“To Paint the Things of Christ, One Must Live as Christ Lived”

MICHAEL SCHRAUZER’S CATHOLIC VISION

By Christopher Zehnder

EVE WAS BEAUTIFUL, I thought, even in her shame. I was viewing the painting “The Expulsion” by Michael Schrauzer, who has spent much of his life in the San Diego area. “The Expulsion” is not the typical rendering of our first parents’ ejection from paradise there is no cherubim with flaming sword, no lush, semi-tropical woodland in the background. In fact, but for the title and the painting’s allusions to certain classical treatments of the subject, one cannot be certain it portrays the expulsion from paradise at all. The picture consists of four wood-framed panels: three square bottom panels, the left the profile of a man, the right the profile of a woman, the center, a smaller square of gold. Above all three panels is a larger one, the sky, blue, dotted with fleecy white clouds. Though seemingly illumined by the gold panel, the man and woman, swathed in darkness, are turned from it, and each other, in attitudes suggesting profound shame and pain. Each has a beauty, however, remanent of a former grandeur.

For those wearied by the grotesque in modern art, Michael Schrauzer’s work is welcome relief. Here one doesn’t find the meaningless abstractions that seem to captivate the modern spirit. At the same time, Schrauzer’s works, though drawing the eye, challenge the mind with arrangements of no easily comprehensible meaning. After time spent in Berkeley, Schrauzer has recently returned to Coronado.

* * *

When did you first discover your interest in painting?

[My family] moved to Berkeley, California from Munich, Germany on my fourth birthday. As my mother relates, all the new sights — the Bay Bridge, the redwoods, the new terrain so different from what I had known in Germany — inspired me. Before that time I had not displayed any artistic talent, but after moving [to Berkeley] I began to Iill up notebook after notebook.

Growing up, I was not athletically inclined, but was interested in reading and being on my own. Since I went to secular schools, I did not know anyone particularly religious or Catholic, so that made me feel isolated. The fact that I actually liked school and liked reading set me apart.

A predominant motif in your paintings is the image of a cloud-filled sky. What do you hope to symbolize by this?

The sky is a symbol for the heavenly, the divine, the sacred, the unearthly. One big difficulty is how you make the invisible visible, so, using symbols like that is the best way. I love looking at skies, and I love clouds, the color blue, and the sense of depth it can create.

But the sky doesn’t seem a very clear image.

For the present age, when people are not schooled in symbolism, you’re right; it’s rather non-specific. But I don’t want the pieces to hit you over the head; I’d like to give non-Christians a way of entering into them. As they delve deeper into the piece’s meaning, they may come across the Christian content. Often, if people see it’s Christian right away, they don’t bother looking at it.

I’m gratified when people who profess no religious belief say they’re aware of something in a piece, and it moves them. That’s a good start for people so hardened to spiritual things; to get them to acknowledge that they exist is a difficult step up.

It’s hard to gauge their reaction, though. Is it merely aesthetic? At the opening of a show in Palm Springs last year, a woman came up to me in tears, overcome by my work. I don’t know, for her it could have been just an aesthetic experience. But an aesthetic experience isn’t valueless, because beauty is of God, is one of God’s transcendental qualities, in fact, so an aesthetic experience is a non-rational way of experiencing God. Only art can evoke the aesthetic response, and if it doesn’t do that, as so much contemporary art doesn’t, then, who needs it? If you want to convey an idea, you might as well just write about it; do not make art that conveys an idea without at the same time being aesthetic.

A work of art should point to something beyond itself; much sacred art does that. But as much as its pointing you in another direction, you’re always experiencing the physical presence of an object right there in front of you. Those two things go hand-in-hand; It’s a kind of sacramental presence, really. It’s what the greatest art should do.

How does your art point to something beyond itself? In “The Annunciation,” for example, you have a white rose, with what appears a “T” piercing its center. At the bottom of the T is a depiction of a sunset. What does all that symbolize?

