Matthew Alderman is a graduate of the Notre Dame Architectueal School and a man of many gifts, architect, artist, and designer of liturgical furnishings. He is a regular contributor to “The shrine of the Holy Whapping” (yes, really!) and “The New Liturgical Movement” (for which he designed their new logo.) For more information about his work and commissions be sure to check out his website at matthewalderman.com
Matt was gracious enough to take time to answer a few questions.
1. Can you tell us a little about your journey as an artist?
I drew with an almost compulsive fervor from a very early age, though I never studied art or artistic techniques with much in the way of a system until much later. My family always encouraged me in this, and I think I owe pretty much all my interest in art, art history, and culture to my mom and dad, who took great pains during my childhood to show me the finer things in life–and also how those fine and beautiful things related to and reflected upon the Faith that I also learned from them. My grandmother and mother have taken up painting as a hobby at various points, so I think that was a big influence on me as well. I trained at the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture in college, and I still consider that my primary vocation, but what I learned there spurred me to get back into art and drawing in a more systematic manner. Once I was on my own, and I realized (once again, encouraged by my parents) that there was an interest in my work, it became a much larger part of my career and vocation, in addition to just being a very enjoyable hobby.
2. Tell us some more about your work.
I realize in the paragraph above, I haven’t said too much about God or Christianity; I think this is because the Faith is so tied into my work, as an illustrator specializing in devotional art and also in the design of church furnishings, that it goes without saying. I have a lot of admiration for the medieval model of sacred art, which saw the highest form of art as indelibly religious, and more importantly, tied to both the liturgy and to a received culture. It’s one reason I love taking commissions, as it forces me to submit my own interests and preferences to bigger needs and wants. At the same time I’m not trying to turn the clock back. I see myself as engaging in a search-and-rescue operation for much of the remainder of Western Culture that emerged after the Renaissance, which is why I often incorporate elements of later styles–art nouveau, art deco, and even some fairly modern influences, etc.–into my work, though always subject to larger, older traditions. Or at least that is what I am trying to attempt. It’s a tricky balance, but I refuse to simply imitate the rather jaundiced-looking holy card art that is often considered “traditional” in certain quarters.
I also have worked in the field of architecture, sometimes as a member of a firm, sometimes as a designer of church furnishings or as an independent design consultant working in association with an architect. The design consultant creates aesthetic concepts for an interior or exterior that an architect develops in terms of details, structure, and materials. Design consulting and church furnishing design is what I am doing at present, which gives me both the opportunity to focus on the more intellectual and aesthetic aspects of the project while working with an experienced architect with an understanding of structural issues. A local classical firm which I have great relations with has been very helpful thus far along this path, and has offered to be the architect of record when I need one, or when the client hasn’t obtained one already.
Much of the same issues and methodologies I mentioned above appear in the architectural realm as well: trying to innovate within tradition, to get at the substance and richness of the tradition, while avoiding superficial imitation. (And this doesn’t mean just knocking off the ornaments off a classical building and calling it “new,” which is a common cop-out. This is especially difficult as I think people are afraid of ornament, perhaps due to lingering American Puritan tendencies, but also because they are unaware of the symbolism behind it and tend to process it as a big glob of curlicues without meaning rather than breaking it down into its individual, rational, symbolic components.) Of course, with architecture, every curlicue costs something, so finding ways to do something traditional within fairly simple parameters is another challenge I face at present and which intrigues me. Often when faced with a budgetary issue, the impulse is to strip away all the extra decoration, as if it were superfluous. The problem is it can look like a stylistic cartoon or parody. The key is to start out simple and understand your limitations to ensure the final result is beautiful within the restraints you have been given.
3. In your opinion what is the role of the artist in our culture?
The problem is art has become something of a closed circle. I lived in New York for about three years at the start of my career, and I saw there was a real disjunct between modern-day artists and the wider, older western culture. It’s easy to complain about the contemporary art scene but even fairly superficial kvetching about abstract paintings underlines the point that artists are now essentially autonomous entities. Their art no longer points to the true, the beautiful or the good, even as today’s very secular society views it, much less in the way our ancestors understood. Essentially, they say, “Here is my vision,” while pounding into our heads that art is a necessity, even if we find it incomprehensible. The odd thing is even the wealthy and au-courant types still love the old masters, and will pay through the nose to support some blockbuster Rembrandt exhibit, but the idea of producing something genuinely new within that tradition simply does not seem to be an option for them in many cases. In an odd way, we’ve become a very “conservative” culture in terms of actually producing anything. (There are some exceptions to the rule as there are always, mercifully, a few wealthy folks who both are willing to break with modernity and also have the good taste to know how to do it well. This is especially true in the architectural realm.)
