Catholic Art Studio

Catholic Art Studio is the name we give to work made here rather than found in a museum. The Charcoal Saints began with a question we kept being asked — is there a print of Saint Jude? of Padre Pio? of Thérèse? — that the old masters mostly never answered. They painted the Virgin and the Passion and left the patron saints to holy cards. So we made them ourselves: forty-eight saints, one portrait each, willow charcoal and white chalk on toned paper, every one drawn to the same sheet so that any two of them hang together like family. Each face and each attribute comes from the saint’s own iconography — or, for the moderns, from their photographs. The drawing hand is an image model working to a written brief; the eye that judged every candidate, sent the weak ones back with notes, rewrote the brief and asked again was a person’s. Some came at once. Some took five tries and a change of heart. What hangs here is the one we would hang ourselves.