{"id":2598,"date":"2007-03-12T14:36:58","date_gmt":"2007-03-12T14:36:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2007\/03\/speaking-of-art.html"},"modified":"2007-03-12T14:36:58","modified_gmt":"2007-03-12T14:36:58","slug":"speaking-of-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/03\/speaking-of-art.html","title":{"rendered":"Speaking of Art"},"content":{"rendered":"

Painting Cardinals:<\/a><\/p>\n

\n
\n

When New York artist Alex Melamid<\/a> watched the funeral of Pope John Paul II on TV in 2005, he was struck by the way the cardinals all looked the same — as iconic dignitaries in red vestments.<\/p>\n

This year, Melamid has set up his easel in Rome. He is hoping to get below the surface image of cardinals and other church figures by painting their portraits.<\/p>\n

"Cardinals should be seen as individuals. I think they have something to communicate, and that’s what I want to capture in my art," Melamid said.<\/p>\n

On an afternoon in late February, Melamid was working in his studio on a portrait of Portuguese Cardinal Jose Saraiva Martins. The cardinal sat on a wooden chair, wearing scarlet robes and a gold and ivory pectoral cross.<\/span><\/p>\n

snip<\/em><\/p>\n

A native of Russia, Melamid emigrated to Israel and then the United States in 1978, where he and a colleague developed a form of conceptual art that took provocative aim at Soviet realism.<\/p>\n

More recently, he gained attention when he taught elephants how to paint, in a nonprofit venture that funds a save-the-elephant program in Thailand.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Painting Cardinals: When New York artist Alex Melamid watched the funeral of Pope John Paul II on TV in 2005, he was struck by the way the cardinals all looked the same — as iconic dignitaries in red vestments. This year, Melamid has set up his easel in Rome. He is hoping to get below…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2598","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nSpeaking of Art - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/03\/speaking-of-art.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Speaking of Art - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Painting Cardinals: When New York artist Alex Melamid watched the funeral of Pope John Paul II on TV in 2005, he was struck by the way the cardinals all looked the same — as iconic dignitaries in red vestments. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2598","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2598"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2598\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2598"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2598"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2598"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}