Isaac Scharbach ’21
Ashes Like Bread
On View: April 28-May 5, 2021
It is hard to express what a lovely human Isaac was and what a joy he brought to the art department and my classes. Isaac was a deep thinker with a kind heart who had an astounding ability to coax paint and words into subtle but profound existence. I met Isaac for the first time over three years ago now. In that time, I observed his care for his family, friends, passion for art and dedication to his faith. I remember his generosity, sense of humor and the way he lightened up class critiques and supported his classmates. In his death, I have only become more aware of the amount of people he was able to touch and inspire in his short life. I am only now starting to understand the impact Isaac had on me and I count myself lucky to carry his memory on in every class I teach. Last semester, Isaac wrote a final artist statement that concluded his Junior portfolio. His words speak with clarity beyond his years that left me speechless at the time and now seems even more profound. – Katie St. Clair, Assistant Professor of Art
“I wake up at 5 in the morning. The stars are still out, but a cold shower drives out the drowsiness and builds fortifications against the cold morning. Despite these inconveniences, before the sunrise the light is right, and I can be with what I’m painting. Someone more skilled could probably paint the same thing from a photograph and probably a lot quicker too. But maybe there is some value to the endurance actually being there requires. It forces you inward to think, about yourself, the outside world, mortality, reality, consciousness, nature, history, time, philosophy, nothing at all.
Because I paint from life, subject matter is limited, and I must find depth and dignity within the things around me, the humble and the common. A tree is something so simple, but it is also a mystery, like all life. When a single leaf dies, something has died more intricate than anything humanity has created. Its quiet passing reminds us that all things will pass, that all things must return to their creator, that we too are dust. Last summer I broke my wrist for the third time. Previously I had thought I was young enough that I could heal from anything, but my wrist will never be the same again. My body has already begun to decay. Every breath is a reminder that one day I breathe no more.
Often when I paint is when I feel so utterly human. My inability and weakness are deafening. When I visited the Carrera marble quarries in Italy, the guide said that those mountains weren’t always there. And one day they will be gone and there will be new mountains. The lifespan of a mountain is something almost incomprehensible in human time. How much more incomprehensible is eternity? How can my imperfect eyes and imperfect hand with art doomed to be imperfect approach a perfect and eternal God?
Often my best efforts find no success. But painting itself by longing for perfection, longs for God. It seems that it is from this very longing that creation draws its dignity. It is with this joyful hope that the sun rises, and the birds sing, and when dawn finally spreads over the hills my shift is over.”
Ashes Like Bread, 2019
Oil and oil pastel
Getting out of the covers at five in the morning to brave the cold outside is one of the hardest things I do in a day, but seeing the sun rise after a session painting in the dark is among the most beautiful. Afterward I go sit in a comfy chair, thaw my fingers around a warm mug of coffee and say morning prayer. No matter the successes or failures I encounter while painting, these things stay the same.
Waiting for Morning, 2020
Oil on canvas
These photons of light bouncing off the water come from thousands of lightyears away, giving an image of the universe as it was long before man’s short life was raised from the dust. Much of my work has an emphasis on the interplay of shadow and light. But what is the difference between the shadow cast by a streetlight and the shadow cast by the moon? And what does it mean for the human figure caught in between, fading in and out of the darkness?
Landscape In Darkness, 2020
Oil on canvas
I have always treasured these moments of solitude. I grew up in Baltimore city. Baltimore was not a quiet place. I would fall asleep to the roar of traffic, a helicopter searchlight flashing through my window, and shouts echoing in the streets. But I found quiet on the roof of our little house. It wasn’t much, only three stories up, but it was three stories further from the restless din in the streets, three stories closer to the sky. Then I moved to the country north of Baltimore. On cloudy nights in the city the sky glowed orange, reflecting the sleepless lights. On clear nights, if I was lucky I could pick out one or two stars. But in the country, the infinite milky way spilled across the sky. The nights had the quiet of frogs croaking way down by the stream and cicadas chirping. And I could walk through the woods to that stream, careful with bare feet over the twigs. Here there was rest in the shadow under the hill, but in the eddies of the water I could make out the reflection of the stars. The smaller ones flashed for a moment and were gone, but the brighter ones flickered like a candle before a shrine.
Things around me 1 and 2, 2018
Oil on wood
Because I paint from life I am forced into my surroundings and subject matter is very limited. Similarly, I must find depth and dignity within the things around me, the humble and the common. It is this very commonality that gives the things I choose to paint meaning. The fact that the way the light works that I am looking at is the same as it works everywhere else in the world invites me to speculation of what else is universal.