The idea for that came while I was saying the rosary, meditating on the mystery of the Annunciation. It’s a way of metaphorically understanding God coming to earth, coming into Mary; the center of the sun is in the center of the rose. In that sense it is, not to sound disrespectful, a very sexual image, really. Though in its midst, the sun is separated from the rose by a gold border inserted into the frame: as much as God entered into the world, there’s still an infinite separation between God and the created world; and yet, God comes into the world, God comes into us. This is one of the main paradoxes of Christian doctrine, that the infinite and the finite, though infinitely separate, have contact with each other.

In my art I’m fascinated with how God breaks into the real world, how we experience reality — the Reality which is all there is. The reality with a small r — the natural world, the created world — sometimes seems distant to me. I’m observing it and not participating, not living, in it. In high school I would watch other students interact, thinking I could never be like them — they were unselfconsciously experiencing their lives, and living within their lives — they were living life, I don’t know how else to put it. It seemed I was observing myself trying to live life, without actually living it. So, those experiences I have had where I have felt greater contact with reality, whether with the created world or with God, become very powerful.

Do you have specific themes in your mind when you’re painting?

Sometimes they’re pretty specific, and other times there are so many overlapping layers, it becomes more complex. I ended up calling a painting “Altarpiece” because I could never conceive of a title that would not limit its meaning. In that piece I dealt with many different things regarding, say, Adam and Eve, salvation history, and, simply, male and female; or ourselves, today; the end of the world, sin and redemption.

The two figures in “Altarpiece,” the man and woman, can be taken to represent the archetypal Adam and Eve, but can also represent us men and women, and the separation of the figures refers to the Fall and sin separating man from woman. The top of the panel between the figures is painted in gold leaf, but further down is a mixture of oil, acrylic, tar, and a bunch of junk to create a mess, in contrast to the purity of the gold leaf up above. Symbolically, the sin of the mess will be purified and replaced by the gold of grace, and the way to reconnect between ourselves, as men and women, and so forth, will be by grace. That’s why the gold panel is penetrating, moving down: it’s the divine, again, coming down into the world.

When the altar piece is closed, you have gray, cloudy sky, and when its open, a clear, blue sky. That’s the idea of revelation and the hiddenness of God — the sky is hidden behind the clouds, God is in the cloud of the unknowing; and yet God will reveal Himself. The landscape on the inside is the natural or earthly paradise, the perfected world. We are below that and move up into it.

Both the name of your painting “Sacred Wood” and the subject suggest, to me, an almost pagan spirit. Have you noted that reaction before?

The “Sacred Wood” was inspired by [Dante’s] Divine Comedy. It represents the earthly paradise on Mount Purgatory. There are seven trees, seven being the sacred number.

As we forget our own Christian symbolism, we forget that we appropriated our symbolism from pagans, and so we think that’s got to be Greek or Roman, or something. In paganism and Christianity, trees are symbolic: we have the garden of Eden, the trees of the garden. All cultures around the world have found meanings for flowers and plants, stars and animals. We Christians have that too, but don’t know it anymore. We’ve forgotten symbols in the scientific analysis of the world. The natural is just utility for us, without metaphor or poetry. When we think of “pagan” symbolism, that just indicates our own poverty, our loss of understanding.

Because your art is so highly symbolic, it seems there needs to be much explanation before most viewers can understand it. Isn’t there a problem with such art?

Probably. I don’t know. I like art that operates at many different levels. Nevertheless, in poetry and, I hope, in my own work, there is an immediate experience of the aesthetic content that, I hope, happens for everybody even before they know what it’s about.

People have accused my art of being elitist. A friend of mine asked me, if you want to use your art to reach souls, doesn’t it bother you that only a very few are going to be reached by it? For one thing, we don’t know if that’s true. But even if it is true, if that’s the only way some people will be reached, so be it. Growing up, I thanked God for those “elitist” works of art that touched me, that none of my peers were reading. In high school I didn’t know anyone else reading the Divine Comedy. In times past, maybe the Divine Comedy was more readily interpretable by people, but today it isn’t. I think art can be elitist, and I don’t think that is necessarily bad. I hope my art speaks to many different people, but if it only speaks to some, that doesn’t trouble me.

