Posted: December 11

St. Francis Xavier- the end of the anniversary year

(Rome) Poor St. Francis Xavier. A week ago the First Sunday of Advent bumped the celebration of his feast day from the liturgy. Well that wasn't so bad because we did celebrate his Mass on Thursday at the Spanish-language liturgy. A Jesuit from Colombia wanted to honor the Jesuit missionary because they are still celebrating the anniversary year in that Latin American country. Our web site (which in fact means me) had already dropped the anniversary year logos and information, indicating that the Francis Xavier-Peter Faber-Ignatius Loyola anniversary is finished. Actually I don't know when it ends. It started with Xavier's feast day last year, but maybe it should run until the end of the month.

Just to show that I did not in fact take the five hundredth anniversary of Francis' birth too lightly, here is the painting that I did in his honor:



This is an unusual painting for me, and its approach clearly comes from my experience in India last May at the artists' institute in Kerala. Most of the Jesuit painters there tend to do symbolic, layered work whereas I usually do straightforward landscapes. For this painting I wanted to have multiple scenes, layered over with some transparency. I also wanted to do a portrait of Xavier that changes the iconography. I did a survey of several books that were issued during this anniversary year, and Xavier is almost always shown with his gaze raised to the heavens. (St. Ignatius, by contrast, is almost always shown looking straight at the viewer.) Nobody knows exactly what St. Francis looks like so I felt free to do what I wanted. And I wanted to show him looking at the new lands that he was traveling to evangelize and the new people he would meet. The background on the left is the actual family shield or escudron of the Xaviers. I see it as the source of who he is but in the process of being overlayed by new experiences.

I enjoyed the freedom of making things up and putting them in the painting because I wanted to. My training in design pushed the value that an image had to make sense immediately to viewers; if they did not get it, you had to change it. With painting I feel freer to be quirky or to do something for my own reasons. I got entranced with the yellow colors in the parasol of the Japanese woman in the lower left-hand corner. They are staying because the color is so good. Each painting is an experiment and a chance to try something new, a dialogue with the material. I find that painting makes me think a lot, constantly, about what I am doing and whether I like something and why. That is a big part of the attraction, along with making something beautiful.