Falls Church Arts: Dubliner's 'Rome Sweet Rome' Wins Juror’s Choice in 'Home' Exhibition

And, in the ongoing battle between the Sacred and the Profane...
A sculptor of sacred art from Dublin won the Juror's Choice Award for his dark and striking memento mori painting "Rome Sweet Rome" in Falls Church Arts' new mixed-media show "Home."
Falls Church resident, Dony Mac Manus of Dublin, Ireland, was awarded the exhibition's top judge's prize by Juror Mark Dreisenstok for his work at the opening reception for the "Home" exhibition at Falls Church Arts' gallery at 700-B West Broad St. Saturday Aug. 24. Mac Manus's brooding painting "Rome Sweet Rome" is a sacred art composition depicting – in bold colors against a forebodingly dark background – a skeletal Swiss guard gazing aloft while seemingly rising toward Heaven.
To a packed standing room-only crowd Saturday evening, 38 artists' works exploring "what 'home' means to them" were featured in the gallery's reception. The exhibit's theme was selected by Falls Church Arts’ Instagram followers using a "March Madness" bracket-style selection method. Mingling amidst hors d'oeuvres and refreshments provided by the gallery, many of the show's participating artists were on hand to answer questions about their process and inspiration.
Viewers gazing upwards at "Rome Sweet Rome" – as if at a Cathedral's stained glass window – may have wondered at the many layers of mystery within the painting: Which way is the figure moving? Whom does it represent? Are Heaven and Hell symbolized by the light, darkness and flaming red? Does the skeleton represent death? Why is the figure wearing such an elaborately colored uniform?
Juror Mark Dreisenstok described the winning painting: “The artistry, scale, and realism of the work are striking. I also appreciated the various and complex definitions of 'home' in the work. There's the idea of home as an adopted home, for the artist chose Rome as his home for many years. Similarly, the Swiss Guards he references are also foreigners who are in Rome as their adopted home, which has been the case for centuries. Finally, with the memento mori theme introduced by the skeleton, we are reminded that our home is ultimately not our earthly abode but our home beyond this world in eternity.”

On his artist website, Mac Manus provides his own background sketch. "Born in Dublin in 1971, Dony Mac Manus graduated with a Bachelor of Design (1995) and a Higher Diploma in Art and Design Teaching (1998) at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin, Ireland. The work from his degree show was selected by the National Museum of Ireland for permanent display to launch the contemporary silver collection. He went on to receive a $20,000 Millennium Scholarship Trust from the Bank of Ireland to study a Masters in Fine Art (2001) at the New York Academy of Art and also won a $8,000 Scholarship from the same NYAA to use a studio in Provence in the south of France."
So, how did Mac Manus shift his perspective toward Italy?
"Shortly after September 11, 2001 [Mac Manus] left Manhattan for Italy where he set up his studio first in Rome for a year and a half and then Florence for the next year and a half while working on large bronze figurative compositions for NYC and Washington DC," his website continues. "He returned to Dublin in 2004 to establish the Irish Academy of Figurative Art over three and a half years which he then entrusted to the remaining faculty and over 100 students. In late 2007 Mac Manus returned to Florence to develop a sacred art studio in the Monastery of San Marco where Beato Fra Angelico used to work and live... While there he travelled to Rome once a fortnight to gain a Masters in Architecture, Art and Liturgy (2010) under l’Universita degli Studi Europea di Roma at the the Pontifical Athenaeum Regina Apostolorum. His studio was so successful that the Archbishop of Florence, Giuseppe Cardinal Betori asked Mac Manus during a visit to his studio to personally found a diocesan Sacred Art School – Firenze based on his studio practise, which started in 2011 (www.donymacmanusstudios.com). The artist left Florence in 2014 to develop Sacred Art Studios to work on large liturgical art commissions and has been working from his studio in Dublin since then."
The Origins of Mac Manus's Spiritual Quest
In Ireland, Mac Manus is not an unknown sacred artist. Irish Times interviewed him as an "internationally commissioned artist" in a 2008 article "Faith in the Figure: Where is Art Going?"
The piece begins: "Where is art going? It seems to have been in the doldrums for decades. Works of art that come to prominence seem to be heaped with plaudits for one thing: their 'shockability.' This neo-iconoclasm palls quickly and can send art into a spiral of nihilism, and even depravity, as artists bid to outdo each other in pushing the boundaries. Is the Irish art world prejudiced against both figurative work and religious themes? The internationally commissioned Dublin sculptor, Dony MacManus, believes so."

