I was brought up Catholic, and I felt the power of art from a very young age - seeing the brutality of all those images of flayed apostles and tortured saints was a pretty strong introduction.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
My interest in art must have started with my Catholic upbringing. Art was everywhere: churches with its paintings, sculptures, stained glass, textiles, and fine metalwork.
In my 20s, as I began to travel in Europe, I found comfort in religious paintings. Even though my own belief in Catholic dogma had been shaken and weakened, I found that the beauty and the richness of the art still held me.
My early paintings weren't that good - I was very influenced by Francis Bacon. But there was a kind of intensity there. And however influenced they may have been by other people, even my earliest paintings were recognisably my own.
You know, in high school I thought Catholicism was funny and sort of ridiculous, but then I also liked it, too. Like, I definitely turned to it in times of trouble.
While I was in college becoming a good Catholic I was also becoming a writer - one haunted by Catholicism.
I didn't want to be like everybody else. Art was my religion.
My mother's family were full-on Irish Catholics - faith in an elaborate old fashioned, highly conservative and madly baroque style. I sort of fell out of the tribe over women's rights and social justice issues when I was just 13 years old.
When I was about seven, one or two people encouraged me, and art became an enormous and important refuge. By adolescence, I was absolutely passionate about it and felt those paintings and those painters, whether they lived a few hundred years ago or were still alive, were somehow my companions.
Art, that great undogmatized church.
And the fifteenth century was an impassioned age, so ardent and serious in its pursuit of art that it consecrated everything with which art had to ad as a religious object.
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