Gordon Fuglie
With his openness to truth and beauty, his sense of moral goodness, his freedom and the voice of his conscience, with his longings for the infinite and for happiness, man questions himself about God’s existence. In all this he discerns signs of his spiritual soul. The soul...can have its origin only in God.
—The Catechism of the Catholic Church
What is a person without a life-form,...without a form which he has chosen for his life, a form into which and through which to pour out his life, so that his life becomes the soul of the form and the form becomes the expression of his soul? If man is to live in an original form, that form has first to be sighted. One must possess a spiritual eye capable of perceiving the forms of existence with awe.
—Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord
AS a nearsighted high school student in La Jolla, California in the late 1970s, Michael Schrauzer found in his study of mathematics, science, biblical history, charts, and diagrams a kind of antidote to his myopia. These tools for obtaining clarity and understanding of the world were among the early interests that he pursued to construct his own intellectual framework. He recalls that these quests to educate his “outer eye” (as he calls it) made him feel as if he were blindly groping for elusive systems that together would provide the explanation of life itself.
Concurrent with and vital to his hunger for knowledge was the adolescent Schrauzer’s perception of spiritual stirrings within. This eventually crystallized for him as a desire for Being that could be realized primarily through the development of his visual sensibilities, his latent “inner eye.” He remembers an anxiousness to “lift the fog and darkness that was in me,” keeping him from apprehending the transcendent. In this regard, Schrauzer was recognizing the importance of a spiritually-based vision as summarized by cultural historian Martin Jay in Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought: “No less symptomatic of the power of the optical in religion is the tendency of the visionary tradition to posit a higher sight of the seer, who is able to discern a truth denied to normal vision. Here the so-called third eye of the soul is invoked to compensate for the imperfections of the two physical eyes.”
Intensifying his quest for Being, Schrauzer began to ask questions about the deeper meaning of his Catholic identity, the religion of his birth, and increased both his participation in its faith and study of its philosophical tradition. By his mid-twenties, Christianity had become for him the hermeneutic on life, his world-view.
Schrauzer’s growing desire to deeply look at, understand, and represent the Cosmos within the rich tradition of intellectual Christianity also turned his interests toward art. It was in drawing, painting, and constructing that he found the means to express what he had learned about God, humanity, and the natural world. His art, therefore, is primarily driven by his study of and reflection on whatever is true and beautiful in its essence, and second, by a mode of representation that is faithful to nature and the Spirit. Schrauzer loves and comprehends God through his intellect: his art is the visualization of the great tradition of Catholic theology and philosophy. Inspired by this tradition, Schrauzer would reverse the modernist notion of art established in the previous century by Walter Pater, who insisted on the absolute primacy of individual impression over the thing that produced it, of experience itself over any abstract principle evaluating it or lesson to be drawn from it, i.e., art for art’s sake. By contrast, Schrauzer makes art in order to externalize his inward knowledge of the Real. His work is a “crystallization” that he hopes will find its way into the sight, intellect, and heart of a certain kind of attentive pilgrim in this secular age.
While Schrauzer was engaged in artistic study he encountered two masters who provided direction for his aspirations in art, one coincidentally in town—Cliff McReynolds—the other a half-millennium and a continent away—Jan van Eyck of Flanders.
In the late 1970s, the middle-aged McReynolds became an inspirational figure in Southern California for young, mainly evangelical, artists anxiously seeking a connection between their newly embraced, biblically dogmatic faith and their raw talent. Not long before, McReynolds himself had undergone a forceful Christian conversion from a bohemian life-style and, hot on its heels, an “artistic repentance.” Repudiating his pre-Christian expressionistic and pop-art paintings (before an evangelical gathering in Orange County, he described a large swatch of color in an early work as Satan), McReynolds executed a stylistic about-face to embrace a conglomerate mode of tightly rendered, illustrative, fantastic and didactic representation of earthly vistas and “spacescapes”—components of his program for depicting a “new earth” in art. Within his jewel-like and brilliant panoramas that bring to mind Hieronymus Bosch and the Northern Renaissance tradition, he simultaneously manifested redemptive ecstasy and angry jeremiads. Confident, articulate, visionary, and prone to probe the motivations of his pupils, McReynolds became a leading figure in the small Southern California subculture of young Christian artists searching earnestly for affirmation of their own expression within their generally uninterested faith communities.
