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She picked up a copy of Betty Edward’s book, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, and began doing the exercises.
“And the surprise of my life came,” she says, “when, as I learned to see, the brain gives the hand the message and I learned to draw.” It became a way to express her inner feelings on a variety of modern injustices, from human trafficking to pollution.
The first image that found its way from Sister Barbara’s dreams onto canvas was her painting titled Shackled God. “It’s God is like a woman who longs to be loving and powerful in our midst,” she said, “but as long as we have violence against nature, against people, we shackle her power.” Lying bound and gagged in the dirt, the God/woman’s eyes are “wise and staring, missing nothing at all.”
A number of her paintings feature horses rising out of the sea and emerged from a time when Sister Barbara was campaigning for just wages and decent working conditions in the garment industry.
“It was really the integration of the unconscious and conscious for me,” she notes, with the horses, whose manes dissolve into the ocean spray, depicting a visible energy force that has “come ashore.”
Viewed primarily at special showings or by appointment at the Notre Dame Home Gallery near St. Mary’s University, all the paintings have stories and part of the gallery experience is hearing them — and sharing your own. Here Sister Barbara and Sister Ann Semel, SSND, (who took up painting herself three and a half years ago at Sister Barbara’s encouragement and now finds herself in demand as an artist as well) welcome a steady flow of visitors who view and purchase originals or prints.
The prints are available either as professional quality photos taken by Sister Ann (who is art ministry coordinator) or near-duplicate giclee digital prints and come in a variety of sizes, including small photographic prints on cards for a few dollars, a price easily affordable to the nearby St. Mary’s students. (Sister Ann is a professor in St. Mary’s English-Communications Art Department.)
The sisters’ art and gallery is a project of the School Sisters of Notre Dame (SSND) Art Ministry for Transformation, with all proceeds benefiting the impoverished in Africa and Latin America. “We tell everybody when they buy one,” says Sister Ann of their paintings, ‘You’re getting a gift and you’re giving a gift!’”
Sister Barbara’s art has been accepted for juried exhibits at the San Antonio Airport, by the Regional Arts Consortium Gallery, the Coppini Academy of Fine Art, the San Antonio Water Color Group and more, including national and regional exhibitions in her native Canada. Still, her late-found talent and success as an artist, surprises her. She frequently finds herself thinking, “Did I really do these?”
One of Sister Barbara’s larger paintings, Good Energy, began with a dream of men carrying a coffin out the side door of a church. “And then I saw all these animals,” she says. They were big animals — elephants, rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses — coming to the front of the church and representing “good energy.” “But the church in its present structure wasn’t big enough for all the good that God was doing all around it,” she said. “In every age you have to keep expanding the structures.”
Viewers’ responses to this painting are so consistent, she feels its elements were definitely drawn from the collective unconscious, giving material form to a common assessment. Tigers (protectors of creativity and energy) rise from the waters that flow in front of the church building that seems ablaze from within. The tigers are another recurring dream figure of hers, surfacing from waters of creativity with an incredible human-like intensity in their peaceful gaze.
Other paintings capture likenesses of smiling seals and dolphins, a product of Sister Barbara’s need the Christmas following the dark days of 9/11 to do “something playful.” And then there is the smiling otter, The Joy of Being Me, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Sister Barbara herself!
One wall of the gallery (which encompasses the entire house) deals specifically with women. A painting of cut roses and bread speaks of “the beauty of women,” Sister Barbara notes. “Women rising up, but also women cut down in the violence against women.” Another painting, done for an exhibit at the Galleria in Houston, is a statement against human trafficking, depicting the anguished face of Tatia, a young Romanian girl who is a sex slave in Italy.
Sister Barbara is actively involved in combating human trafficking and goes on to explain how these women, denied contraceptives, give birth time after time, only to have their babies taken from them. “And they know it’s either for sale for adoption or for the organs,” she relates. “It’s dreadful. It’s hard to even say it.”
A close-up depiction of hands working a sewing machine was inspired by a 14-year-old “slave” in the Los Angeles garment industry. “She slept beside the machines,” said Sister Barbara, “14, 18 or even sometimes 20 hours a day. This is what she saw — just the hands and the machine all day.” Pennies — what the girl worked for — fly over the machine.
One of the stronger feminine depictions in her artwork is found in Black God. In it a black woman, dressed in nurturing green, hugs the trunk of a tree in a snowy forest. The image grew out of a silent, seven-hour train ride through the pine forests of northern Ontario, as well as a period during which Sister Barbara was snowed in alone for ten days in Canada.
“I kept pondering that mystery of the life in the darkness of the earth and what happens,” she said, “what happens in the darkness of the womb, in the darkness of the tomb.” The image that came to her was that of a black woman, loving the earth and drawing healing power for herself and others from the trees.
A major aspect of Sister Barbara’s art has been its relationship to her teaching role. Locally, she has taught at Incarnate Word University (the Thomas French Chair in Theology and Morality), Our Lady of the Lake University and Trinity University. These days, her full time work is as the SSND SHALOM coordinator for the Dallas province, which extends from Mississippi to Arizona, promoting justice, peace and integrity of creation. She is also founder of the South Texas Coalition Against Human Trafficking.
“When I’m doing so much teaching on social justice issues and peace issues, earth issues,” she notes, “it’s very helpful to have some paintings that help us talk about how you cope with injustices, how to get it out. ... because it can be too oppressive and too much to bear.” She sees expressing the message through art as a way of preventing people from rejecting it outright because it seems too difficult to deal with.
Especially compelling are her several variations of The Very Stones Cry Out for a Tidal Wave of Justice, with its stone wall of anguished faces beneath a city skyline over which a wave of tsunami-like proportions rises. It grew out of the years Sister Barbara worked in Canada with the national coalition against sweatshops in the garment industry. “I would walk and see the high-rises in Toronto,” she said, “and just say, ‘Oh God, where are you? The very stones cry out for a tidal wave of justice!’”
She sees this painting as a reminder that the cries against injustice belong in public. “Because when I hold it in, and keep quiet about it, I get sick,” she said. “And when I express it, I am healthy. I think that’s how the women’s movement got started. People, instead of being quiet about being abused, they start speaking up — and it belongs in public — so they do something about it.” She notes that her aim here is “to shift consciousness” through her art. She adds, “I’m not sure what I’ll paint still from Katrina or Rita, which have affected us all so deeply. We are deeply grieved at the lack of action still.”
In contrast to paintings that evoke realization of harsh realities and injustice, there are uplifting ones of flowers and nature, seascapes and landscapes that grace the gallery walls — all with their own stories.
Sister Barbara’s expressive portrait of Our Lady of Guadalupe, based on the writings of St. Juan Diego’s uncle, Juan Bernadino, is not the traditional tilma version, but a lovely young native woman of the people of the Tepeyac region — so much so that a visitor, a native of that area, once remarked, “I want to tell you that she could belong to my family.” And Sister Ann has found a burgeoning business in commissions for her special teddy bear paintings.
Summing up the SSND Art Ministry for Transformation, Sister Barbara notes it is an effective way to deal with the world’s current “culture of death and violence” because it is through finding the images or symbols that speak to people that the underpinnings of the current culture can be changed.
“One of our community mottos is ‘Trust and Dare,’” she observes of their late life venture into art. “And this has certainly been a good experience of trust and dare.” |