Sacred Art: "Theology to be Felt"
Interviewed by Daniel Gallio, Mosaic editor
MOSAIC, Summer 2008

Alfonse Borysewicz, Emmanuel III - Jerusalem, 2005. 69" x 69", oil and wax on linen.

A dramatic painting in a simple wooden frame hangs in the office of Sr. Mary Finn, Sacred Heart's undergraduate pastoral formation director. It is an abstract work, depicting a rough brown rectangle on a field of vivid red. Upon the rectangle are half circles, in facing patterns, of orange, red and yellow.

The artist's intentions become clearer with concentration. The rectangle becomes a table top from which emerge brown chalices, framed by the half circles that now become broken loaves of bread. The field of red symbolizes the blood of Christ, the wooden frame his cross.

The painting has been greeting visitors to Sister Mary's office for three decades. It evokes for her a poignant meeting on Ash Wednesday 1979, between Sister and Alfonse Boyer, a young college seminarian wrestling with his vocation.

"May I have that wall?" Sister recalls Alfonse saying to her in the meeting. "For Lent this year, I want to be reconciled with the artist-I-am."

After Easter Vigil, Alfonse presented a stunned Sister with the painting. Although untitled, each of the past thirty Lents she has given the work a different name, "to keep it alive in my heart." The gift is one of her most precious possessions.

After graduating with a BA in Philosophy from Sacred Heart in 1979, Alfonse went on to earn an MA degree from St. John Provincial Seminary in 1981. Soon after, he changed his name to the original Borysewicz and realized that the "artist-I-am" was his true vocation. He is now a prominent, award-winning sacred artist based in Brooklyn, New York, where he lives with his wife, Kazumi, and two children. He also teaches philosophy at colleges in New York and New Jersey.

Learn more about Alfonse and his work, http://alfonseborysewicz.com/, and in the February 11, 2008, issue of America magazine, http://www.americamagazine.org/.

In an essay you wrote in Image magazine, you strongly identify with your working class, and thoroughly Catholic, Detroit upbringing. How has being raised in Detroit influenced, the style and purpose of your art? 

Any vocation will be hard work and will entail many sacrifices. Same in the arts, perhaps more so. Mix in faith, religion or "the undertow of mystery" (Lonergan), well, then, you're climbing Mt. Everest.

I think Detroit is synonymous with struggle, so my working class family and ethic has in a roundabout way prepared me well. In my years in the art world, I also have come to realize how voices from the lower strata of our society are less heard at, I think, our own detriment. Our culture today tends to highlight thrills and spills, so to speak, ignoring the less glamorous but more profound experience of suffering and sacrifice that is, at its core, more altruistic, more gospel-like.

You also mention a felt tension between your roughand-ready Detroit background and the perception by some of art being a "sissified" endeavor.

That was true when I was struggling with my desire to paint almost thirty years ago. I think today, however, it is a bit different. The culture has been radicalized, so work in the arts can be easily justified and accepted. But to embrace the arts in faith, well that is a different story.

Being an artist can seem like a supernatural calling, similar to the calling to become a priest or religious. Do you see them both as "sacred" vocations?

Honestly, to be an artist or, for that fact, a religious—both quite similar vocations in my estimation—you have to be more than a little "crazy." Yet, I know in my heart—the art of discernment taught to me in my seminary years—I am living the life I was meant to live.

Mother Teresa, who I met when she visited St. Agnes Parish where I was working with Fr. Ed Farrell [former Sacred Heart spiritual director], once answered when she was asked if she was a saint: "I'm trying, how about you?" So I'm trying . . . to be a "sacred" artist.

Though you graduated from Sacred Heart College in 1979, you still maintain closeness with friends and mentors from that period. How did they help you to discern your vocation as an artist?

Sacred Heart and St. John Seminary were quite different places, different times and different experiences. Both indulged my struggle with the idea of being a painter. Both gave me studios in their buildings.

Sr. Mary Finn, Fr. Ed Farrell, who until his last year was trying to get an exhibit of mine up somewhere in Detroit, Fr. Paul Berg and Bishop Bernie Harrington, my rector at Sacred Heart, centered my "wanderings" in learning and the community.

Sister Mary allowed, for the first time, one of my works to hang at Sacred Heart, in her office. That first commission meant a lot to me; my "first fruits." Many came by to see it. It seems to have held its own over the years and it ignited a further deepening of this artistic call.

Also at St. John's, Fr. Tom Moore and Bishop Ken Untener widened that space for me, especially in my class being the first to travel and study in Jerusalem. There at Martha and Mary's household, I prayed with my vocation director Tom Moore about my vocation to the arts and, like Lazarus, heard the reply: "Unbind him and let him go free." Both Sacred Heart and St. John's nurtured my life as a painter in so many ways.

How is your style of painting classified by the art critics?

I think the best term, at this juncture in my life, is that of "erasure." What I mean is I have more or less been "whitened out" from the currents of the art world. Affirming my beliefs is very difficult in an art world singing the mantra of sensation.

The same can be said of the "Church world" giving rise to what I call the "heresy of quietism." That is to say: doing little or nothing in response to cultural trends—besides complaining—rather than some tangible support.

Just recently, some attention from the Church world is being given to the likes of me. In short, I could bore you with words like "post-modern" or "organic abstraction," but simply put: my works are contemporary icons holding the tension between the already and not yet, the past and present currents of artistic and theological thought.

You have described your personal style more generally, as encompassing a "physical theology." What do you mean by this?

In my view, we have just come through a renaissance of Catholic theology: de Lubac, Congar, Lonergan, Murray, Rahner, von Balthasar and Ratzinger, not forgetting Protestant theologians like Barth, and so many others. Now it is time for this theology to be felt. One place it can definitely be felt is in the arts. Theology and the arts need each other to express in images the voice of the disciples at Emmaus: "Stay with us Lord."

A reviewer of your work described the perception of religion by academics and the art community as a "slowly dying mythology." What are some of the difficulties of being a Catholic artist in a radically secularized culture?

I think I touched on this in previous questions, but let me say, after much study and experience, that today, in 2008, we are the Early Church.

At the same time, has being an "abstract" sacred artist hindered your acceptance by the religious community?

Of course! While contemporary music, Arvo Part as one example, has crossed over into the world of Church, the visual arts have not—fault both on the art world and religious circles that have both pushed reactionary buttons. At this juncture, I walk quietly letting my paintings speak for themselves.

How has your art evolved thematically from the early 1980s, after leaving the seminary, until today?

As Dennis Potter, the great British dramatist, said in his last interview, dying from cancer and drinking his pain killers through the straw of a medical milkshake, commenting on this same question: We are like farmers, plowing the same material every season, never doing it quite right, always returning to the same themes, images, etc. over and over again.

What is the ideal goal you would like to achieve through your work, particularly as you enter your middle years?

That my work and life may authentically add to the deposit of faith that we pass on to each generation.