
Dappled Things, a Catholic literary magazine, has announced the winners of the first annual Sacred Heart Art Competition.
The competition was organized to promote a deeper reverence and devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus by challenging artists to create new images of the Sacred Heart.
The top three submissions received cash prizes, and several others received honorable mentions.
The first prize was awarded to Matthew Conner.
Dappled Things describes the first-place winner’s work:
Matthew Conner’s image draws deeply and organically from the well of the final flowering of medieval art, with its mixture of stylization and realism. It is solemn, but not heavy, having that sense of uplifting Gothic attenuation one finds in the Flemish masters. The colors are rich, set against a flat gilded background worked with an incised halo and a simple geometric border, contrasting the appearance of three-dimensionality in the figure with a timeless heavenly gold backdrop, Christ both God and Man; further imagination is shown by rendering the heart itself as an actual sculpted relief.
The second prize was awarded to Joseph Macklin.
“Joseph Macklin’s catalogue of work is of extraordinary quality and shows considerable stylistic variation and a refreshing confidence in being willing to experiment, quite successfully, within the bounds of sacred art,” states Dappled Things:
This work succeeds in being both closely inspired by the work of the Sienese school while successfully depicting an iconographic type that would have been unknown to them, and giving to the luminous chalice and floating heart an arresting weightlessness that contrasts with the solid Italian Gothic face and figure of Christ; the effect is mesmerizing.
Bernadette Carstensen won third place.
“Bernadette Carstensen’s Christ,” Dappled Things stated,
takes the components of conventional modern depictions of the Sacred Heart and re-imbues them with a truly necessary sense of iconographic reverence without going to the opposite extreme and reducing the result to a diagram. Our Lord’s gaze transfixes the viewer, and the graceful gestures of His hands beautifully frame His heart.
The submissions that received honorable mentions can be viewed here.
The founder and publisher of Dappled Things, Bernardo Aparicio García, told CatholicVote: “We are delighted with the results [of the competition] and hope that these new depictions of the Sacred Heart may inspire increased devotion in many hearts and homes.”
According to their website, Dappled Things “is the hub of the new renaissance in Catholic art and literature, featuring essays, interviews, reviews, fiction, poetry, and visual art.”
“We are a journal of ideas, art, and faith for those who find that hope springs eternal. For those who see the other side and strike out for it,” the site adds.