The young Schrauzer was attracted to McReynolds’s prodigiously verist, optically precise visualizations of the natural and imaginary realms that intertwined in the elder’s paintings. Studying with McReynolds also encouraged in Schrauzer a lasting fealty to the craft of art making: the faithful fabricator of transcendent visions needs spiritual integration with his tools and materials. In this regard, Schrauzer’s understanding of the spiritual dimension of craft recalls the dictum of A.K. Coomaraswamy: “Man’s activity consists in either a making or a doing. Both of these aspects of the active life depend for their correction on the contemplative life.” Schrauzer retains McReynolds’s admonition that the task of the Christian artist is to make work that embodies “The Light” so that viewers, as they contemplate the work of art, might “truly see.”
What made Schrauzer unique among his predominantly evangelical peers was his growing understanding of the Catholic Church as a “palatial construction” of divine inspiration and wisdom that welcomed his participation in creating its architecture and his abiding within its environs. As a participant in a faith community with a rich cultural legacy, Schrauzer affirms that he found in Catholicism “the historical grounding essential for my art to be relevant in past and present ages.” In this context, his adolescent riffling through medieval and Renaissance art-history books in search for a role model within the Catholic tradition led him to Flanders where, almost a century before the Protestant Reformation, the late Middle Ages bloomed into the Northern Renaissance in the work of Jan van Eyck (1390-1441).
Schrauzer initially encountered Van Eyck’s work in color reproductions, and became fascinated with the artist’s masterpiece, the monumental polyptych The Adoration of the Lamb, commissioned by the wealthy burgher Joos Vyd to surmount the high altar of the Church of St. John (now St. Bavon) in Ghent, Belgium. Astonished with the Fleming’s simultaneous macro/micro-visualization of a world both knowable and perfectly known, the extraordinary mastery of oil paint, and the integration of multiple biblical and theological narratives in a single work, Schrauzer then and now regards the Ghent Altarpiece (as it is more widely known) as the work that has most influenced his career. Indeed, in 1989 he made a pilgrimage to see it in situ. From that time, the Ghent Altarpiece has been a touchstone for his work, inspiring him to transport and translate its comprehensive theology into his own artistic endeavors.
What is most significant in this work for Schrauzer is its embodiment of beauty and doctrine, and especially, its sacramental setting. These elements may be less clear to Christians in the Reformed and evangelical traditions, or even Catholics who have lost their own history. As both a spiritual and artistic heir of the Flemish master, Schrauzer recognizes in The Adoration of the Lamb its Catholic sacramental function. He understands that Van Eyck has integrally deployed symbolism, mystical vision, and sacred history (especially from the Book of Revelation and the thirteenth century Legenda Aurea) to unite the divine and temporal worlds on its altar setting where Christ is daily the real presence in the Holy Eucharist for the community of faith. Beneath the vivid polyptych, at the moment of the priestly elevation of the bread and wine, the communicant observes above the raised elements a royally resplendent Christ—seated between John the Baptist and the Virgin—administering the life-giving sacrament to the painted procession of prophets, apostles, saints, martyrs, pilgrims, and ecclesiastics approaching the Mystic Lamb. Moreover, the Catholic participant understands that he is part of the present and continuing congregational procession toward the sacrament at the eastern end of the church—east being the direction from which Christ will return to culminate history. It is the sacramental and eschatological functions of the Ghent Altarpiece, where divinity suffuses the temporal, that Schrauzer repeatedly touches on in his work from the mid-1980s to 1994.
The most Van Eyckian example of Schrauzer’s work is Altarpiece [see Plate 5], a hinged triptych upon a predella that the artist began in 1989 and completed in 1994. Standing nearly four feet tall, Altarpiece also widens to over four feet when its wings are extended. Approaching the work, the viewer’s eye is naturally drawn toward the highest panel, a framed square sheet of gold leaf. The simple, unitive use of elemental, radiant gold presents a transcendent and virtually imageless symbol of heaven—the glory of the One. Below it is a “God’s-eye” view of blue sky that is penetrated by the gilt square, the firmament above the desert foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains north of Los Angeles, here crystallized into the landscape of Earth. (In his youthful study of the Psalms, Schrauzer was struck by the notion of God as all-seeing and His capacity for the overall illumination of His Creation. In response to the Creator, Schrauzer strives for that state of closeness to God where he believes all is and will be clarified.)
The mountains also cap the realm in the tripartite predella where the human drama takes place. On either side a dark-robed man and woman stand with outstretched, questioning hands, looking at each other through a square panel of composite elements, including tar and oil, that separates them from one another. Together they represent fallen humanity, depicted in shades of gray, caught in separation from self, others, and God. Yet both the man and the woman are illuminated by a subtle white light descending, as it were, from the heights of heaven.
