Letter From the Editors

Beauty loves to play hard to get. It is not easy to create something beautiful. To be an artist is to be a person in love with the chase, but the pursuit of beauty requires sacrifice. The name of our magazine reflects the power of sacrifice to affect the good: vermilion is the color of blood, and the blood of Our Lord won for us the beauty of salvation. Every artist in The Catholic University of America community, regardless of creed, participates in this sacrificial pursuit of the beautiful.

Vermilion began as an idea, a beautiful idea: to give life to imagination. Imagination, if left unaddressed, sits, festers, eats away at the corners of the mind and nests in the places where cobwebs spool into creatures that whisper musings between observances. It is a beckoning call, a call that echoes through the jungle of jumbled thought. The idea of beauty, the presence of imagination, and the call to create. Each looking for a place to land. 

In a community so rich with artists, the lack of a magazine for creative writing and the arts was a palpable void. There was no home for those trying to answer the call to create. Without an audience, artists are made to be vagabonds scrounging for scraps of recognition from the passerby friend or relative. Vermilion exists to encourage the weary artist and display the wonderful fruits won at the cost of artistic toil and labor. Vermilion exists to give craftsmanship and artistry a home at The Catholic University of America. 

Matthew Sawtelle & Jessica Wyeth 

Co-Editors-in-Chief