saint and speaker of truth to power, who was murdered for defending the rights of the church in a standoff with secular authority. Thomas…
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Jonah does not fit the typical image of a biblical prophet. In fact, he does everything possible to sabotage his mission of bringing repentence to Israel's enemies in Nineveh. He sets sail in the opposite direction until a violent storm at sea and three days spent in the belly of a great fish bring about a change of heart.…
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Elijah ranks second to Moses among the prophets in the Hebrew Scriptures. He spoke words of truth with such power to King Ahab that the weak-willed ruler denounced him as the “troublemaker of Israel." Elijah triumphed over the priests of the Canaanite God Baal in a bloody competition to bring the nation back to faith in Yahweh. Both prophet…
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The subject of this week's featured image from the Sacred Art Pilgrim Collection is Moses, the greatest prophet of the Hebrew Scriptures. Born into slavery in Egypt, he was found drifting in a basket on the Nile by the daughter of Pharaoh and raised in the Egyptian royal court. After striking a blow for the subjugated Children of Israel,…
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During the next few weeks we will be looking at artistic studies of biblical prophets in the Sacred Art Pilgrim Collection. The fate of those who spoke truth to power in the Hebrew Scriptures is a theme that features prominently in the work of Ben-Zion, an East European-born Jewish American artist who evolved an expressionistic style of art, peopled…
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Canadian Cartoonist David Hayward certainly fits the bill of a contemporary artist-prophet. He considers himself to be "The NakedPastor"with a ministry “to bare my soul for everyone to see" and encourage honesty about faith issues. Hayward works with cartoons and satirical sketches like “a graffiti artist on the walls of religion.” He takes us with our shoes on onto…
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We journey north this week from Georgia in the Caucasus Mountains on the southern rim of the former USSR to Lithuania on the Baltic Sea to encounter another artist whose work challenged the atheistic Communist regime of the old Soviet Empire. Antanas Kmieliauskas is known as the Lithuanian Michelangelo for his skill in a wide variety of mediums. During…
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As we consider the topic of the artist as prophet, we travel through history this week from Hitler's Third Reich to the Soviet Empire, where artists posed a challenge to atheistic Communist regimes by making sacred art. Irakli Parjiani was a native son of Svaneti, a rugged Northwestern region of the Caucasus Mountain republic of Georgia, once part of…
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The modern day job description of a prophet can be summed up in four words: speak truth to power. In the weeks leading up to the American presidential election and the season of Advent, I will be featuring works from the Sacred Art Pilgrim Collection, depicting prophets, old and new, and consider the theme of the artist as prophet.…
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It is encouraging to find artists around the globe who are working during the pandemic, making their images available on the internet. So far this year, Czech New Media Artist David Wojkowicz has posted ten "abstract biblical illustrations" on his website, adding to the 94 he has created since 2015. A student of theology, Wojkowicz came to digital art…
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We travel this week to Bulgaria to meet Nikola and Milen Litchkov, a father and son with a small family gallery in the capital city of Sofia who make sacred art. Father Nikola’s sculptures combine the raw expressiveness and rounded solidity of the French early modern masters, Auguste Rodin and Aristide Maillol, with the Socialist Realism in which he…
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It has not been possible during the pandemic to organize artistic events in my local community but the time spent in lockdown has given me the chance to reach out on the internet to art-makers around the world and get a glimpse of different genres of sacred art in the global village. In the coming weeks, I will be…
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In my final essay on artworks in the Sacred Art Pilgrim Collection made for a popular audience, we travel to Poland to look at the country's world-renowned school of contemporary poster art. The product of a mutually-beneficial arrangement between artists and state cultural agencies in the early years of the Communist regime in Post-World War II Poland, this innovative…
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My second essay on religious art created for a popular audience showcases works in the Sacred Art Pilgrim Collection from an intrepid group of artist-illustrators who travelled to Palestine at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the modern era in search of local color to give greater authenticity to illustrations intended for Bibles and other…
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The past few weeks in lockdown have given me an opportunity to delve more deeply into art history in preparing three new essay-length entries for the Schools of Sacred Art section. They showcase works in the Sacred Art Pilgrim Collection, which were created specifically for a popular audience, ranging from posters and satirical prints to illustrated Bibles and Sunday…