On the opposite end of things you have the masters of kitsch like Thomas Kinkaid, who is one of my favorite bete-noirs or boogeymen. If you look at some of his early work, it’s actually not bad, and even his more schmaltzy stuff isn’t technically wrong, but there is this profound sugariness about it that is troubling nonetheless. Someone once commented, I forget where I read this, that this was because our more mainstream Protestant-influenced culture didn’t have a place for sanctified suffering in its art; and I think as a consequence there’s no room for the subsequent triumph. Everything is content and happy, but really lacking true joy and majesty.
For me, an artist’s job is to follow the rules and conventions set down by received tradition, not to hold up a “mirror to society,” or be “transgressive” or whatever they’re calling it these days. But that doesn’t mean he can’t work within those conventions to produce something wonderful and beautiful and genuinely new. Of course, as the guardians of culture have fallen asleep on the job (or perhaps the inmates have taken over the asylum), to some degree Christian artists have to set those boundaries themselves to an extent, which is not such a bad thing, either.
The central problem is our culture now has very little content–whether in terms of the Faith or even in terms of a central secular story. We have nothing to celebrate, nothing to impart, and thus as a consequence rather than, say, decorating our airports with great allegorical and historical images of flight, or of national virtue, or of the patron saints of the air, we get safely non-controversial art generated by a contest among our schoolchildren, or, at most, something abstract designed carefully not to offend. How are we supposed to get inspired by this? How are we supposed to discover what it means to be the inheritor, as a nation of immigrants, of some of the best cultural traditions of the west and the east as well?
I think a lot of people find this sort of traditional culture “elitist” or “imperialist,” which drives me crazy, as I think often when you get down to it you can find more in common among the traditional cultures of the whole world than the secular universe you have nowadays. I rather enjoy, for instance, Tibetan art, as I can understand it from an iconographic perspective and not simply as an exercise in composition. Certainly the theology behind it is radically different than my own Faith, but it’s also still worlds away from, well, shall we call it Starbucks Buddhism? Which can be set aside and put on a shelf when you’re away from the yoga studio. Ideally, inclusion within culture would be represented by a series of statues of the great philosophers where you have both Socrates and Confucius, who the Jesuits actually first translated and introduced to the west. Nowadays you just don’t have any statues at all.
In architecture, it’s a bit different, as buildings have to stand up and people have to live in them (and with them!) but there’s still a polarization–in this case between the avant-garde and often unbuildable darlings of the media like Peter Eisenmann or Gehry, and the kitsch McMansion types or merely practical get-it-done commercial or institutional architecture. The architecture of one can seem actively hostile to tradition and even life (some of Eisenmann’s deconstructivist work is actually designed to inconvenience its inhabitants) while the other imitates tradition in the most superficial and badly-observed way. Most of us who work for classical or traditional firms (quite a few of which exist, and in usual economic conditions, even flourish) have to fight a two-front war between people who assume we’re dangerous reactionaries (Peter Eisenmann once called an audience of classical students, to their face, a bunch of “terrorists”), and those who want something traditional but don’t know where to look and thus end up asking Bob’s Discount Architects for a Georgian home that appears to have been molded out of plastic. And then, nobody winds, save perhaps Bob.
