New for April 2017

April 2, 2017

New for April 2017

As we enter the last days of Lent and prepare to celebrate Easter on April 16th, I have two complete cycles of Stations of the Cross imagery from the Sacred Art Pilgrim Collection to add to the various pages of The Stations of the Cross gallery of the Themes of Faith section.  Interestingly enough, both are the work of women artists but in radically different styles! The earliest of the two Stations of the Cross series (left) is the most modern in form. The fourteen colored etchings, dating from 1973, are the work of French Printmaker Elisabeth de la Mauviniere, whose move toward abstraction came out of her landscape studies of the rugged Ardennes region.  Against a gridwork of cross-hatching, figures are suggested by curvilinear shapes, while intersecting vertical and diagonal lines keep the Cross ever in mind. Southwestern American Saintmaker Marie Romero Cash created her Stations of the Cross cycle (right) just three years ago in a style inspired by the sacred art of the Spanish Colonial era. Her images of the traditional fourteen events of the Way of Sorrow (plus an extra depiction of the Resurrection) were painted with natural, water-based pigments on gessoed wood, keeping alive a regional folk art form that all but died out at the end of the 19th century with the coming of the railroads and an influx of mass-produced religious artifacts. In a craft, traditionally, dominated by men, Cash holds the singular distinction of being chosen in 1997 to paint the Stations of the Cross panels in the Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The pieces in my collection are a small format variation of the Santa Fe images. (John Kohan)