July 2023 Print

Now I See: How Painting for the Immaculata Helped Me See Again

By Bridget Bryan

What I love most about being an artist is how one is able to see from the surface down into the depths of reality. Let me take you on such a journey. In your mind’s eye, picture the interior of a large Romanesque church, in the shape of a broad cross. Go within, and sense her shape coming together in great massive arches under a dome, yet all covered in layers and layers of dark, web-like steel scaffolding, so dense that no one can see to the top. The nine stories of snaking scaffolding hold many craftsmen, each busy at work doing his part to build the church. They bring noise, dust, the beeping of moving lifts, the racket of saws and air guns. With so much work going on in the building, it’s easy to lose sight of the great masterpiece being built. But when visitors and craftsmen alike would come up the shrouded, quiet heights, away from the noise, nearly a hundred feet in the air, and see the art that slowly began to bedeck the sky-blue ceilings by our team, a change would come over them. The artwork helped them see what work their own work played in the project. The Immaculata helped me see again as well.

How I Got There

I had been teaching for 10 years, with a good college education, was single, and was beginning to flourish as a watercolor artist. Yet for several years I struggled with my very existence. Life had not gone how I had hoped it would. I was burnt out and felt little connection to the world around me. I wanted to detach from my present circumstances to gain perspective and clarity. But I needed a job to support myself in the meantime.

Around the same time Fr. Rutledge revealed the interior plan of the Immaculata at a beautiful evening gala-like event. As we viewed the video soaring virtually through the finished art in the Immaculata, I thought daringly, “What if I could help with the art in there?”

The company was Evergreen Architectural Arts. I shied away from applying at the company until encouraged by a friend. I applied as a studio artist. Thanks to connections within the Immaculata Project, I talked to a few people. “Look, your portfolio is more illustrative than classical… But you are an artist, my family are artists, I understand. We have so many stars to put up on that ceiling in the Immaculata, we could use you,” Sofia Stambolieva explained in her Eastern European Accent. On December 8, the feast of the Immaculate Conception, I had my final interview and got the job as a traveling decorative artist. Instead of painting the murals in the Brooklyn studio, far away from the Immaculata, I would have a hand at working in the church itself. I would apply the murals to the dome, ceiling, and walls, do stenciling, touch-up work, and perform at other sites other decorative painting such as wood-graining and faux-marbling. While I helped transform other buildings with these skills, the job transformed me from the inside out.

A Day on the Job

Though the time on the Immaculata project was nearly six months, the following first impressions reveal what the work was like throughout it. As a traveling decorative artist, most of the work takes place on a live construction site. That means wearing PPE—Personal Protective Equipment (hard hat, work pants, boots, and high-viz clothing to start with). I had never worked a day on a construction site in my life, except doing home demolition and remodel work. I knew there would be exposure to construction site work, but in my head I was thinking “Oh we’ll, just show up towards the end and paint and work in a clean environment just like Michelangelo did with the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.” Yeah, no. From the dust-caked scaffolding to the earthy, colorful language, right down to the odorous porta-potties, the Immaculata, like the other projects I helped with, was a real construction site.

My first instinct was to get the heck out of there. It was not my environment. To survive mentally and help myself reframe the situation, I would empty my thoughts frequently in little Moleskine sketchbooks I carried in my back pocket. Just like some people take out their phone every couple minutes, I would whisk out my teal-colored notebook to catch a thought dropping out of my head or capture a scene that struck me in order to bring it alive later in my large watercolor book. Much of my journey was captured in a series of these trusty little books.

On the first day, I basked with pride when my foreman wowed at how huge the church was. That day on, at the beginning of work, I’d greet the Immaculata and the constellations arranged above her in the dark predawn sky. When the glimmers of triumphant dawn broke the darkness on a quick outdoor break, I’d look down on the campus where the old Immaculata had stood, and where years ago I had been a student, and breathe a prayer of gratitude for a chance to play a part in this new stage of history.

Hard hats donned and coffee in hand, we made our way inside the building. Scaffolding, nine stories high, lined the interior of the church like a great steel spider web. Her form was visible, like the hull of a great ship in dry dock. The great arch of her sanctuary and transept and nave, though only partially finished and lined in layers of loud ringing metal, still transported the receptive viewer to the buildings of far-off Europe.

We climbed what would become our morning hike to work, a quarter of a mile of steps one way, till we were right below the sky-blue ceiling of the cupola. Like gods, it was our job to put up the stars and the heavenly figures amongst them.

In order to fix the images and stars in their celestial place on the ceiling, we had to first check all measurements. That meant measuring the dome itself, (architecturally speaking, it’s actually a lantern), and then comparing the murals to the structure’s measurements. We unrolled each massive mural, plotting centerlines and other lines for reference. We then made mockups to hang on the ceiling, tracing the outlines of the murals on butcher paper, the same material my mother served pizza on at her pizza parties: now here we were aligning and taping sheets and sheets of the stuff to cut out and hang on the ceiling of the New Immaculata.

