Fine art wasn’t part of James Erickson’s life growing up in a trailer park on the outskirts of Detroit. His only exposure to art came when he took trips to see his grandmother in Dearborn, Mich.
“She had National Geographic magazines on the coffee table that I would flip through, and I remember observing plants and wildlife in her backyard and immersing myself in those environments,” said Erickson, who teaches art at Woodberry Forest Academy in Orange, where he lives on campus with his wife and seven children. “I had a very natural compulsion to respond to the world with images. I worked at my grandmother’s kitchen table and she always had colored pencils and paper for me, and this feeling would well up inside.”
Surrounded by fall colors at the all-male boarding school founded in 1889, the award-winning artist who graduated from the University of Virginia in 2008, sat outside on a warm afternoon and talked about his philosophy of being a Catholic artist.
“I’m always seeking to go from the particular to the universal,” said Erickson, a parishioner of Our Lady of the Blue Ridge Church in Madison. “It could be my wife in the living room breastfeeding our child, or my children playing in the backyard, or it could be the way the creek bends behind our house and the light that hits it in the fall. Those are particular things — then going from that to communicating in a universal sense, and because art is a universal language, it’s Catholic.”
The soft-spoken Erickson was a busy man at UVA, where he was a distinguished lawn resident — one of 47 students selected annually to live in the rooms of Thomas Jefferson’s “academical village” surrounding the famous rotunda. He also ran track and cross country, while earning a prestigious Sullivan Award for “character and service to humanity,” and, after being influenced by the Dominican friars at St. Thomas Aquinas Church in Charlottesville, he became Catholic.
Erickson is inspired by Paul Cézanne, the French post-impressionist painter, who was Catholic. “He took ordinary objects, presented them in a universal way to show that he was not just capturing the likeness of fruit or the picture on the table, but he was capturing the drama and poetry that was unfolding in front of him,” said Erickson. “He was celebrating these things on a very intense level, by observing their color and their form so intensely and empathetically. I would even say that through his art we can become transformed in a Eucharistic, transubstantial sense — where something is ordinary and it’s transformed. I don’t think that’s a lot of fluff.”
Erickson finished one of his most ambitious projects in August — transforming the hallway outside the youth ministry classrooms at Christ the Redeemer Church in Sterling into a mural of Christ blessing the children. The mural, which took three months to complete, also depicts Sts.Maria Goretti and José Luis Sánchez del Río, and blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati.
“I began looking at what artists had done before me with the theme of Jesus blessing the children, and then I started diving deep into the lives of these youthful saints,” he said. “Frassati had a big impact on me, being a lover of the outdoors and someone who found a natural way to convey his love of God through mountain climbing and sharing that with others.”
What was once a bland space is now a breathtaking work of art covering three walls.
“James was able to beautifully portray Christ as the Good Shepherd and the youth as his flock,” said Father J. D. Jaffe, pastor. “The first day that he came to work on the project, we were celebrating 40 Hours of Eucharistic adoration in the main church. Before starting on the wall, he left his paints and brushes aside and spent an hour in prayer with Jesus, whom he would then eventually depict so beautifully in his art.”
Erickson said that he doesn’t expect everyone who views the mural will have a mountaintop spiritual experience. “It could be something as superficial as, ‘I just feel like I’m in a better mood,’ ” he said. “Matisse used to talk about how appreciating a great painting is like sitting in an armchair after a long day at work. A lot of people critiqued him for that, saying that art is much deeper, but I think it’s both. It can just nudge people into a lighter, more hopeful state of mind, or it can move people to really contemplate their lives in a deeper way.”
It all goes back to his grandmother’s backyard when Erickson first learned to see the natural world. “I’m chasing after those moments where the presence of God is unveiled at just the right moment to impact people,” he said. “When you have those moments, you can’t help but share them.”
