After reading Thomas Merton’s Seven Storey Mountain while an art student at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute, John Giuliani’s life changed. He put down his paintbrush, entered the seminary, and served as a diocesan priest for two decades. Inflamed with the desire to communicate the dignity of all persons, especially those whom society has marginalized, he began painting again in 1989. His meticulous acrylic-on-gesso panel paintings of Christian saints in the image of Native Americans marry the mysticism of traditional iconography with the sensuality of the Italian Renaissance, and, in their depiction of indigenous peoples, transcend both genres.
His paintings are displayed in churches throughout the United States, many of them on Native American reservations. In 2003, a retrospective exhibition of his work was held at the Institute of Sacred Music at Yale University. Father John lives at the Benedictine Grange, a monastic community in rural Connecticut, which he founded in 1977. I spoke with Father John at the Grange in July 2004.This interview was published in its entirety in the September 2004 issue of Faith & Form, the journal of the Interfaith Forum on Religion, Art and Architecture, a Professional Interest Area of the American Institute of Architects. Judith Dupré serves as one of the journal’s editorial advisors.
Judith Dupré: What made you start painting again after a hiatus of four decades?
John Giuliani: Although my sensibility was one that was attracted by beauty and form, and the liturgy itself was an avenue of expressing beauty, form, and ritual, I didn’t paint once I entered the seminary. I moved here with the brothers in 1977. Our life was extremely demanding. We followed the Benedictine rule of life, praying seven times a day. We were manual laborers. We did everything—cut the grass, built outdoor sheds for tools, divided rooms into cubicles for the brothers, cleaned, shopped, cooked, did all the chores as monastics do. This continued creatively and productively for over a dozen years, until 1989. When the last brother left, finding myself alone, I realized that I would have to do something profoundly creative to sustain my solitude. I established the Grange believing that I would be a brother among brothers until the end of my life. Although there was enough ministry and manual labor to fill my hours, I needed something that would bring my solitude into communion, into solidarity.
One Easter morning, my friend Elizabeth and I began speaking about art as ministry. Liturgical art is a ministry. Every object within a liturgical setting is utilitarian. You design a chalice as beautifully as you can for the purpose it serves. We can speak of such objects as works of art, but for me they are works of craft because they exist in the service of others. I thought that I might return to painting. However, not primarily as self-expression. I identify myself as a priest, as one whose identity consists in being ministerial. The art, whatever it might be, had to be mediational, the way a priest is a go-between, a bridge-maker. In this sense, I have never considered myself an artist. The word is too big for me. At most, I can say I’m an artisan, which is very different.
JD: How does your faith inspire your paintings?
JG: I cannot live without a sense of beauty, but it is not separate from my life of faith and worship. They are complementary. When I experience the rush of something that is beautiful, standing within a magnificent architectural space, before a painting or a sculpture, being at the theater, listening to music—this to me is little different from faith experience. Beauty brings us into communion with all that we call God, the transcendent, the sacred, the holy. The experience of “at-one-ment” with a work of beauty is communion. Like prayer, beauty puts you in touch with the source of creativity.
JD: Does nature also inspire you?
JG: Yes, it does. However, for me, inspiration comes more from the productive aspect of creativity. The making. I’m a doer, a homo faber. I’m Italian. I not only talk with my hands, but I do in order to realize. I make in order to see. As I grow older, doing becomes less necessary, the more I can simply be and still experience everything that I was talking about earlier. Age brings one into a deeper, more gentle sense of being with greater patience and contentment in simple observation.
JD: You enrolled for a time at the School of Sacred Art in Greenwich Village and studied Russian iconography. How did that influence you?
JG: It was both grueling and rewarding. Orthodox iconography exists within a canon of hierarchical precepts, meaning it’s full of do’s and don’ts. Executing a traditional icon calls for obedience and humility. The first week we spent sanding and gessoing the wood—eight, nine, ten coats until the surface was like glass. From the beginning, my teacher would say, Giuliani, you must not paint, you must float. Meaning the technique of floating, permitting the color to float on the surface to create an illusion of the patina of an icon.