The gallery just sent me a capsule review of a show that’s up right now that called my work “cool and surrealistic.” I suppose that’s apt, in some ways. I can’t account for everyone’s reaction and everyone’s ability to perceive art. There will be some people who will say, “It’s bizarre, I don’t get that at all.” I have not been very troubled by that, because I can’t think of the audience’s different reactions; I just have to do what I have to do.

Has the Church ever commissioned you?

I did a piece when I moved to Los Angeles, some murals for the Newman Center at UCLA. The priest there who asked me to do the murals in the patio area where they had Mass outdoors on Sundays, had seen some of my work, and gave me free reign to do what I wanted to do — which is the ideal way.

Does Catholic orthodoxy help or hinder you as an artist?

Orthodoxy is a window into the truth, into something that is objective. With my sense of separation from the world, orthodoxy tells me what’s real. I know some say orthodoxy is binding and, no doubt, that is the experience of many. I remember experiencing such joy, true joy, when I first encountered the Summa Theologica and scholastic theology this whole world being opened up to me, this whole reality. The moral precepts of the Church and the teachings of Jesus, sure, are in some ways constraining: you aren’t free to do what you want, at least if you want to remain in God’s favor. But these precepts are joy, because they’re real. Sure, I sin and fail, but to know that reality’s there is liberating.

Too much freedom is bad for an artist. There are people who have a tremendous urge to create, but they don’t have anything to say, they don’t have a reason to make art. I think that’s something any religion or philosophical system could provide; but Christian orthodoxy is going to give you the greatest source to draw from. Are there any great gnostic works of art?

In what direction should current church art go?

In the direction of my art [laughter]. As [French theologian Jacques] Maritain said, it’s hard to be a Christian and it’s hard to be an artist; it’s doubly hard to be an artist and a Christian. Fra Angelico said, to paint the things of Christ, one must live as Christ lived. More than we need committees and architectural planners in the Catholic community, in the art world, we need conversion. We need people to get back in touch with the richness of Catholic theology and spirituality, with the symbolism and the meaning of all this. In much church design today the primary concerns are pragmatic — how can we move people in and out, how can we keep the rain off their heads? There’s much to do with air conditioning and public address systems, and little to do with inspiration and the meaning of the church building itself.

Why is the nave called the nave? Because of the ship of the Church, the boat floating on the waters. How many people know that, or care about it, even? We have to reconnect people to the traditions, not in a nostalgic way, but in the spirit of, if this is our faith, then these are realities; these symbols, these metaphors, certainly these sacraments are part of what was handed on to us. They are precious things to preserve, not to callously reject.

I think a program of Church art reform is essentially doomed to failure, even with the best intentions. Did anyone sit around to devise Gothic art? There was Abbot Suger at Saint Denis in France who had a vision of what he wanted to do, but he didn’t have an agenda for how cathedrals would be built for the next 300 years. People saw it and they liked it, and they went with it. If you try to devise a program of the kind of art we’re going to make, you have what we have already. people more interested in the ideology they want to convey in their worship spaces. It has to develop organically. out of a real vision. not an ideology. no matter what that ideology is.

What about the sentimental, saccharine, holy card art — should the Church return to that?

Obviously that kind of art has served a purpose for many. I don’t think that kind of art is art per se; I call it, not negatively, propaganda. The purpose of that art is to communicate a message very clearly. I do not do liturgical art, because my art is not meant to be unambiguous. Holy card and liturgical art should be very clear and propagandistic.

In the past, in the art of the Renaissance and other times, they’ve been able to transcend that — that’s what makes it great art, I think it’s ironic how secular types will talk about how in the Middle Ages or the Renaissance people had a negative view of reality, but we today see the dignity of people. But if you look at the way people were painted, if you look at a Renaissance portrait, and compare it with a Picasso painting of a woman — who’s treating people with less respect?

I don’t know how you can teach [great liturgical art], however. That is where a conversion of people’s eyes as well as their minds must come, where they must get away from the merely sentimental to understand the majesty of the teaching, the dignity of it all.