Category: art

Yesterday, I accidentally did a saint for June 5th instead of June 4th (thanks, Wikipedia for updating on GMT instead of local time). I suppose I should do a June 4th saint today, but I decided to just google Saint of the Day which turned up Saint Boniface, a Benedictine monk who was martyred trying…

I wasn’t able to find any real information about this Vietnamese martyr online, beyond the link to a general wikipedia article about Vietnamese martyrs which only said that he was a Vietnamese priest. My old parish in California had a sizable Vietnamese community which seemed almost like a separate church within the parish. Unlike the…

At least in part because Christianity has been centered on Europe for the largest part of its history, the canonized saints tend to be white Europeans, so it was a bit of a delight as I looked through my resources for today to discover a saint who isn’t white, Charles Lwanga. A convert to Catholicism…

St Eugene is an interesting figure in that he was a pope elected while the previous pope still lived (his predecessor having been deposed by the emperor over one of those abstruse matters of doctrine—does Christ have one will or two?—that most contemporary Christians likely never think about and if they do, are as likely…

Today is the feast of St Bernard of Montjoux who, it turns out is exactly the St Bernard that the dogs are named after thanks to his establishing a pair of permanent rest houses in passes through that Alpines. That said, even though one of the two pictures I found online shows him with a…

No church available for any of today’s saints, so I decided to do a portrait of Saint Augustine of Canterbury. Less well-known than his namesake, Augustine of Hippo, Augustine of Canterbury led a delegation of monks to England where he would become the first bishop of Canterbury. Not long after leaving Rome, this group of…

There is a St Philip Neri church in Chicago, but it’s been renamed for a different saint and the daily Mass was too early to drag the kids to, so I’m doing a saint drawing again today. This time around, I decided to do it with a felt tip marker thinking this might make the…

Continuing my saint a day project, since both St Bede the Venerable parishes in the archdiocese were a bit far to go with my kids, I opted to do another crummy drawing. This one is a colored pencil impressionist rendering of the James Doyle Penrose painting, “The Venerable Bede Translates John” which depicts Bede on…

Since I wasn’t able to make it to Our Lady of the Wayside church this morning, I instead did a drawing taken from the painting, Madonna Della Strada. The original painting was in a church dating back to the fifth century, although the painting itself only dates back to the 13th or 14th century. The…