Homeowners find divine inspiration in religious art
By MARY VUONG Copyright 2009 Houston Chronicle
Jan. 16, 2009, 2:03PM
Pam Pierce finds it in a collection of religious art. As an interior designer, Pierce works with color and pattern. When it’s time to head home, she wants a place that’s neutral and tranquil.
She began collecting religious art after her husband gave her a santo, a statue of a saint, which she found had a calming effect.
Pierce is among a growing number of homeowners who are incorporating spiritual objects and images into their décor to bring a warm and soothing quality to their lives.
Houston antiques dealer John Holt has seen the trend grow. He opened his Montrose shop, which specializes in religious pieces from Spain and France, 20 years ago. Back then, he recalls, many Catholic customers came by looking for things that fell in line with their beliefs. But as interest in Mediterranean-style homes increased, so did the number of people seeking religious artifacts for decorative, not devout, reasons. Now John Holt Antiques caters to a mixed clientele.
“Some people like comfort food; I happen to like comfort art,” Sallie Ann Hart tells photographer Peter Vitale in his new book The Divine Home (Clarkson Potter, $60). The Houston homes of Hart, Pierce and Carol Glasser are among 30 featured.
Vitale lives in Santa Fe, N.M., where he says religious artifacts — mostly Catholic — can be found almost everywhere you look. It’s a natural fit for the Southwest, given its proximity to Mexico, where religious icons are abundant.
People used to think some of these items were stolen from churches, Vitale says, not realizing that priests and private homeowners did, in fact, sell them. “Most people’s collections are perfectly legit,” Vitale says.
Nearly all of the homeowners that he interviewed collect for aesthetic, not religious, reasons.
“I look at the pieces as art,” Pierce told the Chronicle. “I tire easily of paintings.” She says the santos provide dimension, texture and structure to her 1920s home in the Museum District.
Glasser’s River Oaks home was Georgian with Spanish colonial bones, decorated in shades of red, peach and teal. She has moved to another house with a lighter, paler palette, but says the religious art fits in just as well there. Her favorite pieces are two angels she bought in Dallas years ago, when she was in her 20s.
“I have to use antiques when I decorate because they give that sense of history and character,” Glasser says.
Hart was raised Catholic but does not consider herself devout. “I just respect and enjoy my faith,” she says. The dining room of her River Oaks home is painted red, with a striking wall of South American primitive crosses, an Italian gilt tabernacle and a wrought-iron votive holder for 60 candles.
“Art is something that gracefully comes off the wall and speaks to you or it doesn’t,” Hart says. “I just get this feeling of being uplifted.”
Hart says her collection seems more at home in Houston than it did in a former Washington, D.C., residence, where people would question her choice of art. Houston antique shops tend to carry more religious items than those in her East Coast hometown, she adds.
Holt, the antiques dealer, also collects for home décor. “I have an apartment full of stuff. It looks like a church,” he says. Like Pierce, he finds his collection comforting.
Of course, for some homeowners, religious imagery is more than art.
Motivated by their faith, Dr. Louis Varela and his wife, Alicia, of Spring wanted to find a way to glorify God in their new, custom home. They commissioned the artists at Imago Dei to create larger-than-life murals above the front door, on the living-room ceiling and on a dome above the staircase.
The dome mural, painted in trompe l’oeil style, required scaffolding, 300 tiny paintbrushes and a crew of eight artists. It took three months to complete.
The Varelas, who belong to St. Ignatius Loyola Catholic Church, also built a private chapel with a suite for visiting priests and a meditation garden. The water fountain awaits a statue of St. Michael the Archangel.
For them, Alicia says, it’s about “keeping in mind that we have been blessed.”
At Imago Dei, presidents Jeremy and Jamie Wells and their team of artists create custom murals, faux finishes, fine art and public works.
While most of their business is secular, Jeremy says in the last five years, more homeowners have started commissioning religious pieces. He attributes that rise to business growth and an increasing tolerance of all faiths.
“I think in general there’s more acceptance,” he says.
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