We have forgotten our art, so we have forgotten who we are
The traditions of Christian sacred art, an integral part of our religion that goes back to the earliest possible times, are nearly forgotten in the Latin/Western Church, though they are still a vivid part of Christian life in the Eastern, Byzantine world. Where general knowledge of Byzantine art is part and parcel of being a Byzantine (or Orthodox) Christian, a deep knowledge of the 1200 years of Christian art of the west before the Renaissance is almost unknown among western Christians. It has been relegated to the status of mere academic niche interest, and western Christians have been deprived of a deep spiritual and cultural connection to their religious roots.
This is the most important work I’ve ever done, sharing and making known these spiritually and culturally enriching treasures. If you’d like to join us, to grow in familiarity with these inestimably precious things, I hope you’ll consider taking out a paid membership, so I can continue doing the work and expanding it.
You can subscribe for free to get one and a half posts a week. For $9/month you get a weekly in-depth article on this great sacred patrimony, plus extras like downloads, photos, videos and podcasts (in the works), as well as voiceovers of the articles, so you can cut back on screen time.
We are significantly further ahead in the effort to raise the percentage of paid to free subscribers than we were a month ago, from barely 2% to just over 4%, but this is still well below the standard on Substack for a sustainable 5-10%.
Since the 1980s there has been a grassroots movement in the Western, Latin Church towards greater knowledge of doctrine and Scripture, but there has been no accompanying movement about our artistic patrimony. And it is into this gap that I hope this website can step and make a meaningful contribution.
Plans - courses, ebooks, podcasts, videos and more
This site is expanding from an occasional blog to a full-blown website about Christian sacred art. I started just by sharing the fascinating things I’d been learning, and interest has grown tremendously. In January this year, I was able to turn on paid subscriptions, and then it became an integral and major part of my job.
The programme here is two posts a week, one for the general-interest audience of free subscribers, and another going into things in more depth for the paid membership.
Additionally, I’ve started work on the first of a series of course “packages” that will cluster materials and expand on our topic - the history and meaning of Christian sacred art through the ages and across cultures. These course packages will be available to buy as downloadable PDFs, either as single topic packages or clustered together (and discounted). They will be made available for purchase as “digital products” at my online store here: Hilary White; Sacred Art Shop.
Mini-courses: downloadable packages on specific subjects
Mini-courses will also be made available for paid members as free downloads. These will be made available to non-paying subscribers for purchase at the shop. These will zero in on a particular object or item of interest - the Ghent Altarpiece, the Fayoum mummy portraits of Roman Egypt, or the Coptic frescoes of St. Catharine’s Monastery, for example.
All the courses will, eventually, be gathered together to make up a full curriculum - to buy all together or in pieces - suited to home-schooler families, groups and individuals with a special interest in our subject.
A lot of this is still in development and I am learning how to do quite a lot of things as I am doing them. More features will become available as the (still very new) Substack platform develops them. As more people subscribe to the paid posts, I will also be able to upgrade the material offered.
I’m a painter who writes.
Why am I doing all this? 12 years ago, I was the Rome and European correspondent for an online international Christian news service. To prevent that from driving me into a state of despair, I started taking classes at a private atelier in Rome in classical academic drawing.
I did that for four years, bringing my skills in observational drawing up to a professional level. But for a long time I didn’t know what I wanted to do with that training.
Then, four years ago, in late November 2019, I took a class in Byzantine iconography, and a whole new life was launched. The class finished at almost the exact moment Covid19 struck the world, and all that came with that. I was living alone in a farmhouse in the central Italian countryside, and literally didn’t have anything to do during all that insanity but paint and work in my garden.
Many people reported having their lives changed significantly during that period, and I’m one of them. In that time of isolation and focused work, I left the journalism and activism world behind, and entered a new phase of life. I’ve been painting and studying traditional Christian sacred art, east and west, every day since then.
In November 2021 I moved to the little town of Narni, Umbria where I knew a new phase in that new life would begin. When I launched this website in April 2021 I wasn’t sure what I was doing, and it didn’t see much use. But starting in June 2022 I’d come to understand that there is a great desire among Christians in the west for knowing more about their artistic patrimony and started pointing my work focus in that direction.
I’m still a student
I want to make one thing very clear; I’m not an expert. I don’t have a degree of any sort in this stuff. I’m a student who has fallen in love with these lost treasures, these inestimably precious but mostly forgotten things of our culture’s great past. What I do have, apart from a lifetime of love of art, is training and experience as an investigative journalist: I know how to find things out, ask the interesting questions and talk to experts and write down my discoveries in language accessible to laymen. I’m of the school of journalism that says the journalist isn’t an expert, but stands in for Everyman, Joe Regular Guy. I am really just a person in love, and am looking for a community of other people in love with the same things, and are looking for the same deep and true connection to our Faith that I’m looking for.
I hope you will come along with us.
HJMW
I also sell my painting and drawing work as prints. You can check them out here. Like this drawing of “Christus Patiens” - a graphite on paper of a 13th century Umbrian style crucifixion, an original drawing in the style of, not a copy of any existing work.
You can buy it and other items as high quality art prints here:
If you’d like to set up a monthly patronage for an amount of your choice, click this button. Anyone starting a patronage for $9/month or more will get a complimentary paid subscription here. This is my studio blog where you can also take a look at my painting and drawing work.
