Meet Indiana-based Artist Daniel Mitsui
DANIEL PAUL MITSUI is a Hobart, Indiana-based artist specializing in ink drawing on calfskin and paper. His work is mostly religious in subject, inspired by medieval illuminated manuscripts, panel paintings and tapestries. www.danielmitsui.com
CATHOLIC ARTIST CONNECTION: Where are you from originally, and what brought you to Hobart, IN?
DANIEL MITSUI: I was born at Fort Benning, Georgia, where my father was an infantry officer. I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, and lived in Chicago for most of my adult life. About two and a half years ago, I moved with my wife and four kids to Hobart, Indiana, which is sort of the easternmost edge of Chicagoland.
How do understand your vocation as a Catholic artist?
“Catholic Art” can mean a number of different things: art that happens to be made by a Catholic, whatever it is; art that communicates Catholic ideas and values; art that explicitly treats the Catholic religion as its subject; or art that is considered “sacred” art, meaning that it is intended to communicate religious truth and to assist prayer.
Most of my artwork is of this last kind, so I understand my task as twofold. First, I do my best to follow an established tradition as far as composition and arrangement are concerned. Sacred art should corroborate sacred scripture and liturgy, and the exegesis of the Church Fathers - because it too is a means by which the memory of Jesus Christ’s revelation is carried forward through the centuries.
Second, I do my best to make the art as beautiful as possible, because the experience of beauty is a way for men and women in a fallen world to remember dimly the prelapsarian world, and to grow in their desire for reunion with God. As I wrote in one of my lectures:
It is important “not to consider sacred art a completed task, not to consider any historical artifact to be a supreme model to be imitated without improvement. To make art ever more beautiful is not to take it away from its source in history, but to take it back to its source in Heaven. Sacred art does not have a geographic or chronological center; it has, rather, two foci, like a planetary orbit. These correspond to tradition and beauty. One is the foot of the Cross; the other is the Garden of Eden.”
I am Catholic, and an artist, so I have no objection to being called a “Catholic artist.” However, I do not want to make an advertisement of my personal faith or piety, to suggest to other Catholics that they ought to buy or commission artwork from me because of the sort of person I am, rather than because of the artwork’s own merits. An artist who would make an advertisement of his personal faith or piety has received his reward.
At this time, my personal mission is to complete a large cycle of 235 drawings, together making an iconographic summary of the Old and New Testaments and illustrating the events that are most prominent in sacred liturgy and patristic exegesis. I call this the Summula Pictoria, and I plan to spend the next twelve years of so working to complete it, alongside other commissions. I already have spent more than two years on it, mostly on preliminary research and design work.
Where have you found support in the Church for your vocation as an artist?
The Catholic Church is of course much more than its institutional structures; it is all the faithful. Most of my patronage comes from private individuals rather than parishes and dioceses. I do receive some commissions from ecclesiastical institutions - in 2011 I even completed a large project for the Vatican - but I do not go out of my way to secure them. In ecclesiastical institutions, there tend to be committees involved, and a whole lot of politics; the usual result is that an artist spends time preparing proposals, reserving his most interesting ideas, and just fighting for permission to make the best artwork possible. I feel sorry for artists like architects and sacred musicians who, by the nature of their medium, have to do this. I avoid it whenever possible.
I choose to make artwork that is small enough and inexpensive enough that private individuals can commission and buy it. I think this may be the future of Catholic art patronage; there is not much reason to think that ecclesiastical institutions will be able to provide it much longer. You can look at the demographic changes, at the money lost both through diminishing donations and lawsuits because of clerical scandals, at the amount of artwork already available as salvage from closed parishes - none of this suggests that ecclesiastical institutions will become great patrons of new sacred art any time
soon.
How can the Church be more welcoming to artists?
I think that sacred art should have four qualities: it should be traditional and beautiful, as I said already; and it should be real and interesting.
What the clergy and theologians of the Church could do to help artists is to advance an argument for art that has these qualities. They have not advanced this argument much lately, and a good number of them probably don’t even believe it.