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My series on images of Jesus the Healer in the Sacred Art Pilgrim Collection comes to an end this week with a painting depicting one of the greatest miracles in the New Testament, the raising of Lazarus from the dead in the eleventh chapter of the Gospel of John. After hearing his close friend, Lazarus, is dying, Jesus delays…
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Christ sets aside Jewish customs on social distancing to cure the ailing servant of a Roman centurion in this week's feaured image of Jesus the Healer from the Sacred Art Pilgrim Collection. In Matthew's account of the miracle, the gentile army officer comes directly to Jesus to beg for help. In Luke's version of the story, Jewish intermediaries plead…
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We turn this week to an image of Jesus the healer from the Sacred Art Pilgrim Collection, illustrating a miracle story in two of the Synoptic Gospels, which has long perplexed New Testament scholars, where Christ is rudely dismissive of a non-Jewish woman who appeals to him to exorcise her demon-possessed daughter. The writer of Mark describes her as…
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Next in our series on images of Jesus the Healer in the Sacred Art Pilgrim Collection is a wood engraving from German-American Graphic Artist Fritz Eichenberg, depicting one of the most dramatic stories in the Gospels, when Jesus exorcises a legion of evil spirits from a demon-possessed man and casts them into a herd of swine, which throw themselves…
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The Gospels record two occasions when Jesus healed people suffering from leprosy. Jesus cures a lone leper with his touch in violation of Jewish laws about contact with the "unclean." Ten lepers call out to him and he heals them with an authoritative command. In this week's featured work on the theme of Jesus the Healer, American Artist Edward…
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This week's image of Jesus the Healer from the Sacred Art Pilgrim Collection illustrates one of the more intriguing accounts of his ministry of restoration, found in all three of the Synoptic Gospels. Jesus is making his way through a crowd to bring life to the daughter of Jairus, when he comes to a sudden halt. He senses "power…
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As we continue our series on works from the Sacred Art Pilgrim Collection depicting the healing ministry of Jesus, my selection for this week is a chromolithograph from Belgian Artist Jos Speybrouck of Christ restoring sight to blind Bartimaeus, recorded in Mark 10:46-52. This is one of four accounts in the Gospels where Jesus helped the blind to see…
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For the next few weeks, I will be presenting images, new and old, from the Sacred Art Pilgrim Collection of Jesus the Healer. This theme was inspired by a recent photograph of the iconic statue of Christ the Redeemer in the Brazilian city of Rio de Janeiro lit up to look like a doctor in blue scrubs and white…
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Website visitors staying home during Holy Week might want to return to the first image I brought on-line for the Lenten season on February 23 of the Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem by Cypriot Iconographer Charalambos Epaminonda and follow Christ's journey to Calvary in subsequent postings, concluding with this new artwork of the Crucifixion for Good Friday by Polish Folk…
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As we move through the Lenten season, drawing closer to Good Friday, I have selected a new image this week from the Sacred Art Pilgrim Collection, which is a contemporary variation on a traditional motif of Passion imagery known as Arma Christi (the Weapons of Christ), especially popular in the Middle Ages, depicting the various instruments used to crucify…
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This Lenten season has taken on a different meaning for all of us who have withdrawn from our normal activities until the threat of the current viral pandemic has passed. This imposed quiet time offers the opportunity to enter more deeply into the mysteries of the Passion of Christ, perhaps, by focusing on works of art. We follow Jesus…
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As we follow Christ along his way of sorrow this season of Lent, we come this week to his sentencing to death, depicted in this icon by Ukrainian Greek Catholic Artist Ivanka Demchuk. She belows to a circle of young West Ukrainian sacred art-makers, profiled in the New Iconography of Lviv page in…
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As we follow Christ through the events of his Passion, we journey this week from the Upper Room and the Last Supper to the Garden of Gethsemane, where he awaits arrest. This lithograph of the Agony in the Garden, a new addition to the on-line Sacred Art Pilgrim Collection, is the work of German Artist Otto Dix, an eloquent,…
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As we follow Christ through the events of his Passion this Lenten season, I have chosen a new work from the Sacred Art Pilgrim Collection this week showing the Last Supper, a small format print by Polish Graphic Artist Andrzej Buchaniec now on view in the gallery of the East European Ex Libris… more >>
The Lenten season begins this Wednesday. In the weeks leading up to Easter, I will be presenting new pieces from the Sacred Art Pilgrim Collection, depicting key events from the Gospel narratives of the Passion of Christ, beginning with an acrylic on wood panel painting of the Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem from Cypriot Iconographer more >>
