Every year, the Henry Luce III Center for the Arts and Religion invites several artists to be in residence in the Seminary. While Artists-in-Residence may work in any medium, from poetry to music to drama to dance, most are practitioners of the visual arts, bringing their supplies and processes to the studio in Kresge Hall. The studio open-door policy encourages students, faculty, and staff to drop in to watch the artists and ask them about their work. This year, our Artists-in-Residence are Patrick Birge, a sculptor; Marie Pavlicek-Wehrli, a painter; and Yoshiko Oishi, a master of the traditional Japanese ink painting known as sumie.

The elegant, evocative sculptures of Patrick Birge combine the sacred stories of Christianity with those of other religions. Whether depicting Saint George beheading a human-faced dragon, or the Hindu Nataraj, Birge’s figures seem to dance through space, inviting the viewer to join the swirling, enveloping motion from destruction into new life.

The paintings of Marie Pavlicek-Wehrli suggest a more meditative, inward journey. Like dreams, they are filled with meanings that are difficult to name or to explain. Hands reach upwards and downwards towards heads and bodies floating in fields of color, as though something is lost or someone is drowning; eyes stare sightlessly out of the picture plane, looking beyond the viewer into some other reality. These images of yearning are at once uncomfortable and comforting, reminders that our deepest, most private feelings are at once the most universal.

Yoshiko Oishi comes to Wesley from her home in Tokyo, Japan. Trained in the sumie tradition, her ink-on-paper scrolls and framed works depict flowers, landscapes, and scenes from scripture. A prolific and dedicated artist and calligrapher, her sureness of hand gives immediacy and vibrancy to deceptively simple subjects. For Oishi, both a quickly-flowing waterfall and a single iris can be somehow full of movement while radiating a calm, inner stillness.

It is a great pleasure to present the works of these three Artists-in-Residence. Their very different approaches, subject matter, and technique complement one another, each commenting on a different aspect of what it means to be human, what it means to be a person of faith.

Patrick Birge has been a professional artist for 12 years. He studied at the University of Notre Dame, Rome, Italy, Los Angeles and Washington, DC. His work is a contemporary celebration of the human figure and the relationship humanity has to the earth and to one’s deeper Self. He works in many forms, from painting to sculpture and jewelry to photography, employing many different media such as bronze, Lucite, and gold, as well as ceramics, wood and stone. His works are in many private collections nationwide as well as public sites such as the University of Maryland at College Park. Currently, his work is displayed and selling at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. He teaches both in Virginia and Washington, DC at the University level.

The four paintings exhibited here are part of a group of works completed in 2001 when I had my studio in the carriage house of the Alice Pike Barney Studio House in Sheridan Circle, Washington, DC. The space was large, and, for the first time in years, I had hours of concentrated quiet in which to work. This can be both liberating and intimidating. Because I tend not to work in a premeditated way, I had to trust that subject matter would eventually present itself. The important thing was that I show up each day and begin to go through the motions of working. The hope is that, eventually, something will happen.

These images are meditations on matters both personal and universal. I use the human figure because it allows me to convey, most directly, the experiences of emotional, psychological, and spiritual connection and, likewise, ruptured connection. The paintings became repositories for my ponderings on many seemingly disparate things, including the recent deaths of my mother and brother, the imagining of a female "god" (with her X stigmata and milk-laden breasts), memories of a visit to the Nazi internment camp and transport station of Terrezin in the Czech Republic (the striped dress), the experience of motherhood, heat, and water. The painting Seer/Seer? was completed on 9/10/01, and was the first thing I saw when I was finally able to re-enter my studio after 9/11.

<   my  heart >

Coming light the air
Coming dark the air
Without expectation,

A girl
Why, must be turn empty into sumie
Why, must be meditate a life into sumie,
But
Hearing thou romantic voice
Hearing thou beautiful delight, 

Even if birds flew away heartlessly
Thou told girl
"I love you a great much. "
Thou strong arms
Thou mighty love,
Being with me forever.

A girl
Living vividly now
Into sumie at Wesley.