"Art and Christ: exploring a thousand years of Christian sacred art"

An update and plans for inviting all my friends on a great treasure hunt

Knowing where to find rare high quality downloadable manuscript miniatures is turning out to be more useful than I’d anticipated. This is a Nativity miniature from a 15th century French Psalter held by the British Library. You can order this tree ornament here.

Learning unexpected things

I'd like to start by thanking everyone again who has ordered things from the shop in the last month or so, and I'm very glad you've all come with me so far. It was all a learning experience for me and I've come away not only with a much more stable financial life, but with a much better idea of what I'm doing than when I started. There's nothing like diving in and having a go to teach you things. 

One thing about it that has been an unexpected bonus, is that it has taught me things about myself I didn't know before. That I can do difficult and complex things that I had no idea how to do before. I can figure stuff out.

And it's awakened in me something unexpected: a kind love. Apparently there's a kind of familial spirit - almost like a kind of filial piety - to business that no one really talks about. You feel like you're really working for others, trying as hard as you can to help them get what they want, things that will help them and to make the things you sell as good as you can. To help brighten up their lives. And you start feeling responsible for them, like they're a distant relative you're trying to look after.

I've gone to some lengths, for example, to find a fine art printer that will provide the right kind of paper, something that looks nice and will give a genuinely authentic feel to the pieces. I find I want to do everything as well as possible out of a feeling of... well... love, I guess. That’s odd, isn’t it?

The Shop and plans for the future: courses and digital stuff

Quite excited to be able to offer pints on wood panels. This creates an item that closely approximates a traditional icon as a formal egg tempera painting on a wood panel.

You can order one here.

It's going quite well, overall, despite whatever glitches I've run into along the way. And I think this quiet time before and after Christmas, while still taking orders for the tree ornaments, calendars and prints, is an ideal period to get going on something I've been planning for a while: digital products. These are things like e-books, downloadable PDFs, "How to paint an icon" worksheets and kits for kids and courses.

This drawing of the crucified Christ in the typical style of the 13th century Umbrian panel crucifixes, is my own favourite thing in the shop. It is printed on high quality drawing paper, the same kind I use in the studio. This high resolution scan will produce an image almost indistinguishable from the original. You can order here

Online courses are quite the thing these days and there are a lot of tools out there for even the less tech-savvy to help create them. I'm still working on switching the shop to a more flexible platform (have decided against Shopify in favour of a smaller, more niche-market thing a lot of artists are using) and working towards a move. 

These wall calendars are printed with rare images from a 12th century Romanesque manuscript, held by the Bibliothèque nationale de France but not displayed to the public. The images illustrate biblical scenes from he old and new testaments.

You can order one here.

The great advantage with "digital products" is no shipping involved. It turns out that shipping is the WORST! Quite apart from the expense and time involved, shipping companies, as well as middle-man aggregator sites like Printify, are turning out to be absolute pirates with their shipping policies... "Customs brokers" my foot! 

I will say that the fine art printer, Finer Works, has been great; they do their own printing, packaging and shipping, so don't charge me separately for each item in an order, and their quality has been spectacular. But they aren't so good at the Christmassy stuff like tree ornaments, calendars and cards.

So, while I'll still be offering prints - and am quite excited by the printer offering prints on wood panels - I'm rethinking my way forward a bit. I'm going to keep doing physical products, bcs they're fun. Physical things are fun to make, and fun to buy and I think people just like them. As long as I can figure out how to get away from Printify and their horrible, horrible shipping nightmare, I see no reason not to keep doing fun things that people like.

I'll still be offering cards and other nice religious themed Christmas things, but I'm going to be looking for ways to bring things to the shop for next year that are a little more "high end" and locally sourced (no more mass produced blanks from China if I can help it).

 

Sacred Art curriculum: "Art and Christ: Exploring the Meaning and History of Christian Sacred Art"

Long-time readers will know that the big thing I've been planning is the home school curriculum/courses in the history of Christian sacred art. I've wanted to do something like this since I was a kid and saw the BBC television series Civilisation with my hero Kenneth Clark. I revisited this series in high school because it was so good the British Columbia ministry of education made a 12th grade social studies course out of it. (I aced it, of course...)

So, I've got back to working on this and I've got a pretty good idea how to go forward. The more I look into it, the clearer it becomes that this kind of course is ideal for "digital products," the kind I can produce once and sell many times as digital downloads, skirting around the whole shipping nightmare. 

There are some really good tools now for creating courses, and I'm looking at options. My idea is to market it as a series of packets, starting with the general, broad survey or overview: "Art and Christ: the first thousand years." Then adding the Big Three main separate sub-modules: Byzantine, Romanesque and Gothic. These would have the text, worksheets and projects and tests etc. all in one package for a set price as downloadable PDFs.

Then a pretty much never-ending stream of interesting supplemental stuff can be added on as separate items, like monthly materials exploring in more depth specific aspects of the Big Three. Additional materials could include stand-alone monographs ("Who's that saint? How to read Gothic iconography") and longer form articles with teaching materials like worksheets and "draw along" projects, instructions for things like "Make your own mosaic"...  The fun stuff.

And finally I'm planning on creating the Christian Sacred Art Homeschooler Network, using subscriber page here on Substack, that would include videos for members, (that I'm going to have to learn how to make) going in person to look at the actual art in context in the actual places, the off-the-beaten-track places that aren't on any tourist package. Just. Like. Sir Ken!

People need this

What's really become clear in the last few years of writing and talking to people about sacred art is what a huge appetite there is for these kinds of works and for more understanding and appreciation of them. People know the names of Leonardo and Michelangelo, but that's the start and the finish of it. The response to what I’ve been writing and drawing and painting, from just regular folks who have never had the opportunity to experience and understand the whole world of Byzantine, Romanesque and Gothic sacred art, has been tremendous. 

We live in dark times; I really am glad that I can help by lighting this one little candle, to reveal genuine lost treasure.

Stay tuned...

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