By Gretchen Keiser

When Father Bernard Quinn of Glenmary first began his search for an artist to work with in expressing a Catholic vision, Paul DuSold was only three years old.

“I have been trying for 19 years” to begin to express a Catholic vision for the South in artistic symbols as well as in words, explained Father Quinn, who is director of the Glenmary Research Center in Atlanta. Over the years many artists have gotten very excited about the concept, but have never produced the work, he said in a recent interview.

So it has turned out that Paul DuSold, who is a 22-year-old from Ashe County, North Carolina and a recent graduate of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, is the first artist to complete a commissioned painting for the Glenmary Center.

Father Quinn and the artist discussed the painting recently on the top floor of the Research Center, which is a renovated white house on Piedmont Avenue in Atlanta where the Glenmarys base their research into the Church’s work in the South and ecumenical endeavors. The order, whose mission is to send priests into areas in the South where the Catholic Church is not yet established, also devotes time and attention to research into the way the Church can best grow in the South, and into the relationship between Catholics and other Christians in the South.

As ideas are spawned, Father Quinn wants to communicate them in more ways than one and points out that the Catholic Church, historically, used artists to portray religious truths and to inspire believers.

“When the Church wants to effect reform or renewal, it does not hire more bureaucrats, it hires more artists,” he says.

Father Quinn met DuSold in the summer of 1984 while the priest was serving as a summer replacement for a Glemmary priest in DuSold’s North Carolina parish. DuSold, who paints in representational fashion and is interested in portraits, discussed several possible subjects with Father Quinn, but they finally settled upon an incident described in the Gospel of Luke. It takes place after the Resurrection when Jesus meets several of his disciples on the road to Emmaus, talks with them, explains Scripture and then stays to eat with them.

The large-scale oil painting, which is over five feet long and over four feet high, depicts the moment in which the disciples recognize Jesus, the moment of the breaking of the bread.

The incident “was chosen because, although the hearts of the disciples were ‘burning within them’ while the Lord spoke to them about the Scriptures on the way, their hearts were ‘opened’ and they recognized the presence of Jesus, in the breaking of the bread,” according to the formal description mounted alongside the painting.

Father Quinn expanded upon the choice and placed it within the framework of the Glenmary order’s vision and research. The Center’s study considers “What can the Catholic Church affirm about the South and its religion, what can it supply, and what does it have to reject,” Father Quinn said. Answering those questions is “not so easy,” he added.

The incident at Emmaus emphasized the importance of Scripture, which is the heart of Southern Christian tradition. “And we affirm that, we rejoice in that,” Father Quinn said. “But one of the gifts we (as Catholics) bring is the bread, the breaking of the bread.”

“We do that with love,” he added. “We try to make a statement with a beautiful painting.”

The oil painting depicts four figures around a table, with Christ at the head. His raised hand blessing the bread catches the other three figures in a moment of recognition.

DuSold, who worked on the painting throughout his last year of study in Philadelphia, says that he attempted to meet the need to give the painting a Southern quality in a subtle way. “I relied a lot on my own Southern influence,” he said. “It couldn’t be overt because it would look sarcastic.” Instead he sought “something deeper” to express a regional note, “a matter of character rather than detail.”

The artist, whose use of human figures rather than abstract subjects is unusual in the contemporary art world, acknowledges that he was overly optimistic as he set out to do the painting, the most complicated he has attempted. “I was presumptuous,” he says. “I dove right in and started the painting on canvas.”

As a result, he says, one of the figures had to be altered in position on the canvas, an effect that is known as “pentimento” – an artist’s “afterthought” caught in the painting.

DuSold is the son of physicians who moved from California to rural North Carolina seeking an area in need of doctors. His interested in art was sparked in 1980 when, as a teenager, he worked on a fabled project in North Carolina. With others he helped complete frescoes by artist Ben Long in rural Holy Trinity Episcopal Church in Ashe County. That experience with Long sparked his desire to study art and to work in traditional manner and form, he says.

DuSold is now living in Philadelphia where he will be showing some of his works and continuing to study and develop portraiture.

Father Quinn hopes to lend the painting out not only as a work of art but as a message of evangelism and ecumenical outreach.

After 19 years of effort, he is pleased to have begun again to communicate the vital message of the Church in art. “We want to say it in a visual way by great art,” he said. “We want to work with artists – not just one – who can express (a Catholic vision) in a real way.”