"Complete relativism affects artistic production...," Mac Manus says in the article. "Take Duchamp's Urinal, which he exhibited as a work of art. It was the ultimate statement in relativism in the visual arts, everything is art. I think it was a clever statement in 1917, but unfortunately artists have been repeating the same statement since and it gets a bit tedious after a while. I believe that because of this poverty of ideas, this deconstruction of thought has been reflected in the deconstruction of art, architecture and society."
"However, society looks to artists and philosophers for guidance and to project a way forward," he continues. "I believe that we have failed miserably in this task. I think it's really important to reconstruct the true identity of who we are as human beings and project the positive image of the person, and in that way help to lead society towards a more hopeful future as mentioned in Pope Benedict's latest encyclical, Spe Salvi (Saved by Hope)."
"In our contemporary western culture of repudiation and disenchantment," he says, "there is much need for a witness to hope in the form of beauty, a truth born of faith and love."
Mac Manus describes how his sacred art is an outgrowth of his spiritual and artistic quest to help cleanse Western society and contemporary art of its degraded tendencies. Not only does he create sacred sculpture, designs and paintings, but he takes to the public speaking pulpit. "I enjoy the opportunity to speak about what I know best which is my own experience as primarily a contemporary liturgical artist in a culture of repudiation," Mac Manus says. "My work has given me a platform to expose the spiritual wounds of our society and to propose the soothing balm of faith and the beauty it produces as its remedy. By taking such a counter cultural stance, I feel that I stand out like a red dot on a green canvas and hence draw the wrath of many and the admiration of a few."
"I think this experience is effectively articulated as follows: '… the decline in religious faith means that many people both skeptics and vacillators, begin to repudiate their cultural inheritance. The burden of this inheritance, without the consolations on offer to the believer becomes intolerable and creates the motive to scoff at those who seek to hand it on.'" ~ Roger Scruton.
In a YouTube video entitled "Virginia Catholic Sculptor: Sacred Art Can 'Save the World,'" Mac Manus describes being rejected by the faculty of Dublin's National College of Art and Design due to his expressly figurative and Catholic sacred artworks and his subsequent sense of mission to double-down on his spiritual and artistic drives.
"I’m Dony Mac Manus and I’m a sculpture from Dublin," he begins. "And I’ve just settled here in Falls Church. I went to art school in Dublin where I was promptly kicked out of the art department for being too figurative and representational in my art and too Catholic. As I see it, there’s a crisis in our culture in the West right now and I see the solution is to go to the core of our culture — which is Christ."
"My calling, I suppose, my vocation, as an artist is to resurrect the Christian tradition in the visual arts," he continues. "And why I produce sacred art, logically, it comes from the overflow of my interior life. So, if all art is the overflow of the interior life — if my interior life is steeped in the Liturgy and attending mass daily and praying in the church daily and the scriptures, and the life of the saints and so on, then that interior life will overflow in my work. If we resurrect the Liturgy that will resurrect our culture and save our culture moving forward. So, essentially, in order to save the world, we need to save the Liturgy. And as Dostoevsky says, “Beauty will save the world.” So, if we put those two truisms together — beauty will save the world; Liturgy will save the world — well then, liturgical art is core."
The Falls Church Arts gallery is located at 700-B West Broad St. (Route 7), Falls Church. It is open Tuesday-Friday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., Saturdays from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., and Sundays from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Admission is free.
Artworks can be viewed online at www.fallschurcharts.org. All pieces can be purchased at the gallery or on the website.
The Juror’s Choice and People’s Choice awards have been made possible by a donation from FOXCRAFT Design Group, 110 Great Falls Street. The People’s Choice Award for the "Home" exhibit will be announced on Sept. 14, based on votes from visitors to the gallery.
By Christopher Jones
Member discussion