SUNDAY CHAT: DON MESERVE

Gordon Chibroski/Staff Photographer

Divinely inspired: His Stations of the Cross through Jesus’ eyes continue to earn Maine artist Don Meserve critical acclaim.

By BOB KEYES/Staff Writer March 16, 2008

Widely known for his nautical sculptures, Don Meserve is also hailed internationally as a liturgical (church) artist. The panels at left are from his Stations of the Cross, being shown this month at Manhattan’s historic Trinity Church. Meserve, above, leans on one of his boat pieces – this one will go in front of Gleason Fine Art in Boothbay Harbor.

ROUND POND — Many people know Don Meserve for his nautical sculptures. Obsessed by boats and the sea, the 69-year-old has spent much of his artistic life turning blocks of granite into rugged cleats, oversized hooks and abstract boat forms.

But Meserve has another passion as well.

The sculptor, who lives on the Pemaquid peninsula near Bristol, is known internationally as a church artist — that is, he creates liturgical art. As a much younger man, he studied briefly to be a priest, and has lived an intense and deeply personal spiritual life.

This month, Meserve is showing his Stations of the Cross at Manhattan’s historic Trinity Church on the corner of Broadway and Wall Street.

Taking various forms, the stations are a fixture of many Catholic churches, and are shown in other churches during the Lenten season. Some are exquisite artistic pieces; others mass produced. They all attempt to tell the story of Jesus Christ’s final journey, from condemnation to crucifixion and burial.

Meserve’s bas-relief is unique in that Christ is not present in his 14-by-14-inch lead panels. His stations tell the story of the journey through Jesus’ eyes — what he might have seen and felt during his final, blurry-eyed journey and about those who condemned him, wept for him and came to his aid.

Danish filmmaker Carl Dreyer, with whom Meserve shared a friendship when the two were neighbors in Denmark, influenced the artist’s decision to construct his stations with a cinematographic flair. They are powerful and provocative — and controversial. Meserve has been criticized for presuming Jesus’ perspective.

Meserve created the 14-panel narrative over six years, beginning in 1979. The panels are part of a larger exhibition at Trinity, “Through His Eyes,” which also includes several of Meserve’s boat forms.

He has exhibited his Stations of the Cross eight times over the years, including in Washington, D.C., at the National Cathedral and in Boothbay Harbor at Gleason Fine Art, his local gallery.

Meserve and his agents are working to have the stations placed permanently in a church or chapel, perhaps in Maine. He recently talked about his art over a cup of coffee in the kitchen of his woodsy home.

Q: Your Stations of the Cross have brought a lot of attention. Have they been good for you?

A: What they have done for me is gotten me a lot of commissions for other Stations of the Cross and other religious and liturgical products. I have used them as a showpiece. It gives me a little bit of an identity as a church artist.

Q: You’ve talked before about the influence of Eric Gill, whose carved stations have been in Westminster Cathedral in London since the early 20th century. In what ways has Gill influenced you?

A: When I got into dealing with church work, I was actually advised to take a very careful look at how Gill had run his studio, and I kind of modeled the way I have dealt with the church and religion around the way he did.

He was a very similar kind of guy to me, in a way. He was an artist-craftsman. He preferred not to be in a major metropolitan area, but he didn’t think of himself as a bumpkin. And he ran a little studio-shop (that) was very full service, and I have kind of done the same thing. I do all the burial markers for all the dogs in town. Animals die, someone is at my door. I make things for people.

I also used his model for dealing with the church. He was a very serious Catholic, which is very different than I am. But he was not terribly loved by everybody in the Catholic Church. Even that famous Stations of the Cross (in London) was not received very well. If you go to Westminster, you will see those things are installed in a way to least offend those who didn’t like them. It’s interesting. Now they are seen as the greatest thing since sliced bread, but at the time, they were not that loved.

Q: What are your religious beliefs?

A: Well, basically, I am an animist. I am somewhat involved in Native American approaches. Every thing is a living thing. My involvement with the church is much more with its history.

I did study Greek Orthodoxy for a while. I studied — quote, unquote — for the priesthood in Washington, D.C., for a year. But I don’t think at any moment there was one person who believed I was ever going to become a priest.

But I found being around the Orthodox community was really quite good. It taught me I didn’t want to be within the framework of a given religious structure, but it showed me the elegance of a religious structure.

Q: What has been the reaction to your Stations of the Cross?

A: The Stations of the Cross that I did, I got some outrageous letters and comments on them as soon as I had finished them. And when I showed them (previously in New York in 1999), there were a lot of people who thought they were kind of inventive and a lot of people who were interested in the kind of approaches I had taken, and liked them a lot. But there were some people who were very troubled by them, because there is an artist’s assumption. I — me the big artist — will put Jesus’ head on and take you through this thing.

Q: Do you do a lot of church work, relative to your other sculpture?

A: I have to keep them in balance. I have maybe only one going on at a time, or none quite often. This morning, I just got a new church project, as a matter of fact. It’s called “The Great Cross,” and it’s going to be in a new Roman Catholic Church being built in West Virginia, not too far from D.C.

I am going to do the cruciform, which is going to be the central object in the church. It’s going to be quite a big deal, actually. I am going to carve that in wood, which is something I don’t normally do. The figure is going to be about half scale. The average wingspan of a human is 62 inches. It’s going to be 30 inches or something like that.

It’s going to be tricky to be working that size, but I think it’s going to be OK. So that is going to start to be progressing along.

Q: You do a lot of abstract work and create a lot of abstract forms. The religious work might be more literal, but you manage to leave a lot of space in your religious work too.

A: A work of art in some instances is a frame. The viewer and sometimes the critics and sometimes others fill in the blanks, if you will, and then make it the special thing it can be. The artist is one of those participants. So my approach with liturgical things, I want the work to be very, very simple, but I want to build in teeny-weeny little things that the viewer builds on. The real problem with that, if you layer it too much and tell the viewer too many things, you actually create a situation where they are not going to go where they could go.

One of Gill’s ideas was interesting. He said, ‘If you leave a lot of stuff out, if you only leave a few things in but they are substantive things and meaningful things, then the possibility that the viewer might be 10 times brighter than you hasn’t been eliminated.’ That’s why I find putting titles on works of art very, very tricky.

Q: Ultimately, what do you hope happens with your Stations of the Cross? Do you plan to continue to show them?

A: We might do one or two more shows, but the big idea now is to maybe try to find an appropriate church or chapel where they can be permanently placed, which does involve money. We’ve got inquiries, and we’ve got people interested now. They have a certain amount of provenance. They would be a decent, sensible purchase. A couple of architects are interested in placing them. That’s the direction we’re going.

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