4. How is your faith reflected in your work?
Considering most of my work consists of images of various saints and other religious figures, it’s everywhere! There’s always a slight tension between when I treat an illustration I’m doing as an exercise in composition, and as an aid to devotion, or to illustrate a particular theological point. I think ideally there should be no such clash, as they ought to be perfectly beautiful and perfectly suitable for their purpose, but working out that relationship can be tricky. I think, though, there is a tendency among purists to want to reduce religious art to a series of flat theological diagrams, which is simply not part of the Western Catholic tradition, which has had room for some limited artistic freedom (admittedly sometimes abused) for six or seven centuries or more. While I could stand to be more systematic, I do pray while I work, and try to ask God and the saint I am drawing to find that balance between composition and intelligibility–I usually ask God to let me do a worthy drawing, but also to have a bit of fun with the subject while I’m at it. And that “fun” also has a component of Faith to it, as it usually manifests itself in the details where I work in another subtler level of symbolism. An ornamental edging of a dress worn by the Virgin might have seashells worked into it, for her title of Stella Maris, for instance. I am reminded of the work of the architect Edwin Lutyens, who once designed light fixtures resembling cardinal’s hats for a Jesuit chapel, with the humbling and subtle joke behind then that the red hat was always just a bit above reach for most Jesuits.
In architecture, it’s much the same. It’s easy to assume a “Catholic” church building will have some saints here, some pointy windows there, maybe a dome–and it often should have these things–but if you don’t get the essence right, if you don’t adhere to those fundamental underlying codes, it’ll look superficial. The way we lay out the sanctuary, the way we plan the location of the altar, or install a baldachin or pulpit, the spatial arrangement of all these is critical in elucidating what we believe. Is the altar and the tabernacle the center or focus of the church, or is it the people? What do these choices tell us about what we believe? It’s not enough to simply smear a coating of badly-done “traditional” ornament over a modern shell-though ornament, well-done, is extremely important as well. You just have to get the soul and structure right first. In some places, of course, this may not be possible–in which case you have to use space cleverly and find subtle ways to redirect people’s attention to the points that matter.
5. By pursuing a career using your creative gifts, have you had to make sacrifices specifically because of your faith?
The subject matter of my work and the clients that find me mean I tend to not run into a lot of problems like this. I suppose I could be making better money as a proper secular illustrator, but then I’d not probably be drawing something recognizable to me as my own style, or even as art. Though in most cases even the secular commissions I’ve done would hardly have been likely to turn out to be anti-Catholic. Non-Catholics tend to be either really intrigued or kind of mystified by my work. One friend of mine is absolutely entranced by it and always looking over my shoulder when I sketch or draw in public, while once, when I told someone that I was drawing a saint for a patron, she simply asked, “why?” Not in a mean way, just…”why?” There’s a missionary element to all this.
And in terms of architecture, while high-end residential work tends to be the bread-and-butter of most classical firms, I do get to work in the ecclesiastical realm on occasion, and more and more frequently, as I am now specializing in church furnishing design, which, in the context of a renovation, is a great way to freshen up a tired 1960s church (even if perhaps its layout isn’t the best) without having to resort to the bulldozer.
6. We have a rich tradition of Catholic art to draw upon, how much of this plays a role in your work?
A huge role. I look at dozens of examples of Catholic iconography before embarking on a drawing, to see what the tradition is for depicting a saint, and what is in a sense open to interpretation, and then I consider, how best to interpret those stylistic grey areas so it reflects the personality and life of the saint. I like to pick a style of art or drawing which reflect the saint’s charism or the period of his or her life when I do an illustration. For instance, I once incorporated some Jugendstil (a German/Austrian version of art nouveau; the name literally means “youth-style”) elements into a conceptual design I did for a church dedicated to St. Agnes, as the style reflected her young age and flowery beauty.
7. What is the biggest challenge for Catholics today who want to pursue an artistic career?
Well, I’ve never tried to pursue a conventional mainstream career in the arts: I have tended to work for architectural firms that were exclusively classical, or at least traditional in bent (though I have done modern work on occasion, and don’t mind it if it’s well done and in the right context), and my own commissioned work tends to be exclusively for people who appreciate the heritage of the Faith. It is a bit of a walled city, so to speak, but sometimes walls are the only way to keep the barbarian hordes out. The great difficulty is there simply is no common ground in the more rarefied echelons of contemporary art to build upon. Even Picasso and Rothko used canvas–how can you argue with someone who considers art to be a rather shopworn shark carcass sitting in a tank of embalming fluid? Fortunately, there are a lot of normal people, both rich and poor, who disagree. They just may not be sitting at the top of the pyramid.
