The Struggling Saints series is an open ended series of big S and small s saints created as either pen on paper line drawings or acrylic on canvas or hard surface, and often both.  In the Catholic tradition, the capital S is reserved for a formal canonization of those living exceptionally holy lives.  Small s applies to all faithful:  we are called to live holy lives and so called to be, ordinary saints.

Images of canonized saints are part of my visual history.  Over time, those images begin to feel a bit one dimensional.  It can be quite clean to experience, create, and view a Saint simply from their final destination: holy people who lived nearly flawless holy lives: less important life story, more important the final ending as glorified people who’ve earned crowns - and now stand separated from us and the human experience.

That can become a limited position to view them from.  Saints, and the depictions we often see of them, begin to feel more like Saints on a pedestal:  admirable yet unreachable, as opposed to an ordinary human that may have experienced struggles and challenges very much like my own.

Drawing, painting, and writing an intercession to a saint is a way to explore the recognized and canonized as well as lesser known lives that intrigue and inspire me. Both are flawed humans on journeys much like my own, rather than finished products.

Most of the images in this collection wear contemporary clothing and styles. They are depicted largely as people of now, sometimes people beyond time with a visual nod to iconography and stained glass depictions.  In order to envision the connection between the saints and my own experience, I find it helpful to take them out of the past.  More important than placing them in any particular point in history is removing them just slightly from a specific time.  Invoking a litany of the saints throughout the series is a way to be specific in conversation with the saints, and a connection to the timeless lineup they form as guideposts.

In reflecting this way, I begin to draw the connection of difficulty and challenge as part of the human experience.  When we view holy people through this lens a conversation happens between us:  I can commiserate with their own challenge and understand a bit more clearly what my own struggle is really about, and how I might better frame it.

Exploring these people of history, these saints of story, offers a lens to look through another’s struggles to see my own, understand a new timeline in which they stand as an arrow on a journey, and a point of connection and interaction as I navigate my own way forward.  Knowing this, I experience what holy life can be in a more interactive and fruitful dimension.  One that is somewhat beyond a story to which Catholic faith or history might confine it.  One in which others have made their way and I am called to as well.