Fr. Gregory Havill in classroom

Artist in the Abbey. To complete this year’s series on “Artists of the Abbey,” we look within the monastic community itself. Father Gregory Havill took his Solemn Vows to enter the community at Portsmouth in 2006, having attained a successful academic and professional career as an artist working in a variety of media. He identifies an array of influences and experiences in his life that shaped his path, both as an artist and as a monk. These two dimensions seem to him to be held together seamlessly in a kind of synthesis, a life that has consistently been informed by an awareness of the presence of God. While one might label Gregory a “late vocation,” the thought of a priestly vocation crossed his young mind in childhood, with the reception of his First Holy Communion. “My First Holy Communion was a pivotal event for me. I was seven years old and in second grade and like the rest of my class, understood very well what was happening. Our education was superb. Every child anticipated first Confession and Communion with excitement. It left me in a state of exaltation. I can still recall the aroma of the pages in the prayer book we were given. It brings me right back. It was at this time I resolved to become a priest.” It took a fairly direct inquiry from Our Lady some ten years after his Solemn Vows at Portsmouth, while on pilgrimage to Lourdes, to prompt him to “seal the deal” and extend his consecrated life into the ordained life. This he did in 2015.  

 

 

Gregory with a childhood neighbor

Early Influences. Dom Gregory was raised in the northern Midwest, moving as a child from Minneapolis to a home on Butternut Lake in northern Wisconsin: “In the grandeur of the north woods and the high drama of the seasons they instilled in me and my sisters a deep sense of security, adventure and wonder, combined with a sensible attitude toward life’s priorities. For us children it was an idyllic upbringing. My sisters and I still agree that it was a unique and marvelous childhood.” His father was a multi-talented craftsman, particularly skilled at carpentry, developing a profitable cabinetry and shelving business. We find here the roots of Gregory’s multi-faceted talents, as his father, “installed plumbing, electricity, paneling, insulation, and a new roof. And with incredible patience he taught me these crafts. We even dug a basement and put the building on a foundation.” His family was active in the Catholic faith, his mother shaped by a “fervent French-Canadian Catholic soul,” harbored within a “sarcastic Swedish façade." His father, at his mother’s prompting, became a Catholic convert, from Methodism. The family would host priests on their property, as a kind of northern wilderness retreat. The woods became part of the fabric of his young life. With “long days off in the forests with my dogs hunting or exploring,” he, “began to experience moments of deepest silence.” This brought a sense of God that has remained: “I understood from the beginning that this Presence was the Lord. It was also clear to me that this was a kind of prayer.” 

 

 

Fr. Gregory teaching outside the McGuire Art Building

Journey to Monastic Life. His “vocational” journey - and here we may well integrate the secular and sacred senses of the word - passed through Brunnerdale seminary, seeking clarity in his vocation, and not finding it leading him at that time to become a parish priest. He entered high school and later attained a degree in Fine Arts from Beloit College, then on to the University of Wisconsin and later Michigan State. He was encouraged by his father to pursue a career as sculptor, and is grateful for that prompting. He would later teach sculpture and drawing at Humboldt State University in California, Alma College in Michigan and Southern Connecticut University. His personal journey through these years included married life as a husband and a father, years he describes as containing “very difficult, sometimes tragic circumstances.” He learned of the “Oblates of St. Benedict” at St. Procopius Abbey in Illinois and first became an oblate there, feeling drawn deeply to the Divine Office. He later transferred his oblation to Regina Laudis Abbey in Connecticut, where he restored a colonial blacksmith shop on the abbey’s grounds, working in the shop for 21 years: “I taught a long list of ironworking students including two of the nuns. I came to know monastic life very well.” It was here that his monastic vocation clarified: “My youngest child had just married and moved away. I had recently been granted an annulment.” In 1996, he felt prompted, he says, while warming a sandwich in the microwave, to “Go to Portsmouth!” This developed into a vocation that led him into consecrated life as a Benedictine, and later at the inquiry of Our Lady, to priestly ordination. Fr. Gregory serves as the School’s chaplain, which keeps him in touch with the students, maintaining an office near the student mailboxes and regularly beginning school assemblies with prayer. He retired from teaching after more than a half-century in the classroom, though he maintains that role in the novitiate and in assisting with other religious communities. He looks back fondly on his 14 years helping lead school trips to Rome, instructing the students in drawing and joining visits to sacred sites of the church, including those dear to the Benedictines. 

His Work. Gregory Havill’s opus is too extensive and varied to allow for comprehensive discussion in this brief article. We will have to settle for a summary discussion of a few specific pieces, as indicative of some of what is behind his artistic work. 