God the Father was the first mural to be hung. After fixing the mockups to the ceiling, and making sure that all was well, we traced their shapes, then applied R-35 within the outline. R-35 is a base coat and helps create a better hold between the glue and the canvas. The next morning (my birthday in fact), Mark Sova, Mike Carpenter, and I climbed 100 feet up, onto the highest level of scaffolding, and then atop a rolling scaffold from where we would hang the canvas.

We first rolled a generous amount of pasty, thick, bodily-smelling glue. Then we positioned the canvas atop the glue, ensuring the center line on the ceiling matches the center line drawn on the canvas. Using a rubber scraper we gently scraped back and forth, pushing out any air bubbles (the most delicious, satisfying part), checking for dry spots or overloads of glue. All the while we sponged the mural and its edges to remove any slugs of glue that might have been smeared over the handprinted murals. God the Father went on perfectly—but if it hadn’t, at this point, the massive mural would have had to be taken off, the yucky glue all over it, and be repositioned to get it just right.

Once everything was satisfactory with the mural, we arranged its border around it (almost any repeating pattern was printed on vinyl from a computer but looked very similar to a real paint job). We affixed the pieces of the border around God the Father in the same way as the mural. Many times the measurements given to the studio where the art is designed are just slightly off due to real life happening on a construction site: if the steel underneath is slightly off, the framing and drywall are off. It’s only at the end when the art must be fitted that the decorative artist must come up with creative ways to make the product work with what he is given. And so it was with the border we put up around God the Father. Much touch-up was required to make the canvas and vinyl an integral homogeneous painting. Once God the Father was fixed to the center of the cupola, calling the viewer to Him with love and gravity, the other artwork gradually came into place throughout the six months.

The ultimate joy for me was hanging the Immaculata. She was one of the last of the figures to be hung up in the lantern and was the largest of all. We cut her in half to ensure that she could be fixed properly. After her base coat dried and the glue was applied, still 100 feet up high, I stood at the very top of the rolling scaffold and unrolled her, passed her down to the others, and began to pat and scrape her into place on the ceiling. The feeling of unrolling the Immaculata and hanging her to the ceiling was almost overwhelming after witnessing the lives and the stories of all those who had played a part in the old Immaculata. The combination of thrill, gratitude, awe, and contentment was the same expansive immenseness I encountered at the Great Pyramids of Giza. My foreman had told me “No notes or signatures written anywhere,” but encouraged and covered by another colleague, I whisked out a pencil and scribbled a secret note to Our Lady, signed it, and smothered it with glue before the canvas covered it forever.

Now when I look up to the Immaculata’s image at weekday Mass, I breathe a prayer of gratitude and am proud of what part I could play in making her beautiful. The whole ceiling makes me smile. There are a few areas where I look away quickly, recalling difficult on-the-job drama. Each mural has its own particular set of memories, each section of stenciled stars has its own unique flashbacks, and the red paint running around the ceiling has its own behind-the-scene story to tell. And closer to the floor, the sanctuary paintings, arches and soffits, the backdrop on the rear of the church, and the stations of the cross each could fill an article with what happened at each stage.

Through Our Lady’s project, I was able to see several things deeply while working in the Immaculata.

Outside of Time

Art for me is an act of contemplation. Entering into the creative act is like entering a hermitage cell or a quiet little adoration chapel, getting down on one’s knees, and adoring. It is in this way that the invisible penetrates the visible. It was difficult for me to work with someone else’s creation and not create my own, but because I had already been given the grace to develop strong habits of letting the invisible penetrate the visible, I was able to unite with the ultimate artist while I worked.

As a sort of priest, the artist, on a natural level, keeps alive the remembrance of all. He is a portal through which the past can be present. In this portal, the past and present actively influence creative momentum and impact the future. Over and over again I recalled Josef Pieper’s words:

We… sense… the artist’s inner relationship to the priest, who is called, above all, to keep alive the remembrance of a face that our intuition just barely perceives behind all the immediate and tangible reality—the face of the God-man, bearing the marks of a shameful execution.¹

While I painted stroke by stroke, suspended 100 feet in the air, swaying back and forth by the gently ever-moving scaffold like a ship on a calm sea, trying to keep my brush steady, all those people who had been a part of the Immaculata passed through my mind. I held them and besought God who would be dying on Cavalry right below me in a year’s time, to witness and remember all of us. Like a procession before the altar, they moved through my head: from the founding of Saint Marys: the Jesuits, St. Philippine Duchesne, all the alumni who had been part of her building, down to those who found the campus and helped restore it right before and after she burnt down, and all of us in our parish and all over the world who had sacrificed and prayed for so long, right up to the present moment. I brought them alive in those moments and in a way, enabled their immortality.

Art and Architecture: Uplifting and the Ship-ness of Churches

Architecture, like art, invites one to contemplation. I am directly impacted by the architecture and design of buildings. The ship-ness of the building I was in every day spoke to me. The design of a church really is like a ship. That the Church is Peter’s barque (a small boat) is something I’ve heard throughout my school years, but to see the ship-ness in the architecture resonates within my soul. Whether it was the Immaculata or St. Isidore’s at Kansas State, it felt like I was in the hull of a great ship in the ocean—the ocean of the Kansas sky, headed towards the King of the heavens.