As in Van Eyck’s polyptych for the Ghent altar, Schrauzer incorporates hinged panels in Altarpiece, allowing him to change or add to the meaning of the work. With the panels closed, the sense of humanity’s separation from God is portrayed even more keenly: the upper realm is now replaced by a “middle realm,” a brooding mass of slate-gray clouds that obscures the heavens from Earth. The artist has used his fear of the loss of clarity to image in atmospheric terms a spiritual overcast that keeps humanity apart from its Source. Yet for the Christian, this darkness is also the condition in which the light can still be apprehended. Indeed, it pushes against the low horizon above the man and woman, creating a white glow that announces the potential for redemptive breakthrough.
The light of the “new earth” is fully evident when the panels are open, and the possibility for redemption is revealed in the expanse of sun-drenched mountains—the vanguard of earthly matter, gently extending into the realm of the divine. Fr. Luke Dysinger, a Benedictine, has noted that the upper gold panel—which remains visible even when the hinged panels are closed—stands as a crown and focus of the henotic, or union-effecting, experience of Christian mysticism. So understood, there is a configuration of hope in Schrauzer’s composition: the upper gold panel might also descend to illuminate and replace its elementally debased lower counterpart, ending separation from humanity’s divine destiny, thus creating a new earth.
Unlike his mentors Jan van Eyck and Cliff McReynolds, Schrauzer has not considered the eventual placement of his works as a factor in their production, apart from taking into account the milieu offered by the gallery and the home of the collector. By historical contrast, Van Eyck enjoyed noble, royal, civic, and ecclesiastical patronage until his death. This meant that he knew where his works would be installed when they were commissioned, and undoubtedly designed them with particular spaces in mind. McReynolds has had something of the equivalent in this age of mass communication: an illustrated autobiography has circulated his philosophy and work in self-consciously Christian art environs; his paintings have been sumptuously reproduced in commercial calendar formats; he has even reproduced his images on T-shirts.
Schrauzer seems to stand somewhere between his mentors. Formally and theologically, his work recalls the late medieval world of Jan van Eyck, when altarpieces were made for high altars of churches or placement in secondary or private chapels. But in sensibility he resembles McReynolds, using contemporary settings and points of view; no winged angels, saints with attributes, or crucifixes appear in Schrauzer’s imagery. This simultaneous past-and-present element may locate Schrauzer’s work in a contextual limbo. His carpentered and painted constructions appear to belong in some kind of formally designated sacred space, but they are finally too existential for traditional church settings. Conversely, as works of art they lack the verve of individualistic expressiveness (gesture, color, scale) that collectors have favored in modernist art. In Schrauzer’s fusion of Catholic spirituality with modernity, his update of the medieval/Renaissance tradition and his devotion to craft, he seems to chart a new territory between the historical past and modernist present, as well as asking for a more contemplative viewing than most moderns are prepared to give.
For example, after a potential buyer pondered The Vigil [see Plate 6] at some length in a Los Angeles gallery, the individual finally rejected the work, saying he “could not comfortably live with a religious relic.” A work of luminous yet somber quietude (eventually acquired by a Catholic collector who embraced its historical and contemporary elements), The Vigil is composed of pronounced vertical and horizontal elements which lend it a severe presence. These elements are enhanced by an all-encompassing framing structure of darkly stained wood, a feature of most of Schrauzer’s work and one which he fabricates himself.
The bisected lower portion of the work contains vertical paintings of a slumbering male and female who are literally clothed in shadow. Above them in the smaller connecting element is a yellow thistle, sharp and dry. Here it is a symbol of the sun, and thus a powerful yet delicate sign of the possibility for matter to be transformed and ennobled. In the upper panel (the heavenly realm) the pink light of an expansive dawn plays in the clouds.
The title of this work points to its tradition: the Easter Vigil is the liturgical culmination of the Christian year. At midnight when the rest of the world is asleep, new fire is applied to a ritually prepared candle to symbolize the risen Christ. By this light the Scriptures are read and the inner meaning of human history is revealed: against expectation, the eternal Word of God has become flesh. Moreover, the Word-made-flesh has suffered, been put to death, and is risen. Now no pain, betrayal or emptiness need keep humanity from God. Fully illuminated by the Resurrection, all things become means of union; each human experience can become a portal leading into the divine. Something as thorny, dry and common as a thistle can become a light to awaken slumbering humanity to new life. In The Vigil, humanity’s shadowed dreams and brightest longings are about to become real as they emerge into the light. The sunrise of the eastern horizon heralds a new age on Earth.
