A special aspect of the time that I've spent with the Missionaries of the Eucharist is being able to share in the lives of many different people, even if only for a short time. Here are some sketches from life of some of the people I have been able to spend time with. Some of them are fellow missionaries, some of them friends of the missionaries- members of host families and others who have spent time with us. I feel that a special privilege I have as an artist is that when I am able spend time with someone through drawing them, it is a unique opportunity to reflect on the dignity and beauty of the human person and seek to perceive the image of God in people.
Blessed John Paul II's Theology of the Body has really had an impact on me as an artist. Pope John Paul II really emphasizes in his teaching that the person, made in the image of God, is revealed through the body and therefore the human body communicates into the visible world the mystery of God more powerfully than anything else in the created order. In his General Audience of February 20th he stated that:
The body, and it alone, is capable of making visible what is invisible: the spiritual and the divine. It was created to transfer into the visible reality of the world the mystery hidden since time immemorial in God, and thus be a sign of it.
Along these lines, in his Letter to Artists Pope John Paul II writes that "Art must make perceptible, and as far as possible attractive, the world of the spirit, of the invisible, of God."
For this reason I feel it my responsibility and privilege as an artist to go deeper into the mystery of the human person, whose spiritual mystery is expressed visibly through the body. For going deeper into the subject of the mystery of the human person one reflects on the mystery of God.
-Shana
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