By "real” I mean that sacred art ought, at least as an ideal, to be made by real human hands or voices. Music sung or played in person is a different thing, and a better thing, than an electronic recording. A picture drawn by hand is qualitatively superior to picture printed by a computer. There is at least a rule on the books that liturgical music needs to be sung or played live, not off of a CD, but even there a lot of fake things are broadly tolerated: bell sound effects played from speakers in a tower, or synthesizers dressed up in casings to look like pipe organs. Visual artists don’t even have this sort of rule in place for them. Printing technology - both 2D and 3D - is now so sophisticated that I worry about it displacing human artists, without the clergy or theologians objecting.
I fear that some time soon, one of the great artistic or architectural treasures of Christianity will be ruined - more completely and irreparably than Notre Dame de Paris - and that in response to demands that it be rebuilt exactly as it was before, living artists will dismissed from the task as untrustworthy. Instead, a computer model will be constructed from the photographic record, and everything will be 3D printed in concrete or faux wood. Once that happens, a precedent is set, and living artists and architects thenceforth will compete, most likely at an economic disadvantage, against computers imitating the old masters.
I don’t oppose reproductions themselves; I have digital prints on display in my own home, and I sell digital prints of my own artwork. I listen to recordings of music. I do oppose the idea that these can, in themselves, provide a sufficient experience of art and music. I oppose the idea that sacred art and music can be fostered through attitudes that would have made their existence impossible in the first place.
By “interesting,” I mean that art and music should command attention. So many Catholics have gotten it into their minds that the very definition of prayer or worship is “thinking pious thoughts to oneself.” They close their eyes and obsess about whether they can think those pious thoughts through to a conclusion without noticing anything else. With this mindset, art and music are praised as"prayerful” simply for being easy to ignore. Art or music that are particularly excellent are condemned as “distracting.”
This, really, is wrongheaded. Distractions from prayer are foremost interior, the result of our own loud and busy and selfish thoughts. Sacred art or music that draw us out of our own thoughts, that make us notice their beauty, are fulfilling their purpose; they are bringing us closer to the source of all beauty, God.
I can’t remember the last time I heard a living priest of theologian say as much.
How can the artistic world be more welcoming to artists of faith?
I don’t really think that it makes sense to speak of an artistic world as opposed to any other world, at least when it comes to sacred art.
This art is meant to be in churches, or in homes, or in any places where people pray - that is to say, anywhere. It belongs to everyone.
I have no objection to seeing my artwork in galleries or museums, but I don’t seek out those spaces; I try to make my artwork available to anyone, as directly as possible.
How do you afford housing as an artist?
The medium in which I chose to work - small scale ink drawing - does not require a very large working space, and uses no toxic materials or dangerous equipment. So really, all I need is a room in which to work. It doesn’t need to be a space outside the home, or away from my kids.
So affording housing as an artist is, for me, the same as affording housing in general. I moved to my current home after my wife and I decided that our family was too large to stay in apartments any more; we have four children, and wanted a yard of our own for them. We wanted to be near Chicago, but everything on the Illinois side of the border was too expensive. It took about six months of house hunting, and one temporary move, before we found what we wanted, and we had to borrow most of the money to buy it. So I don’t know that I should be giving out advice, except perhaps to urban artists who are "apartment poor” like I used to be, not to let that situation go on too long.
I advise any artists who are still early enough in their careers not to be wedded to a particular medium to consider how their choice of medium will affect what sort of living space they will need eventually, especially if they hope to have a family. If you want to paint pictures or make prints that require pigments or chemicals too toxic to have around young children or pregnant women, that is something you should be prepared to deal with in advance.
How do you financially support yourself as an artist?
My artwork is my livelihood. About half of my income is from commissioned drawing, and about half from print sales, licensing and book royalties. I do teach, write and lecture on occasion, but this is not a significant part of my income. I’ve never had a residency or a grant, and I do not seek them out.
I’ve had my own website, www.danielmitsui.com, since maybe 2005, and use this as the primary means of displaying, selling and promoting my work.
What are your top 3 pieces of advice for Catholic artists?
In one of my lectures, Heavenly Outlook, I gave three pieces of advice to anyone who want to appreciate or make sacred art, and I will repeat them here:
First, never treat art like data.
Second, be guided by holy writ and by tradition itself: liturgical prayer, the writings of the church fathers and the art of the past.
Third, do not consider sacred art a completed task. Do not consider any historical artifact to be a supreme model to be imitated without improvement.
Please pray for me, and for my family.
