Contemporary Christian art: what it is and why it is back

You have probably stood in a home store holding a verse print and put it back. Nice type, cream background, the right words, and somehow nothing to look at. That small letdown is where a lot of women start looking for something else, and it is where the phrase contemporary Christian art comes in.

It just means Christian art made now: living artists taking Scripture, Christ and the life of faith as their subject, for the rooms people actually live in. It runs from those verse prints to abstract canvases to painted scenes from the Gospels. And the painted scene, after a long stretch out of fashion, is quietly coming back.

What do people mean when they say "modern Christian art"?

When someone types modern Christian art into a search bar, she usually has one of three things in mind, and the three look nothing alike. It helps to name them before deciding which one belongs over your sofa.

Minimalist typography and verse prints

This is the one you have seen. A verse or a single word in clean type on a white or cream ground, sometimes with a line drawing of a cross, an olive branch or a mountain range. It came out of the same design culture as the neutral living room, and it fits that room well.

Its strength is clarity. Its weakness is that it says the words and leaves the picture to you, which works over the coffee maker and works less well as the one piece a room is built around.

Abstract and symbolic work

The second strand carries faith through color, texture and symbol rather than through a figure. Think of layered gold and deep blue, a field of light with no horizon, a form that suggests a dove or a wound without drawing either.

Makoto Fujimura, who paints with ground mineral pigments in the Japanese nihonga tradition, is the best-known living example; his illuminated Four Holy Gospels was commissioned for the four hundredth anniversary of the King James Bible.

Abstract work asks something of you. Many people love that. Others find that without a figure, the painting stops being about Christ and becomes about paint.

Painterly scene art

The third strand is the oldest, and it is where we sit. A scene from Scripture, pictured whole: Jesus walking toward a boat, a shepherd holding a lamb, a hand reaching down through water. The texture is painterly rather than photographic, the palette is calm enough for a modern home, but there is no mistaking the subject.

You know what you are looking at from the doorway, and you know which passage it comes from. It counts as contemporary because it was made this year, for a living room, while doing what Christian painting did for most of its history: telling the story in a picture.

Where did Christian art come from in the first place?

Christian art began as scene art. Some of the earliest Christian images we have, painted on the walls of the Roman catacombs, show the Good Shepherd carrying a lamb on his shoulders. The scene was chosen because it could be read at a glance by people who could not read.

The icon tradition of the Eastern church took a different route. Icons are flat, frontal, often set against gold, and painted according to established patterns rather than from life. They were not meant as windows onto a scene so much as aids to prayer, and they are still painted that way today.

Western painting turned back toward narrative in the late Middle Ages, and many of the most famous paintings of Jesus date from the centuries that followed. Giotto's frescoes in the Arena Chapel in Padua gave biblical figures weight, grief, and gesture, and the Renaissance carried that further: Masaccio's Florentine chapels, Leonardo's Last Supper in Milan, Michelangelo's Sistine ceiling.

Caravaggio then did something painters are still copying. He lit ordinary-looking people with a single hard light from one side, so that the Calling of Saint Matthew looks like it happened in a tavern down the street.

Rembrandt, a Protestant working in Amsterdam a generation later, made the Bible his lifelong subject in etchings and paintings, from Christ preaching to a crowd of the poor to the late, tender Return of the Prodigal Son. His storm on the Sea of Galilee is one of the few seascapes he ever painted.

The nineteenth century brought a revival. The Pre-Raphaelites in England painted Scripture with almost photographic care: William Holman Hunt's The Light of the World, Christ knocking at an overgrown door, hung in churches and homes across the English-speaking world, and John Everett Millais's Christ in the House of His Parents scandalized critics by showing the Holy Family as a working carpenter's household.

In France, James Tissot traveled to the Holy Land and painted hundreds of watercolors of the life of Christ, and Gustave Doré's Bible illustrations reached ordinary households by the tens of thousands.

In Denmark, Carl Bloch painted the Gospel cycle for the chapel at Frederiksborg Castle that would be reproduced in Sunday-school rooms for a century. If you went to Sunday school in this country, there is a fair chance one hung on the wall.

Why did painted scenes go out of style?

Two things happened in the twentieth century, and they pulled in opposite directions.

The first was mass reproduction. Warner Sallman's Head of Christ, painted in 1940, became one of the most reproduced images ever made, printed on wallet cards, calendars, and church-basement walls. It comforted millions. Your grandmother may have had one.

It also taught serious painters and serious collectors to associate the painted Jesus with sentiment and low print quality, and much of what followed in the gift-shop market confirmed the association.

The second was that the most gifted modern artists who kept faith as a subject moved away from the readable scene, and how painters today paint Jesus himself still carries the marks of it.

Georges Rouault, a devout Catholic who had trained restoring stained glass, painted Christ in heavy black outlines and jewel colors, and his Miserere prints are among the century's great religious works, but they are closer to icons than to narrative.