I’m not the best person to ask this question, and I’m not sure hanging out in the Catholic ghetto is a viable solution, either, to healing the culture. Unfortunately at this point I’m not sure there’s too many other ways to actually produce real art that our ancestors would have recognized and not dead sharks in formaldehyde. I will say that one should avoid the conventional “gallerist” models of art where you put your vision out there, have a show, and then have people asking you for your art regardless of content. Take commssions. Even small ones. I’ve designed everything from a forty-foot-tall organ case to holy cards. It’s far more interesting, and more in line with traditional notions of art.
8. Where have you experienced success and failure in your artistic career?
The economy has been a roller-coaster for the past two or three years, which has had a big impact on what sort of work is available. On the one hand it has not really affected my artistic business, though people are more skittish about design and construction projects. I’m actually doing fairly well at present, with a couple of design-consulting and furnishing jobs on my plate, however. I’m always worried potential employers may be put off by the amount of ecclesiastical work in my portfolio but I’ve almost always found them extremely receptive; even if they personally are not interested in that work, they can appreciate quality and beauty.
I have discovered it’s important to work very closely with your client, and not to simply impose your vision. They have to live with what you do, whether it’s art or architecture, and are often a lot closer to earth–in a good sense–than an artist. Even for a traditional artist there’s a great internal drive to innovate and experiment and make sure you’re not doing the same thing over and over again. But often a client can spot that something which is new and intriguing to you, may well be just plain ugly, something which might be more apparent to the artist when you step back from it and the novelty wears off.
9. What advice would you give aspiring artists?
Don’t eschew formal artistic education. Just make sure you find the right school. With the exception of my architectural training, and a few classes here and there as a child (which I chafed under, I’ll admit), I am mostly self-taught. As a consequence, I think much of my artistic style is the result of me trying to make the best of various compositional bad habits! This is not such a bad thing, but at the same time I am blown away by the technical abilities of painters and artists whose work I could never remotely emulate. Don’t feel a need to express yourself right up front–learn the techniques, use your time to practice on projects, and then you can start experimenting and combining on your own. (Though also realize your teachers may give you contradictory advice and you have to resolve or ignore it.) Don’t also feel yoked to one particular style. I am a great believer in what the architect Ninian Comper called “unity by inclusion,” which means taking the best of the past and using it to clothe the theological or liturgical armature provided by the Church. At the same time, you have to really know what you’re doing to get it right. Most importantly, simply do what you do. I’ve found the best practice for me has been simply doing commissions; my style has developed and improved immensely in the past four years I’ve engaged in graphic design and illustration of various kinds. Work hard, take pride in your product, and eventually people will notice you.
Also, know when to listen. Starting out, you may be thin-skinned about criticism. Often your critics may be right. Just as often, they may be totally off-base. An experienced artist has the confidence both to totally ignore his critics, and know when to pay attention to them. Be gracious, never defensive, and occasionally sometimes just keep your mouth shut.
10. What resources would you recommend to aspiring artists?
I tend not to read a lot of theory, for better or worse; I find I learn best visually, and simply look at as much as possible, at as much art, nature, and architecture, as I can, even sometimes in styles or periods that otherwise might seem irrelevant. As I’ve said before, I hate to see beauty wasted, so such explorations are to me an act of restitution and rescue. Look at books, look at buildings, look at shadows and people. In terms of resources, the internet is great. It took me years to get a website and in the past month alone it has given me a sense of permanence and “legitimacy” that I felt I lacked up to this point. Don’t forget to network and cultivate your clients–it may seem silly or shallow to schmooze, but I’ve found it helps get new commissions and more often than not you end up being very good friends with the people you work for. It may start off as a business relationship but it often becomes something more. And try to write–either in magazines or online–about your work. Many artists or architects aren’t terribly articulate, but I think it’s essential to cultivate this talent as well as your visual abilities.
And pray, and trust. My prayer life is always an object of dissatisfaction for me, as I never quite feel it is good enough when compared with friends I know, but then, that’s sort of the point. God knows you’re trying–at mass, in the confessional, at your bedtime prayers. Sometimes I plead or argue with God, or even get a bit frustrated with Him when I run up against a brick wall or turn down a cul-de-sac in some aspect of my career, but as you get older you begin to see the reasons, and the long periods of trial lead to moments of light and beauty that make it all worthwhile. He may drive you bananas some of the time, but He knows what He’s doing and He loves you. I’m not saying that makes everything easy, but it’s important to remember.
Thanks, Matthew