Despite the "lean years" being still very much a thing of reality, especially in the Art world, I still
do manage to obtain the occasional commission for sacred, devotional paintings. The Church, as it is known, has always been historically one of the main patrons for artists and, thankfully for those of us who still insist on choosing this way of earning a living, it still continues to be. A symbiotic relationship, I think it is: the artist serves the need that the Church has to evangelize by converting the mystical and spiritual into something tangible and graphic for the faithful, and, in this way, the hunger that the artist has to create and be poetic in his creation is also fed. His main aim from the client´s point of view is to invite meditation and to offer the faithful something "real" so as to make the sublime more accessible and something to be reached.
One of my more recent ones were these three pieces I was asked to execute for a chapel in Rome, no less…quite flattering for any painter, I think.
And this is how the pieces looked in the workshop before shipping. The client wanted a background that was quite undefined and just a juxtaposition of quadrilateral shapes with gold-ochre tones to sort of imply light and lend an ethereal character to the figures.