Ultimately, I could not get past my proclivity toward line and depicting the human form more realistically than stylistically. This was at odds with traditional Orthodox iconography which consists in being faithful to surreal, or unreal, perspective and sources of lighting. It was a marvelous discipline, but after a year I realized, I’m not Greek, I’m not Russian, I’m North American. That epiphany was wonderfully liberating. Being a first-generation Italian-American, I easily identified with Native Americans and their sensibility, which is tribal. Italians, with their extended families of relatives and friends, are tribal people. We also shared the same sense of economics—of recycling, and producing more with less. My father was a shoemaker, my mother crocheted and knit. Her kitchen was a room of artistry. All of these indigenous characteristics became identifiable among the Native Americans as I began to reflect upon them and study their craft. It was a wedding.
JD: Your Native American icons defy traditional representations of religious subjects. Is the viewer empowered by seeing the saints rendered in their own likeness?
JG: My intent in depicting Christian saints as Native Americans is to acknowledge their original spiritual presence on this land. Many have been converted to Christianity with little of their indigenous culture remaining. It is this especially that I celebrate in rendering the beauty and excellence of their craft as well as the dignity of their persons. It is work of personal reparation. I have no intent to proselytize. When the Lakota Sioux throughout the Dakotas, most of whom had been evangelized by Jesuit missionaries, first saw themselves depicted in my works as saints, they were ecstatic. Many of them contacted me, weeping even, and said, We have never before seen ourselves depicted as Mary, as Jesus, the saints. So the flood began.
I met Bishop Charles Chaput of South Dakota whose mother is Potowatomi. He was totally supportive, and put me in touch with the Jesuits who were running a spiritual retreat in South Dakota. Father Hatcher asked me if I would paint a trinity because the Native Americans were having a hard time understanding, intellectually, the concept of the Trinity. They were visual people and if they could see the Trinity depicted, they would understand. I painted the Father as an aged wise man, and Jesus as the victorious warrior in his warrior jacket, and the Holy Spirit as a red-winged hawk, the sacred bird, and, in another painting, as an eagle, the most sacred bird. He also asked me to paint a resurrected Christ as a Sundancer with bear claws and wounded body. They understood what the Sundance sacrifice is all about.
JD: I worked at Fort Belknap in Montana, also an extremely isolated and poor reservation. Many aren’t aware of the role of prayer in Native American art. I was always struck that prayers were offered before any object was made, in thanks for what was being given to the artist. The art was given to the artist, as opposed to the artist giving the art.
JG: That is what is so powerful about the orthodox iconographers. They are considered priests. They don’t even call them painters, they are writers. One “writes” an icon. The icon writer is a priest, a mediator, a servant of the image that becomes the window through which, both ways, the human and divine are operative. All of this connected with me, and that’s why I didn’t abandon the spiritual principles of iconography in painting Native Americans. I wanted these paintings to reflect back onto the Native American viewers their own dignity and sacredness.
JD: What is the particular power of figurative, realistic work?
JG: What do we know better than the human body? We are utterly familiar with it. Such beauty, such sensuousness. That for me is the ultimate attraction of the human form. As Christians we believe that we are incarnate beings, that Divinity resides within us, and that makes the body all the more to be reverenced.
JD: How does an icon mirror the soul?
JG: The icon invites the viewer to look upon the divinity it depicts, as into a mirror, and then to see oneself reflected in that light. As I look upon that which is holy, I see myself reflected as a holy one. At first I did not intellectualize this. When I painted an icon, especially as the facial features began to emerge, I realized that I was looking into the soul of the image which had taken on its own identity. I came into relationship with that soul, and it was no less relational than you and I are at this moment. The image took on its own reality. It was no longer me. It called for a response of reverence and humility.
JD: You were being reformed by the very thing you were painting.
JG: Precisely. That’s why I could stand back, look at the image, and say, with no regard whatsoever to myself, “You are beautiful.” The image had come into a life of its own. And I was amazed, as I am each time this happens. As I fall into the painted folds of the fabric, I sense myself as a weaver with a brush watching something marvelous emerge. The more marvelous it becomes, the less I’m aware of the maker. The work takes on its own life.
