Friday, March 26
John Collier, Catholic Artist
Remarkable. I discovered Collier about three minutes ago via the good ladies of the Summa Mamas. He is adept at rendering his canvases with a grand, almost baroque splendor with just the right touch of the surreal, as above in The Woman Clothed with the Sun. Other works have a stark, wintry sobriety that reminds one of Grunewald and van der Weyden. He also has a talent for reintroducing that sense of timeless contemporarity--ancient St. George as a "modern" medieval knight--that gives much of Gothic art its charm. While Lazarus in jeans and a tee shirt might seem more of a stretch than showing him in Germanic trunk hose as in many anachronistic triptychs, Collier's suburban Annunciation, with a delightfully awkward teenaged Virgin in rolled ankle socks, works. And works sincerely, not as some postmodern liturgical jive. I would be honored some day if a Collier image would hang above the candlesticks of any of the high altars, whether Baroque or Gothic, that I hope to design in my career as a church architect.
![[SMMMHDH]](http://www.mgilleland.com/music/smmmhdh.png){kind=small}
