From an Interview with Author/Artist Michael O’Brien

(The Rescuer by Michael D. O’Brien)

Question: Your creative energies, going back to your youth, were originally focused on visual arts, leading eventually to the writing of icons. What are some of the relationships or parallels—in terms of content, approach, themes, and so forth—between the visual arts and the literary work?

O’Brien: Clearly the two media are quite different modes of communication, the painting focusing on a static moment, the novel on a fluid narrative. Both seek to express a variety of truths in such a way that love of the subject is evoked in a viewer of an image or a reader of a novel. You know the popular expression, “He lost himself in the story.” I would say it’s more accurate to say, “He found himself in the story.”

Perhaps that’s another way of saying that each art, in its own way, by evoking a reader’s or viewer’s understanding of himself, can make possible the growth of a proper love for himself. He may come to see his own greatness and follies, and above all, the beauty of his personhood.

Question: We return again and again to the question of beauty. Should the writer or artist make beauty primary in what he creates, almost an absolute?

O’Brien: A certain caution must be exercised here. Beauty is a highly subjective thing. It can also be used to beguile and deceive. Keats wrote that beauty is truth and truth is beauty, and that’s all we need to know on earth. But this is a gravely flawed concept. We need to know a very great deal more than that. Beauty alone cannot save us, though it can help draw us into deeper perceptions of the mystery of existence.

However, when Truth is incarnated in beautiful forms, something far greater becomes possible. In the midst of a frantic world, this kind of beauty can bring us to a moment of quiet contemplation. This state of attentive silence before a mystery can then lead us to a sense of wonder and awe, and from there to reverence. And then, with grace, we may arrive at a condition in which we are better able to worship the source of beauty, our Father-Creator, He who is beauty itself.

Question: If you had to summarize some of key aspects of your approach to the arts and to what you think art is and should be, what would you say?

O’Brien: ...I would condense everything down to this: The arts are languages of the soul, which at their best make visible in beautiful forms the unseen realities—the interior life of man and the metaphysical. For this reason, the Christian artist has a great responsibility before God and Man. He must be dedicated to a life of prayer, as well as diligent development of his natural skills. He must be ever growing in sensitivity to the promptings of the Holy Spirit.

(From an interview with Carl Olson - November 7, 2020)