JD: On one hand, your work is tethered in by the portrayal of specific ethnic identity, yet, at the level of the brushstroke, it foregoes any such limitation. At close range, the very fine surface marks are apparent, and the paintings become cosmic, completely liberated.
JG: Within the first year of painting, I needed new eye glasses because my eyes were so strained from rendering detail. I am drawn to detail because of the beauty and fineness of Native American artistry—the beadwork, quill embroidery, weaving. I wanted to emulate that fineness in a different medium. What you say about meditation describes my state while painting. Once I enter into a painting—after the pragmatic prep work is done—the painting becomes an invitation, a contemplation when the mind ceases operation and the soul is at one with the Other. It claims more and more of my time and energy without my thinking of time and energy.
JD: You enter the transcendent state of prayer.
JG: Yes, enter no less than a contemplative prayer in which five hours could be one minute or one minute could be five hours. Time is a fiction. When one is rapt in prayer, not so much intercessory prayer while praying intentionally for particular concerns, but prayer in its purest form, in wonder and awe, self-forgetfulness, puts us in rapturous communion. There is no separation.
JD: The idea of no separation from each other, from God, from the past, present, or future, is the most beautiful thought. Let’s talk about Our Lady of Guadalupe, whom you’ve painted and to whom we are both devoted.
JG: Guadalupe falls into the category of revelation. It is a vision given, a vision not relative to the artist. I am not talking about faith here. I am talking about the visual fact, the miraculous imprint of a revelation. While there is room for stylistic variations, the essential canon of the image is set. The image is not subject to the suggestion of the artist. We don’t have any visions of John the Baptist, of Francis of Assisi. We have endless stories that can stimulate any number of creative expressions, but there is no canon. There’s something sacrosanct about the vision that is given, especially since it rests in a material basis: Guadalupe imprinted on the mantel of Juan Diego.
JD: I appreciate that your diptych broke with convention and showed Juan Diego at the same size as Guadalupe. He is so often seen as an accessory to the story, the poor soul who got the ball rolling, but his faith and courage were exemplary. Faced with the same mission, most of us would be daunted into inaction. We would not have the faith to believe, quite simply, that we were the one who was called to deliver the message.
JG: When I was asked to paint Guadalupe and Juan Diego, I intentionally saw them side by side, in relationship. One without the other does not truly exist. I wanted to convey Diego’s awe at the gift given him. What must have he experienced in that encounter! He looks, like most of the men in my paintings, like my brother Vin who died several years ago. There he is, Vin, with his huge eyes, dark brows, full lips, and innocent gaze. His spirit gave life to Diego’s wonder and amazement. I want to say that Guadalupe’s face is one of the most beautiful that I’ve ever painted. Again, I say this only because the painting has a life of its own. I look at her and wonder, “Where did she come from?”
JD: What periods or paintings have had greatest influence on your work?
JG: I’d have to say the Italian Quattrocento, and of those artists, without question, Piero della Francesca. There’s something mysterious about him. His work not psychological at all–that is what he doesn’t offer. In a sense, his figures are lifeless, more statuesque, simply there, gazing at the viewer like gods and goddesses waiting upon some response. Some 20 years ago at the Clark Art Institute in Massachusetts, I stood before a della Francesca—Virgin and Child Enthroned with Four Angels [c. 1460-70]. How remarkable that out of the small number of surviving della Francescas, one of such beauty is here among us in New England! As I stood in front of it something happened. I don’t know what. When I came out of “it,” I knew without protestation that I had painted this work. I knew how I had painted it—to the brushstroke. It was a mystical experience. I felt an intense simpatico and soul identification with della Francesca. This has never happened before or after.
JD: What do you think you experienced?
JG: What happened at the Clark Institute was unique and, I suspect, the result of the soul’s openness to the sheer power of beauty. I believe in the communication of souls. What is time, what is space? These are the big questions. We succumb to conventional imposition of limitation. In reality, there is no limitation.
JD: Would you say your experience was a divine gift?
JG: Only in the sense that I believe divinity is experienced in the ordinary. Each of us would be capable of entering into such an experience not only once in a lifetime, but many times if we were able to see past cultural impositions. This why art is so powerful, why beauty like prayer is so powerful. It enables us to see through imposed obstacles. It liberates us.