Meet: Anthony Santella
ANTHONY SANTELLA is a NYC-based sculptor/artist using wood, paint and mixed media. (www.anthonysantella.com / instagram: santella.anthony)
Catholic Artist Connection (CAC): What brought you to NYC?
Anthony Santella (AS): I was born in Manhattan and my family is from Brooklyn, though I grew up just across the GWB in Teaneck, NJ. So, as I tell people, being from here, I just don’t know any better.
CAC: How do understand your vocation as a Catholic artist? Do you call yourself a Catholic artist?
AS: I do see myself as a Catholic artist. Visually my work doesn’t focus purely on Christian religious subjects or forms; I’m influenced by many world ritual woodcarving traditions, but I think my faith is reflected in all of my work. In all of my work, I’m struggling with issues of suffering, fears, hope and desires, all ultimately through a Christian and Catholic lens. My vocation, I think, as a Catholic artist, is to explore all these issues that I face with attentiveness - not only to my own experience, but to how my work might help others in their struggles. It’s hard given the shitshow of life, but it’s essential to keep focused on grace and hope in Christ’s redemption.
CAC: Where have you found support in the Church for your vocation as an artist?
AS: A big piece of community for me has been the Openings Collective based out of St. Paul the Apostle off of Columbus Circle. It’s a unique project being church based and a project of the Paulist Fathers, but not explicitly Catholic. It’s been a huge source of community and opportunity to interact with other artists, both Catholic and non-Catholic, grappling with the meaning of life with all its messiness in their work. Exhibiting and curating at the church has also been an opportunity to bring the visual arts and the faith threads of my life together.
CAC: How can the Church be more welcoming to artists?
AS: This is an interesting question. There is a very limited space for visual arts that explicitly grapples with faith, at least in a respectful way, outside of a church context. In the same way there is fairly limited acceptance of the visual arts in many church communities. Much of my work is ambiguous enough that acceptance in the mainstream art world hasn’t been a major issue, but it’s definitely shaped my work. I’d love to see more Catholic churches with art based ministries, creating galleries in available spaces, rejoining the visual conversation in our culture that is so dominated by the competing vernaculars of advertising and commoditized modernism.
CAC: What is your daily spiritual practice?
AS: I have to say, my daily spiritual practice could use work. I do find some time at the end of each day to pray. I try, but don’t always succeed in finding a little time to flip open the bible at random.
CAC: What is your daily artistic practice? And what are your recommendations to other artists for practicing their craft daily?
AS: I work a full time day job as a research scientist in an academic lab. There are pros and cons to this approach. While my time for my art is limited by work hours, I can be much more focused on where I want to go with the work in that time, and less on hustling. It’s an approach that I think works only if you are really disciplined and driven to make the work you’re pursuing. If not, the work can easily get pushed off to the side in the course of life.
CAC: What are your top 3 pieces of advice for Catholic artists moving to NYC?
AS: Know what you’re coming to accomplish at least loosely, and sanity check that plan to make sure outlandish levels of success are not an essential part of it.
