About The Chapels and Art of Mary Holmes
"Art is not just some kind of a silly frill or self-indulgence or self-expression or anything like that. It has to do with the sacred. It's bound to.
These are the words of Mary A. Holmes, an artist, scholar, and beloved member of the Santa Cruz community. Ms. Holmes is Professor Emerita of the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC), with a long and distinguished career lecturing on art and art history, at the University of Iowa, the University of Ohio, UCLA, and as a founding member of the faculty of UCSC.
In recent years, near her home and studio, she built a chapel comprising a center chapel and two side chapels. The central chapel is dedicated to the Holy Spirit, and for it, Ms. Holmes painted illustrations of the Gifts of the Holy Spirit, including Self-discipline, Faith, Hope, anti-Greed, Joy, Gentleness, Compassionate Love (Agape), Temperance, and Erotic Love (Eros). The chapel also has Ms. Holmes's paintings of the Virgin Mary and Saint Michael, the weigher of souls, judging "what we've done with the gifts that we've been given. Ms. Holmes said: "As I painted these, all of these paintings, I had the real revelation that they are all so absolutely linked together that one cannot exist without the other. You see, compassionate love cannot exist without some tempering, and it can't exist without some hope, and it can't exist without some faith. And this is true of all of them. Hope itself can't exist without love, and it can't exist without some sense of the wonderful erotic nature of the world. And none of them can exist without temperance, because if they aren't tempered, they turn into their opposite immediately. You see, the whole thing is absolutely bound together into one great thing, which is the gift of the spirit.
On the right wall of the main chapel is a doorway that enters the Ladies Chapel, dedicated to the Holy Virgin. Ms. Holmes painted four scenes of the Virgin Mary. One is the annunciation; the next is the visitation; then the next one is the return from Egypt; and the last is the Virgin Mary at Jesus's tomb. Ms. Holmes said "those are the identifying things. And I think that they have a wider meaning than just the Christian meaning, ... those are really the great experiences of women.
These chapels and other temples Ms. Holmes has created are rich, forceful expressions of her faith and knowledge, full of history, philosophy, humor, and delight in the strengths of the feminine. The paintings relate a lifetime of experience and thought through numerous stories from religion and mythology. Especially important is the proximity of the paintings in the small chapels. Ms. Holmes said of paintings in small spaces: "You're surrounded by the images, and it gives them great power. They get power from each other, and you feel them; you feel their presence. You feel it much more than if they're just out on a wall somewhere. And of course that's really what art is, any making of images was for: was for the making of sacred images; it was always.
Since the first time I met Mary Holmes at her studio, I knew we had to produce a virtual walk through her work. The studio and surroundings together make an extraordinary experience of her art and vision. QuicktimeVR was a natural choice. The three points provided here are just part of a complete walk-thru we've been working on for months. We have over 20 individual nodes, hundreds of still photos and more than 10 hours of interviews. From these, we chose the chapels for our Sacred Worlds offering. We hope you get a sense of what it is like to walk among Mary's paintings and creations. We invite your comments at m3mail@esinet.net.