Liturgy of the Hours, 2019
Oil and oil pastel on canvas
The Liturgy of the Hours is an ancient form of prayer consisting mostly of readings from scripture that change with the days and seasons. Its purpose was to give structure to the lives of priests, monks, and nuns. I rarely start a day of work without saying morning prayer, and it fits into my routine of art making.
Sun’s Hour of Rest, 2020
Oil on canvas
Since studying his Metaphysics freshman year, I have been fascinated with the philosophy of Aristotle. In a culture that honored the Olympian gods, Aristotle wrote of a one God who orders the whole universe. He observed the great beauty and order of the cosmos from the littlest plant to the movement of the stars. He believed that this order arose from the striving of all things to be perfect like God is perfect. Aristotle predates Christianity by 400 years, but these two worldviews closely align. The Psalmist of the Bible writes, “As a deer longs for running streams, so longs my soul for you, my God.” (Ps 42:1) and “The heavens are telling the glory of God and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.” (Ps. 19:1) Through the Fall, the world was separated from God. The death of Jesus paved the way back to God and all creation longs for the day it will be reunited with him. With the advent of Postmodernism came the rejection of grand theories that sought to explain the world. I don’t see it as something grand. It is my own struggle and simple hope.
Absence of a Chair, 2020
Oil on canvas
When I stayed in Cyprus last summer I spent a lot of time with a baker named Angelos. I worked with him on the little house he was building for his family and helped him deliver bread. Angelos was also a teacher of Byzantine chant and sung in church almost every day. Byzantine chant is sung in Ancient Greek and uses a musical notation that predates the Western use of staves and note heads. The chant is peaceful and of an otherworldly beauty. Its purpose is to lift the soul up to the beauty of God. Driving back from Azule this past semester I found out that a well-known prayer to me, the Phos Hilaron, is the earliest known Christian hymn. I read it in the original Greek text and its beauty shook me to the core.
Phos Hilaron
Hail Gladdening Light
Of His pure glory poured
Who is the Immortal Father, Heavenly Blest
Holiest of Holies, Jesus Christ our Lord
Now we are come to the sun’s hour of rest
The lights of evening ’round us shine
We hymn the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit Divine
Worthiest art Though, at all times to be sung
With undefiled tongue
Son of our God, Giver of life alone
Therefore, in all the world Thy glories Lord
Thine own
Batter My Heart, 2018
Oil and spray paint on canvas
Poetry has a lot of beauty in its striving for order in meter and rhyme and feels very connected to my art practice. I think a lot of John Donne’s Sonnet “Batter My Heart.” He writes, “Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend, / But is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue. / Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov’d fain, / But am betroth’d unto your enemy.” So much of human existence is a contradiction against which reason is little defense. We want and don’t want. We love, but our betrothed through vice to our lover’s enemy. I have also had on my mind recently the poetry of Robert Burns and Ben Jonson.
World Bound By Time, 2019
Oil and oil pastel on canvas
Abakanowicz writes, “To make something more durable than myself would add to the imperishable rubbish heaps of human ambitions.” She wants what she creates to share her mortality. She asks, “How to give vent to this innate defeat of life other than by turning a lasting thought into a perishable material?” Impermanence, mortality itself is a mark of life. You cannot die unless you have lived. This gives hope to the artist whose work is doomed for imperfection: there is value in the struggle itself.
Easter Vigil, 2020
Cedar
The Church year begins with Advent in December or November and continues through the months following the life of Christ. This structuring of the year inevitably has influence on my work. Since high school I have wanted to do a work focused on the feeling of Advent, of waiting for God, and I have finally found a way to do that. The Easter Vigil is the most beautiful liturgy of the Church year. It begins on Saturday night before Easter with the lighting of the Paschal flame outside, which is carried on the Paschal candle into the dark church. The Easter Exsultet is a hymn sung only at this moment in the entire year. Following the salvation of God through history reaching its epitome in the death of Jesus, it proclaims, “O truly necessary sin of Adam, destroyed completely by the Death of Christ! O happy fault that earned so great, so glorious a Redeemer.” Made around the same time, my most recent sculpture was heavily influenced by the beauty of the Easter Vigil.
Isolation, 2020
Oil on canvas
While in Cyprus last summer I had the opportunity to visit with several iconographers. I asked many of them how they prayed while they worked, and each responded it was with the “Jesus Prayer.” The Jesus Prayer is an ancient prayer vigorously practiced in monasteries consisting of the continual recitation of the words, “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.” It is fulfillment of the exhortation of the Bible to pray constantly, and orienting the mind and heart toward Jesus, makes the most menial work and act of service to God.