The week's new addition to the on-line Sacred Art Pilgrim Collection is an unusual three-dimensional piece from Massachusetts-based "Word" Artist Sandra Bowden, whose works often explore the visual aspects of the language of sacred texts. In creating The Book of Psalms, Bowden used an open book as her working surface, covering it with raised lettering suggestive of Hebrew script.…
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French Modernist Alfred Manessier was a master of free-form abstract compositions, represented in the gallery of his profile page in the Sacred Artists section by suites of color lithographs on Easter themes from 1949 and 1978 and Les Cantiques Spirituels of Spanish Mystic St. John of the Cross. This week's new addition to…
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This week's featured new artwork in the on-line Sacred Art Pilgrim Collection is a large format print from Brazilian Folk Artist Jose Francisco Borges that I have long admired but only recently acquired, offering another whimsical glimpse into the grassroots faith of the hardy residents of Borge's home in the sertao region of Northeastern Brazil, an arid outback famed…
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January is the month when Americans remember the life and work of Martin Luther King. I recently aquired this week's featured image of the civil rights leader from Mississippi Outsider Artist Carl Dixon for a church exhibition with artworks from the Sacred Art Pilgrim Collection on the theme, Voices in the Wilderness: Prophets Old and New in Contemporary Sacred… more >>
New artworks continued to find their way to the Sacred Art Pilgrim Collection during the past year, when I devoted my weekly What's New section to highlights of my first ten years of art-gathering, so, I am pleased to launch my 2020 on-line art listings with an eclectic sample of these new pieces, different in style and mediums, which…
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Filipino-American Artist Wayne Forte created this last image in my tenth anniversary overview of highlights of the Sacred Art Pilgrim Collection for the Advent art exhibition, O, Come All Ye Faithful, transposing the manger scene from Bethlehem to the mean streets of a modern American city, where sanitation workers stand in for the…
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As my year-long, 10th anniversary overview of highlights from the on-line Sacred Art Pilgrim Collection draws to a close, I've selected a Christmas-themed piece, recalling a genre of public religious art I remember well from my years growing up in a conversative Protestant faith community: the chalk art ministry. This serigraph of a silhouetted manger scene in shades of…
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Cypriot Iconographer Charalambos Epaminonda is a good friend of the Sacred Art Pilgrim Collection, one of the first five artists featured in my on-line art holdings. He created this week's image of the Virgin Mary and the Baby Jesus at my request for an Advent art exhibition of modern depictions of the Madonna. Trained in the traditional conventions of…
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All art collectors face the problem of where to set limits. I strayed from my original intentions during the past ten years in looking for nativity scenes, which are the sole focus of many fine collections. There are so many splendid handmade pieces by international artisans the temptation proved too great to resist! German Woodworker Eckart Henzler creates “tree…
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As we enter the final month of my tenth anniversary year survey of highlights of the on-line Sacred Art Pilgrim Collection, I have selected images for December in a variety of styles from international art-makers depicting the Birth of Christ, a theme well represented in my collection listings. The first featured work is a chromolithograph of the Adoration of…
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This week's featured Annunciation scene is an acrylic on wood panel painting by British Artist Frank Humphrey Allen. Discovering Allen's work at an exhibition in a resort hotel on the island of Cyprus over ten years ago inspired me to look for more pieces on sacred themes by other unknown contemporary art-makers, helping…
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There have been many surprise encounters with schools of sacred art, new to me, during the past decade of collecting. One of the most exciting discoveries came three years ago, when I uncovered a treasure trove of contemporary icons on the website of the ICONART Contemporary Sacred Art Gallery in Lviv, Ukraine. This week's image of the Annunciation is…
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This week's featured image of the Annunciation is one of the more unusual art objects to be found in the on-line Sacred Art Pilgim Collection, a glazed enamel on copper plate depiction of the Angel Gabriel appearing to the Virgin Mary by French Artist Hermine David. Long overshadowed by her husband, the flamboyant Bulgarian-French artist, Jules Pascin, she has…
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As we continue my tenth anniversary survey of highlights of the on-line Sacred Art Pilgrim Collection, I have selected artworks for the month of November on a biblical story, appropriate for the weeks leading up to Christmas--the Annunciation, recorded in Luke 1:26-38, when the Angel Gabriel appeared to the Virgin Mary to tell her she had been chosen by…
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Four new scenes from the Life of Christ, painted on parchment, have just been added to the Ethiopian Icons gallery in the Schools of Art section. I don't know the name of the artist who created these beautiful pieces, but they are clearly by a different hand than the other sacred images in my Ethiopian art collection. This folk…
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