Not an Atheist, But an Art Enthusiast

From a distance I noticed the pronounced shape of a cross. It stood erect, the silver rods stabbing into the creamy blue of the French sky. I continued walking up the cobblestone street, feeling each stone press through the shiny black leather of my Mary Jane’s and into my aching heels. My eleven-year-old body was fatigued from all the walking that the French were so apparently accustomed to. However, the chapel finally drifted into my sight of vision. It was painted a pure white, as crisp and untouched as freshly washed bed linen. Two oblong panels of stained glass were framed with a garland of wilting ivy, which swayed with each breeze that braided through its sad petals. In the surrounding area, there were no maisons that blocked the soft sunlight and no more Vespas that mixed their warm, burnt gasoline into the breeze. The wind tickled the hairs on my tanned arms and brushed against the backs of my sweaty knees. The chapel was completely free of that restless movement familiar in cities and those reverberations of sound and smell recognizable in towns. La Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence was simply a chapel upon a hill, confident in its solitude and boisterous in the art it held.

La Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence (also known as: La Chapelle de Matisse) was built in Vence, France between 1949 and 1951 by Henri Matisse, who worked with a Sister to fill the vacant space with his artwork. Matisse had visited  Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris in the summer of 1951 and described his desire to build his own chapel: “The immense crowded heads as far as one could see, the architecture, the stained-glass windows and at times the waves of the music of the organ passing over the heads were all most impressive. Upon leaving, I said to myself ‘Very well! All of this considered, what is my chapel?... And then I thought: it is a flower. It is only a flower, but it is a flower.’” He did not make the chapel as an appeal to the Heavenly Father or as a pilgrimage site for fellow Christian impressionists. He constructed the chapel for its potential in aesthetic healing: an ode to art. 

I guess a chapel never was truly attractive me. It’s not because I don’t appreciate its intricacies; more so I was never truly attracted to religion. To this day, I consider myself non-religious. Mind you, I am not an atheist, and I do believe there is some sort of higher power that puppeteers my everyday actions into ones of Purpose and Reason. In fact, I find the passion that comes with religion attractive. I assume it’s the same passion I feel when I see a new piece of art. I might not fully grasp the allure of a church sermon, but I believe in the perplexing trance one enters when one observes a work of art. And so I found a physical manifestation of this inner conflict I seem to face: La Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence. I did not go to this chapel because it was a chapel; I went to this chapel because it was a museum. 

I entered the chapel bowing my head, and my mother, as well as a couple of tourists, trailed behind me like ducklings. The ceiling was smaller in scale than I had anticipated. The marble floors were glimmering, as though they had just been polished, and the walls were plastered with Matisse’s handiwork. Blue and yellow stained-glass windows, carved with images of coral reefs, filtered a turquoise light into the chapel. On the wall above the altar was a circle, a collection of scribbled lines resembling a robe, and a square with a cross on its cover: Matisse’s depiction of Saint Dominic, a Spanish priest. This image filled the entire height of the wall and overlooked the interior of the chapel in an ominous, Big Brother type of way. It was ghoulish, and I had goosebumps. Acrylic eyes on a large canvas can make you feel like that sometimes. It’s similar to when Mona Lisa’s eyes seem to follow each step I take. I am aware that it is not God watching me through Leonardo Da Vinci's paint strokes. She’s just a woman with a strong gaze, isn’t she? 

My mother had been walking around the chapel, enthralled in her own internal monologue, but she finally stood still in front of the mural of the priest. I stood next to her, clutching my book against my chest just as the priest was. However, instead of a Bible, I held to my heart a book about Henri Matisse. 

Looking at my life, I am acutely aware of the jagged edges, the rough, foundational canvas, the clashing colors of the piece. I attempt dissecting every miniscule detail in my life that irritates my symmetry-obsessed vision. When I search for guidance, I do not find myself in the corridors of a church or sitting cross-legged on the floor of a monastery. Rather, I find myself sitting solemnly on a bench in the middle of an exhibit. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is my mosque and the Musée d’Orsay my temple. I enter the museums and gape at their high ceilings and glistening wooden floors. Maybe I am in the mood for an impressionistic interpretation of the world by Cezanne or Manet? Or do I crave the modernism of Warhol and Ernst? Art is a personal and intimate manipulation of our own realities, and artists seek to make sense of what we accept so easily in our daily lives. I am forced to question the pronounced outline of my own shadow, and to analyze the glint of light that sits in the creak of someone’s iris. My “God” is in each stroke of a paintbrush. Through Art, I find beauty in an orange rind, in the ocher of a sunset, in the heavy plumpness of a woman’s breast, in the protruding veins of a wrinkled hand, and in the withering remains of a rose. Maybe a child had finished eating that orange after a sweltering summer day and left the rinds on the wooden table. Maybe that sun was setting in the south of France or along the horizon of the Hudson Valley. Art enables me to be an agent for my own stories, and when I try to create with my own bare hands, it is imperfect and unpracticed, just as an unfamiliar prayer would be. I usually paint and allow my hand to follow an inner rhythm that results in lines and contours on the gravel of my paper. I assume hearing a harmony in the chorus might create the same sensation as seeing the mixing of two colors: a wash of calm. But just as one’s trust in one’s faith wavers or strengthens in times of hardship, my understanding of Art sways and intensifies.

Indeed, Henri Matisse was a Catholic, but I like to think he worshipped and prayed to Art with double the fervor he did to God. Matisse said at one point in his life, “I don't know whether I believe in God or not. I think, really, I'm some sort of Buddhist. But the essential thing is to put oneself in a frame of mind which is close to that of prayer.” In that chapel that stood at the peak of the hill, I was a young girl holding a book in the place of a Bible, and I promised to myself that I would worship Art and my form of prayer would be Creation.