Art and Sacrificial Love: A Conversation with Michael D. O’Brien

By Clemens Cavallin and Michael D. O'Brien

This work is a profound and illuminating conversation between two Catholic artists who are also gifted writers. The setting is a house in the woods near Combermere, Canada. The two men are alone, free to explore the wellsprings of Christian art and the suffering that its creation entails.

This moving discussion between the two artists and writers is not theoretical. It lays bare the anguish and the joy of a life lived in the service of an artist''s vocation. Includes an eight-page art insert.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ignatius Press
• Release date: Jul 29, 2021
• ISBN: 9781642291803

Book preview

PROLOGUE

As we drove through the late November countryside of Ontario—from the large fertile fields outside of Ottawa to the wooded hills and lakes surrounding Eganville and Killaloe—our conversation quickly found common ground in questions of sincere Christian life and art. For me it was like meeting a twenty-year-older version of myself with silvery beard and hair: a Catholic dedicated to art and writing, having, as I did, six children (three boys and three girls), but who had made several radical and life-changing decisions that I had not made.

At the same time, due to our age difference—Michael O’Brien was in 2011 sixty-three years old, and I only forty-two—there was still a possibility for me to find a similar way forward: to follow the narrow and winding path up the mountain and gain a clearer view of the heavens. He had done it, so why couldn’t I? I just had to pay close attention to how he went about things—not prejudging, but with an open mind.

When we arrived at the home of Michael and his wife, Sheila, I saw that it was not extraordinary in any sense: a one-story, white house with a small separate garage and studio—hidden away on a back road, situated in the middle of endless woods, but with the magnificent Madawaska River close by and a few minutes’ drive to the village of Combermere.

The interior of the house was similarly simple with deep red kitchen cabinets beside the pride of the furniture, an Irish iron stove for cooking and heating; above it herbs were drying on a grate, while tomatoes were ripening on the window-sill. Nothing in the house was new and shiny, but worn and made of natural materials, evidence of a predilection for handicraft. It was similar, I thought, to the home of my parents on the farm back in Sweden.

Sheila was away for the weekend, so we were alone. A friend of Michael’s wondered how we were then to survive, as Michael’s cooking was notorious for its frugality. As my gastronomic skills and palate were similarly limited, and my hunger was more for a conversation on things close to my heart, I suffered no lack of sustenance.

Outside the thin walls of the living room, darkness and cold descended upon the forest, which was waiting for the first snowfall to come any day now. Michael kindled the large fireplace, and we sat down in the two sofas with teacups in our hands, ready to resume our conversation on art and literature. Although bookshelves lined the uninsulated walls around us, I felt both the heat from the fireplace and the cold from outside—fortunately there was a patchwork quilt on my sofa.

After a while, Michael rose to light one of the candles at his home altar, above which hung two of his paintings of the Immaculate Heart of Mary and Sacred Heart of Jesus. As I watched the clear blue and red colors of the images, I sensed a cloud of grace surrounding Michael, something of which, I think, he was quite unaware. He had striven for so many years to be true to divine inspiration (despite the few material rewards and the almost complete social marginalization that had followed) that this had become second nature; he primarily felt, I believe, his own inadequacies, not how God was using him for an overflow of His glory.

In 1976, together with Sheila, who was six months pregnant with their son, Michael had entered the little church in Blue River, British Columbia, and put his brushes under the altar. Trusting in divine inspiration, they made the leap together from a low-paid but secure job of weather-observing to the adventure of sacred art.

Providence immediately put him to the test. He had to endure three weeks of complete inability to paint even a single stroke of the brush. It was a premonition of the endurance his choice of work would require.

After the initial period of creative cramp, Michael began to paint icons; later he developed a style he calls Neo-Byzantine expressionism, which synthesizes Eastern and Western forms of sacred art.

Michael builds up his images with thin layers of diluted acrylic paint upon pieces of gesso-primed hardboard. The motifs are mostly explicitly Christian; the colors are strong, and the figures have serious expressions, reflecting an inner, solemn presence. He paints while immersed in prayer and seems to have lost contact with the outer world.

Michael never took art lessons or went to art school. He is self-taught. But he did have mentors: first, a female icon painter who was a member of the Madonna House community in Combermere, and then, for a short period, he received advice and encouragement from the well-known Canadian painter William Kurelek until the latter’s death in 1977.¹

To live on sacred art proved to be hard; the sense of marginalization caused much anguish, but Michael never gave up. It is important to note that his determination and endurance were not born of bitterness or a steely will to take revenge on cynical art curators, but rather on submission to the divine will, which empties out self-will.

This submission provided his self-understanding with a foundational poverty, which was not merely a form of deprivation. In a similar way, the simple interiors of the O’Brien home were not the result of a lack of expensive furniture; they were complete in themselves—although insulation and a more modern kitchen would have been welcome; one should not romanticize the lack of resources. Still, my point is that there was an austere but warm and cultured quality to that poverty, like the will and imagination of a person chiseled and formed by sacrifice, of having every day to give up his dreams and plans, ambitions and self-understanding, but not his soul.

Perhaps it was this northern ethos, molded by a harsh climate of long winters (both material and spiritual), that appealed to me; it was so far from the easy exuberance of Italian baroque churches with their floating saints, cherubs, and popes with golden robes.

To overcome the bitterness of the cross, Michael had daily recourse to prayer, which often led him into mystical experiences animating his imagination. The result was an inner life in which artistic inspiration and mysticism were not two different realms, but two aspects of the same life.

I especially remember when on later visits we prayed the Divine Mercy Chaplet together at three