Majesty in the Maelstrom
By Tom Wachunas
“The human body is a way to express our
“soul’s experience.” There is an inner landscape within us that is often
veiled, even from ourselves…It is complicated and simple…It is full of life,
struggle, endurance and stubbornness.” -
Karen Laub-Novak
“Laub-Novak was one of the vanguard of
faithful Catholic artists from the Vatican II era who believed that modernist
artistic expressions were not only compatible with the faith, but also were
capable of opening up new insights into Church traditions.”
- exhibit curator Gordon Fuglie
EXHIBIT: Karen Laub-Novak: A Catholic Artist in the Age of Vatican II, THROUGH MARCH 15 at Walsh University
Birk Center for the Arts, 2020 East Maple Street, North Canton, open daily from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m.
With only a week
left to see this superb exhibit, I apologize for my late commentary.
Nevertheless, if you’ve not seen it yet, I respectfully ask that you do so
quickly. Featured are 36 drawings, prints and paintings by the late Washington,
DC, artist, Karen Laub-Novak (1937-2009) that cover her career from the period
of the early 1960s Vatican II reforms in the Catholic Church through 2000.
The exhibit title
notwithstanding, don’t expect a heady exposition of exclusively “Roman
Catholic” symbols, dogma or practices. The works presented here are from
various series that drew their inspiration from not only the books of Genesis
and Revelation, but also the struggle to find faith and salvation described in
T.S. Eliot’s “conversion poem,” Ash
Wednesday, and the existential suffering embraced by Austrian poet Rainer
Maria Wilke in his Duino Elegies.
While much of the
iconography is indeed Biblical in nature, Laub-Novak’s brand of Figurative
Expressionism effectively transcends merely literal illustration. I think her
imagery metaphorically addresses the human milieu coming to terms with the ineffable fullness of
Divine being – what in Christian Scripture and theological discourse is
referred to as the pleroma.
Many of the Biblically-sourced lithographs are
loosely rendered figural situations that
appear to emerge from abstract murkiness into cathartic episodes, transpiring
perhaps in maelstroms of holy desire and conscience, or rising out of
eschatological darkness – Cain slaying Abel, or Apocalyptic Horsemen dispensing
death, for example. In all, there’s a gripping sense of mystical convergence of
flesh and spirit.
That sense of
convergence is particularly compelling in the oil paintings. The gestural
intensity of Laub-Novak’s rhythmic brushwork infuses her surfaces with palpable,
even electrified energy. And in their explosive chromatic splendor, there’s a
frenetic majesty at work. Moses takes
its visual cues from Exodus 19:4, wherein God tells Moses and his people, “You
yourselves have seen what I did to Egypt, and how I carried you on eagles’
wings and brought you to myself.” We see the eagle’s talons firmly gripping the
shoulders of God’s appointed leader. Capturer and captured are one. Likewise,
in Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, rather
than describing the throes of writhing struggle between the physical and
supernatural, the painter presents two similar anatomies on the cusp of mutual
embrace, floating and nearly fused together in a radiant vortex of color.
The painting is
beautifully emblematic of the exhibit’s provocative spirituality, articulating
the potent drama of seeking and discovery, of calling out and being heard, of
grasping and being grasped. Laub-Novak’s art is an arresting reminder that
human history is most purely discerned as our desire to be integrated in the
pleroma.
PHOTOS, from top: Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse – Death, lithograph,
1963-4; Moses, oil on canvas,
1990-98; Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, oil
on canvas, 1990-98
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