 

 

Christ Crucified, 27” high

Christ Crucified. One of his more striking works is an unusual depiction of Christ crucified with a muscular, powerful corpus. Having been commissioned to do a crucifix for a Congregational Church, Fr. Gregory sought a figure for Christ that avoided conveying two problematic directions artists have taken to capture the image. On the one hand, Christ’s body is envisioned as entirely physically destroyed, overwhelmed in the crucifixion. On the other hand, Christ may seem to transcend the physicality of the cross, almost as if he is posed in front of the cross rather than on it. Gregory sought to capture both Christ as victim, yet also as one who wills these events. The unusual image found an equally unusual inspiration: Gregory drew on his personal experience with weightlifting, in fact finding his concept while watching a competition on television, observing the “snatch” weightlifting move. 

 

 

Santa Lucia (30” square)

Santa Lucia. Fr. Gregory created a four-part series of virgin martyrs for Regina Laudis Abbey in Connecticut. The set depicted Lucia, Agnes, Agatha, and Cecilia with “rather large” (30”) low-relief works. Each work contains a “surprise”: “I really enjoyed doing those,” Fr. Gregory notes with a smile. The surprise “hidden” in the Lucia image is that while she seems to be looking at you, those who know of her martyrdom may realize that her eyes have been gouged out. This has been depicted in various ways in the history of art, such as with her eyes on a plate or held in her hands. Here, the low-relief gives the possibility of the use of shadow, leaving the impression that her look lingers, and one does not immediately notice that her eyes are missing. 

Stations of the Cross. A set of the Stations of the Cross for a church in Connecticut also employs the technique of low-relief, one of Father Gregory’s specialties. He notes that it is in effect a kind of drawing, able to utilize the play of light and shadow. “It requires a skill that is difficult to teach,” he remarks, and unlike other techniques he typically found that he could only have students observe him to learn what he was up to. Lighting is crucial for these works, and “a raking light in a darkened church works much more effectively” than direct lighting, a factor he notes has often been neglected in the positioning and lighting of many works of art. The depth of low-relief can be quite small: “There is only 1/60^th of an inch difference in places.” The inspiration for this set of Stations came over one calendar year, with the images based on various photographs and other images. Two of these were actually Vietnam War era pictures of soldiers. A photograph of a soldier being carried by a medic provided the inspiration for Christ being carried down from the cross. In another, a Vietnamese soldier being stripped and subsequently tortured produced a connection to passion of Christ being stripped for the cross. 

This series of stations were not produced in sequential order, but through a gradual inspiration, as Fr. Gregory was getting to know the subject to be portrayed, “through daily experience and through prayer.” Christ falling for the third time was from an entirely different and perhaps unexpected image. Fr. Gregory encountered a photo of a rodeo cowboy thrown from a bucking bronco. He was shocked to see “a big tough guy just flopping like that.” This visual image evoked Christ falling with his cross, a striking image, in which the body of Christ is covered with cloth drapery. Fr. Gregory stresses here the importance of composition in drawing, that producing the totality of an image is of paramount importance. This became an important aspect of his teaching. The use of drapery is a common element in achieving the overall feel of a piece, as can be seen for example in the images of the Annunciation. “Is the drapery relaxing or upsetting?” he asks. These are intentional decisions to elicit meaning in the images, and he calls the drapery “the subconscious of the work.” In his depiction of Christ falling for the third time, much of Christ’s body is covered. There is nothing elegant in the image. He notes that the upside-down face is not peaceful, and the background is of rough clay, a kind of visual “background noise” that is meant to be unpolished. 

Saint Benedict. Fr. Gregory relates that a bust of Saint Benedict was actually done in connection with a portrait sculpture commissioned by a Detroit physician while he was at Alma College in Michigan. Fr. Gregory notes that he has always pictured Saint Benedict in his own imagination quite differently from traditional portrayals, indeed his personal sense of the saint was framed largely before Gregory became a Benedictine monk. Here, in these busts of Benedict, Gregory does not visualize the saint with a beard. Also, he describes the inspiration in creating this work as indirect and somewhat unanticipated. The process of producing a portrait of a subject requires the subject’s periodic approval of the various stages in the creation of the work. As the work’s gradual approval by the Detroit physician was progressing, its approval by the subject coincided with an awareness in Gregory that, for him, the image he was producing did not in fact simply depict the sponsor, but expressed a latent vision he harbored of Saint Benedict.  

The monastery website offers more extended autobiographical information from Fr. Gregory. The website also includes a slideshow of more of his works.