The nave, the lengthy section where the lay people worship, takes its name from the Latin word for ship, navis. In fact, “The church has been compared to an ark as a place of refuge from the chaos of the churning waters. A nave provides similar protection from the sins of the world while leading its members on a journey of pilgrimage to heaven.”²

Fr. le Roux, the rector of St. Thomas Aquinas Seminary, remarked in one of his many interviews during the construction of the new STAS seminary that such a building “must speak of God.” That phrase came to mind often on this project, followed by “Architecture is music frozen in motion,” words of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Architecture informs the soul as music does. Referring to music, Plato remarked,

Rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul, on which they mightily fasten…making him who is rightly educated graceful…he…will most shrewdly perceive omissions or faults in art and nature, and with a true taste, while he praises and rejoices over and receives into his soul the good.³

The arches of the church itself actively rising like Beethoven’s Ninth, yet staying still and silent, like a great monument, impresses itself over and over on the human soul. As a burbling clear brook soothes the soul, so did viewing the splendid arches and pillars which leap-frogged down the nave. Even on the hardest days, I felt uplifted and exalted under the great curving vaults where the nave, transept, and sanctuary met. The very architecture of the Immaculata, climbing under her great arches and domed lantern every day at first light, lifted up the heart and the spirits even when all was dark on the inside.

What it Means to Be a Woman

To go into the construction environment was not only an assault on my sensitive nature—so receptive and hungry for beauty—but it was so outside of my comfort zone and contrary to the life I really wanted.

I desired to be in a beautiful home and to bring forth beauty constantly in homemaking, flower bouquets, my art projects, interacting with loved ones, and bringing hospitality everywhere. The construction environment was so different from that. Yet I discovered something even more valuable and foundational: resilience in how to see and bring what was meaningful to me to my workplace, and also to my temporary hotel living spaces.

It started first with my habit to draw little sparks of joy or note them down in my trusty Moleskine notebooks. These little lights were encouragement, breadcrumbs, much like the glimmer of hope Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn experienced in the gulag seeing an old man at mealtime sit with dignity, unfold his threadbare napkin, and eating slowly and with such comportment that one was transported back to a fine feast. Keeping my art alive in little ways helped me go from the visible to the invisible and find richness all around me. As Pieper noted,

Only through seeing, indeed seeing with our own eyes, is our inner autonomy established…the mere attempt…to create an artistic form compels the artist to take a fresh look at the visible reality…the artist will be able to perceive with new eyes the abundant wealth of all visible reality, and, thus challenged, additionally acquires the inner capacity to absorb into his mind such an exceedingly rich harvest. The capacity to see increases.⁴

In between these mental consolations, I struggled with other dynamics of work so much that I wanted to run from the job. But I wanted to keep my own home, so I had to show up to work. If I wanted to work in the Immaculata, I had to keep up with the other projects and tolerate struggles on the job site. I couldn’t back out. It forced me to dig down deep and discover that even though there was a lot of unpredictability and disorder in work, I still could have the tranquility of order and boundaries within myself. That internal order also helped me to see that it’s not so much what one wears or where one works that makes a girl a woman or a man a man, but embracing one’s true nature and in looking for how to be that woman and be feminine in the environment she finds herself.

I discovered the truth of St. Edith Stein’s observation:

The participation of women in the most diverse professional disciplines could be a blessing for the entire society… if the specifically feminine in those would be preserved. A glance toward the mother of God becomes indicative for us… Let her be conscious of where there is want and where help is needed, intervening and regulating as far as it is possible in her power in a discreet way. Then will she like a good spirit spread blessing everywhere.⁵

I found that I could serve my fellow men and find some fulfillment through this example and by being myself.

Gradually that presence brought good cheer to those around me, respectfully supporting and bringing humor to the work environment. The order within reflected order on the outside: the decision to be beautiful inside out manifested itself deciding to again wear earrings, braiding my hair, and choosing more becoming construction-friendly clothes, in spite of feeling dirty and sweaty, always covered in glue and paint. And I saw other people’s attitudes change. I saw the joy and lightheartedness it brought people.

And it also led to some comical comments: once a mailman looked over at me as I walked along the sidewalk amidst all the lunch break construction workers. “What are you doing dressed like that …you jezz a regular chick—you don’ look like a construction worker,” while one of my colleagues took to calling me “the nun.” That work environment brought me to a more confident embracing of my own nature and an interior resilience to figure out how to bring who I am and what I love into wherever I was at. In the end, I realized that the Immaculata helped me treasure not only my own life, my community and its history, but also my nature, feminine and artistic; she wrought in me an image of herself.

An art project impacts you and imprints a mark upon you. The other day when I went into the Immaculata, I looked up into the sky of her ceiling, and heard the words a colleague told to me in the first weeks of the project “Look, one day your grandchildren will point up to the ceiling and say ‘Grandma, you painted those stars!’” I may not have grandchildren yet, but the Stella Maris, the Star of the Sea, helped me to see and to have hope in the God whom she holds. I am grateful and proud to have been part of this project, to have the image of the Immaculata imprinted on me in some way, and to have passed her on to others.