When a committee makes the decisions, what emerges is often a sort of just-traditional-enough art. It fills the most minimal requirements of continuity, but is too dull and unremarkable to make the iconoclasts complain very loudly. And the poor artist or architect or composer spends most of his creative energy just fighting for permission to make the best art possible. That is maddening; patrons are supposed to demand that artists do better, not worse!
REGINA: You’ve begun a long term project from Easter 2017-2031 called the Summula Pictoria which will be 235 images depicting the great events of the Old and New Testaments.
Daniel: Yes, I plan to draw an iconographic summary of the Old and New Testaments, illustrating those events that are most prominent in sacred liturgy and patristic exegesis.
These events are the very raw stuff of Christian belief and Christian art; no other subjects offer an artist such inexhaustible wealth of beauty and symbolism. Were I never to draw them, I would feel my artistic career incomplete. I hope to undertake this task in the spirit of a medieval encyclopedist, who gathers as much traditional wisdom as he can find and faithfully puts it into order. I want every detail of these pictures, whether great or small, to be thoroughly considered and significant. Collectively, these will form a coherent work; every person, place and thing that appears from picture to picture will be recognizable. Their common style and perspective will reflect a proper theology of time and space, light and darkness, sacred numbers and directions.
I’ve had to learn the intellectual understanding of sacred art on my own, mostly from books. It's a little frustrating there isn’t a trustworthy and comprehensive guide for this. I am trying to make one myself, in the hope of helping aspiring artists.
REGINA: You make a living to support your growing family of six. That sounds quite difficult?
Daniel: For more than seven years I’ve made a living from my art. I am very fortunate to have been able to do this. There is a lot of risk and uncertainty, and it certainly gets frightening from time to time when the queue of commissions is short or the print sales decline. But I am happy, and I get to spend a lot more time at home in the company of my family than most professionals. I hope that my children will be useful as apprentices when they are a little older.
It is a real poverty that so many people spend the majority of their waking hours at jobs where they find no intellectual or creative fulfillment. And that affects how they live the rest of their lives, because it forms a habit. People who spend their days staring at computers are, I think, much more likely to spend their nights staring at computers.
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