![\"Black](\"https:\/\/imagejournal.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/Sean-Scully-on-wikimedia-commons.jpg\")
<\/a>When I finished reading Paul Anel\u2019s article on the chapel art of Sean Scully, in the current Image<\/em> (#91), I was moved to close my eyes in prayer. It wasn\u2019t verbal prayer. It was a sitting within a sense of the sacred.<\/p>\nBoth Scully\u2019s art and Anel\u2019s graced account of it had drawn me into this sacred space. Anel focuses on Scully\u2019s transformation of an ancient, crumbling building\u2014the Chapel of Santa Cecilia on the grounds of Montserrat Abbey in Spain\u2014into a glistening, vibrant work of art: indeed the article is titled \u201cGathering the Light.\u201d<\/p>\n
There\u2019s no point in my repeating Anel\u2019s account here; you can read it in Image<\/em> online.<\/a> What I want to ponder instead is, first, what drew me into prayer on finishing the article. Partly, I think, it was the humility of both Scully and Anel. Neither calls attention to himself in his work, whether visual art or prose.<\/p>\n We don\u2019t learn that Anel is a priest until the penultimate paragraph, when he recounts celebrating the first Mass in the newly reborn chapel. And Anel has discussed Scully\u2019s \u201chumility and objectivity\u201d in keeping himself out of his art. Not totally, because any art has to come out of the artist\u2019s soul and life experience.<\/p>\n For instance, a tragedy in Scully\u2019s life (the death of his nineteen-year-old son in a car crash) appears in one of the chapel\u2019s abstract paintings: blocks of black, grey, and white oils painted onto aluminum. \u201cThe placement of this painting in the chapel,\u201d Anel writes, \u201ctransforms the tragedy into an offering, the failure into a prayer.\u201d<\/p>\n Anel\u2019s essay draws me, further, to muse\u2014beyond its specific content\u2014on its perfect match of prose with visual art. What accounts for this match, I wonder? It happens not only in this particular essay, but in all the articles in Image<\/em> on a specific artist (usually two per issue). It helps that we\u2019re given color plates of each artist\u2019s work, so we can see at least some of what the essayist is describing. But without the writer\u2019s prose, these plates would be close to meaningless.<\/p>\n By comparison, I think of prose about music. I go to many classical music concerts, and I\u2019m fairly literate in music; yet I nearly always find the program notes incomprehensible. Is it because music can\u2019t be held still? You can\u2019t experience a piece of music all-at-once, as you can a work of visual art.<\/p>\n The visual artwork stands still, letting an essayist\u2019s prose move into and around it: out into the artist\u2019s life, back into some dimension of the artwork, out again to comparison with other artists. And through all this dancing around of the prose, we can hold the artwork unmoving in front of us.<\/p>\n But if I were reading prose about a musical work called \u201cSaint Cecilia,\u201d the prose would dance around while the music moved onward as well. If I pause the music, all I\u2019m hearing is a single note or chord, not the whole work.<\/p>\n Take, for instance, Anel\u2019s discussion of one of the paintings in Scully\u2019s chapel: that of the chapel\u2019s namesake, Saint Cecilia. When I first look at this painting (it\u2019s reproduced in Image<\/em>), I see a pleasantly intriguing abstract work: a background of thick alternating red and gold horizontal stripes, onto which seem laid two horizontal rectangles\u2014the top one white and covered with thin wavy horizontal black lines, the bottom one vertical bands of black and red.<\/p>\n That\u2019s as far as I can get on my own. Here\u2019s where Anel steps in to elucidate what these abstract shapes are depicting. The painting, he writes, tells the story of the fifth century Saint Cecilia. As a young woman she was brought to the Roman court by a man who hated Christians. She was instructed to sacrifice to pagan gods; if she refused, she would be killed.<\/p>\n She chose martyrdom, singing to God as the executioner approached. Scully\u2019s upper inset, which looks a bit like a musical score, refers to her singing. It is, Anel writes, \u201ca spiritual portrait of the patron saint of musicians.\u201d The lower inset, with its harsh black and red vertical lines, evokes her beheading. Meanwhile, the painting\u2019s background red and gold stripes are the flag of Catalonia, where this chapel stands.<\/p>\n As the patron saint of musicians, Cecilia has had many musical works composed for or about her. But, ironically, since I\u2019ve said that (for me, anyway) music and prose don\u2019t make a good match, prose about them would not help me understand them more deeply. And they\u2019d have to be very simplistically programmatic for me to see the saint\u2019s life in them. Whereas through Anel\u2019s entry into this painting with his prose, I can see (and almost hear) Cecilia singing.<\/p>\n Finally, I want to return to my first reaction to reading Anel\u2019s essay: being moved to silent prayer. In closing his essay, Anel reports Scully\u2019s response when asked what he himself was most grateful for in the chapel he\u2019d restored.<\/p>\n Scully replied: \u201cThe little frescoes on the wall, because they are the humblest part: You know, when you do something, no matter how big and expensive it is, its value will always lie in something very humble. It\u2019s like love.\u201d<\/p>\n And what is prayer but love?<\/p>\n Peggy Rosenthal is director of Poetry Retreats<\/a> and writes widely on poetry as a spiritual resource. Her books include Praying through Poetry: Hope for Violent Times<\/em> (Franciscan Media), and The Poets\u2019 Jesus<\/em> (Oxford). See Amazon<\/a> for a full list. She also teaches an online course, \u201cPoetry as a Spiritual Practice,\u201d through Image<\/em>\u2019s Glen Online program<\/a>.<\/p>\n Photo of Sean Scully via Wikimedia Commons, used with permission under a Creative Commons License.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When I finished reading Paul Anel\u2019s article on the chapel art of Sean Scully, in the current Image (#91), I was moved to close my eyes in prayer. It wasn\u2019t verbal prayer. It was a sitting within a sense of the sacred. Both Scully\u2019s art and Anel\u2019s graced account of it had drawn me into […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1050,"featured_media":11158,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[4142,342,4143,3572,364,4144,4145,191],"class_list":["post-11157","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-peggy-rosenthal","tag-chapel-of-saint-cecilia","tag-humility","tag-paul-anel","tag-peggy-rosenthal","tag-prose","tag-sacred","tag-sean-scully","tag-visual-art"],"yoast_head":"\n<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n