A similar, more abstracted, work with Marian symbolism is The Annunciation [see Plate 7], inspired while Schrauzer was praying with friends in a weekly rosary group. (The rosary is a structured prayer in three “decades” that usually includes a meditation on the mysteries of Jesus or the Virgin). An oil on panel, The Annunciation comprises a gilt-framed T-shape penetrating from above and contained by a U-shape below. This configuration, which represents the divine penetrating the earthly, symbolizes Mary’s willingness to be a vessel for the incarnation of God, a model of humility for the Church. Schrauzer has painted a potent natural metaphor for the Incarnation at the vertical base of the “T,” where a fiery sunrise gathers strength as it consumes the darkness above, evoking John 1:4-5: “...that life was the light of men, a light that shines in the dark, a light that darkness could not overpower.” The incarnational character of the bright dawn—birth and beginning—is also emphasized by the artist’s centering it over the heart of a pure white rose, which blossoms to cover a leaden background with its sacred, sexual, beautiful efflorescence.
Charged and significant moments are a frequent feature in Schrauzer’s work: light breaking through clouds; the divine hovering above earthly matter; people on the verge of waking or unification; new dawns and final sunsets. Common to these moments is their relation to events that happen in time, but not necessarily in chronological order. Rather, it is God’s time—kairos instead of chronos—which concerns Schrauzer, the arrival of the divine that announces new possibilities for humankind. He also is concerned with kairos in its eschatological meaning: the time when the purposes of God for His creation attain fulfillment.
Triptych (To Be Opened on the Last Day) [see back cover] addresses the Christian end times in an astringent, vertical composition. Two hands grope in the darkness behind hinged panels that are secured shut by bossed nails. The closed wings of the triptych conceal its central, defining element—the fullness of revelation in the fullness of kairos. The work is a poignant sign that Christian faith always rests upon the unseen and hoped-for, and the piece is likely an autobiographical portrayal as well. The hardest part of Schrauzer’s (and our) faith journey must always be the abiding trust that, in God, all will be well. In his unabated desire to know by seeing, to Christianize his hungry intellect, he has understood the necessity to dwell for a time in the “dazzling dark,” resting in the “nothingness of God.” This is central to the apophatic tradition of Greek Orthodoxy, in which the One beyond all words, images, thoughts and ideas is mystically perceived—God in hidden grandeur, who overwhelms humanity in His radical simplicity.
At the close of 1994, Michael Schrauzer had completed a distinguished body of work that marked the close of the youthful phase of his career, and signified the arrival of a maturing artistic voice. But he was also spiritually depleted and depressed, feeling as if he had become unmoored from God. It was as if an earlier work from 1990, The Expulsion [see Plate 8], had anticipated Schrauzer’s spiritual state five years hence. In it, humanity is riven, grieving in darkness and incapable of envisioning, much less recovering, the light of the heavenly realm above.
Having drained his intellect and spirit to produce art for a traveling exhibition of his work, having labored intensely for eighteen months, Schrauzer turned from art making and, in his thirty-fourth year, questioned the meaning of his accomplishment and what he ought to do next. Subsequently, many options emerged for him, and in July of 1995, after considerable inner deliberation, he left Los Angeles to join his family in the remote Cuyamaca Mountains, inland from San Diego, where he is constructing a studio. Perhaps it will be there that Schrauzer will rise from the “dying” that many young artists experience following the completion of their first breakthrough body of work. We spoke last Christmas and he was brimming with new ideas for the second stage of his artistic life. He sounded spiritually replenished, ready to see what will be revealed next as he returns to his vocation as a Catholic artist, to demonstrate in his work the Church’s teaching of a life devoted to incarnational labor.
The author expresses his thanks to Ron Austin and Wayne Roosa for their helpful criticism of this essay, and to Laura Lasworth for her insights on the vocation of the Catholic artist. Portions of my article are adapted from an earlier essay by Fr. Luke Dysinger, OSB, in the exhibition catalogue, Burning Lights: Spirituality, Tradition and Craft in Recent Art from the City of Angels (Laband Art Gallery, Loyola Marymount University, 1994).
Visit Michael Schrauzer as Image Artist of the Month for September 2001
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