Marc Chagall, who was Jewish, painted biblical subjects all his life, including the White Crucifixion of 1938, and filled churches and synagogues with stained glass; the work is unmistakably scriptural and unmistakably not a scene you could step into. Mark Rothko's chapel in Houston holds fourteen dark canvases and no figure at all.

By the second half of the century the split was set. Abstraction was serious art; the painted scene was something you bought at a Christian bookstore. Churches built in those decades were mostly plain, and homes followed.

So why are they coming back?

Because people want an image that tells the story, not a slogan. A verse print tells you what to think about; a painted scene shows you the moment and lets you stand in it, which is the difference between verse art and scene art. When you look at Peter sinking and a hand reaching down, nobody is telling you to trust. You are watching a man learn to.

Because homes changed. Twenty years of neutral walls, natural wood and fewer objects have left most living rooms with one open wall and an appetite for something on it. A wall of small typographic prints starts to feel like the noticeboard at church. One strong painted piece, calm and clear, does the work of the whole wall.

And because the printing finally caught up with the taste. Putting a painting onto canvas used to mean muddy color and a plasticky surface. Archival pigment printing on matte canvas now holds texture, depth and light, so a single image can live in a hundred homes without looking like a poster.

What should I look for before buying contemporary Christian art?

Start with light. Nearly every Christian painting that has lasted is, at bottom, a painting about light: where it falls, what it reveals, who is standing in it. If a piece has no clear source of light, it will look flat on your wall no matter how good the color is.

Then check that the subject reads at a distance. Hold your phone at arm's length or squint at the thumbnail. If you can still tell what is happening, it will work from the kitchen doorway. If it turns into mid-toned mush, it will do the same at six feet.

Ask what you are actually buying. An original, a fine print and a design assembled from stock elements are three different things, and they should not be priced the same. A studio that made the painting should be able to tell you who painted it and which passage it comes from.

Finally, ask how it is printed and stretched. Matte canvas avoids glare under lamps. A solid wood stretcher will not warp. Ask whether the sides are printed or left plain, and whether a frame is available if you want one. Dull questions, and they decide whether the piece still looks right in ten years.

How does Mercy & Light do it?

We make scenes from Scripture and print them to order. Each artwork is our own image of a Gospel moment, made to be looked at from a sofa on an ordinary Tuesday rather than from a pew on a feast day.

The palette is kept quiet so the piece sits well in a modern room; the subject is kept clear so you never have to explain it.

In His Presence is a portrait of Jesus with a steady gaze and gentle light. We paired it with his own invitation: "Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest" (Matthew 11:28, KJV). It belongs where you pray or where you read.

Above the Waves takes the storm on the lake from Matthew 14, the night Jesus came walking toward the boat across a restless sea. Matthew records his words to the frightened disciples: "Be of good cheer; it is I; be not afraid" (Matthew 14:27, KJV).

The painting takes the moment before he reaches them, when the sea is still rough and the figure is still approaching. That is where most of us spend our time.

Every piece is printed on matte cotton-polyester canvas over a pine stretcher, made to order in the US, frameless or in a natural or black pine frame, in six sizes from 8x12 to 30x40 inches. You can see the full set of painted scenes in our contemporary Christian art collection.

What is it like to have one on the wall?

The case for a painted Gospel scene in a home is not about art history or decorating. It is that you will walk past it several times a day. A verse on the wall becomes wallpaper within a month; a face, a boat, a hand in the water keeps catching you off guard on the way to the laundry.

John says of Christ that "the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us" (John 1:14, KJV).

Many readers see in that the whole warrant for Christian painting: a faith that arrived as a person and a story can be pictured, and the picture can dwell among us too, over a sofa, at the end of a hall, beside the bed where the day begins.

Frequently asked

What counts as contemporary Christian art?

Any art made in our own time that takes Christian faith as its subject: Scripture, Christ, the church, the life of prayer. Verse prints, abstract panels and painted scenes all count. The word describes when it was made, not how it looks, so a painting of Jesus on the water finished this year is as contemporary as a gold abstract.

Is modern Christian art appropriate for a church or a home?

Both, though the best choice differs. A church wants larger, more formal, often more symbolic work that serves a whole congregation for decades. A home wants something you can live with at close range: calmer color, a readable subject, a size that fits the wall. A moderate-size painted scene suits a living room, a fellowship hall or a pastor's office.

Is printed canvas "real art"?

A printed canvas is a print, and it is honest to call it that. The artwork is made once; the print carries its color, texture and light onto canvas so that many homes can have it.

It is not the original and should not be sold as one. It is not a poster either: printed on matte canvas over a wood stretcher, from a real painting, it will hold up for years.

What is the difference between minimalist Christian art and painterly scene art?

Minimalist pieces use type and simple symbols and rely on your memory of the verse. A painted scene shows the moment itself: a figure, a place, a source of light. The first suits small spaces and groupings, a kitchen or a stairwell; the second is built to carry a wall on its own.

Passages cited: Matthew 11:28; Matthew 14:27; John 1:14