Padre and Painter
The 49-year-old monk from Tewksbury, Mass., has worked in the Alva deMars Megan Chapel Art Center for seven years, as director for the last four. While he didn’t set out to become an artist or a priest, there were early harbingers of both careers. When his high school staged Don Quixote, the young J. Grant MacLellan was assigned the role of the Padre. Art was not part of his early schooling, but when he and two classmates had to paint a matador scene on the classroom window, he gladly did all the work.

Nurture and nature were equally strong currents in this artist’s development. Both parents had an appreciation for aesthetics and encouraged their children’s creativity. Allan MacLellan was an imaginative entrepreneur who was constantly developing new products and materials used in his businesses, and Virginia MacLellan’s keen sense of beauty was a constant in family life. She had a vision for every family celebration; to carry it out, she rented paintings from the library and borrowed mantelpiece decorations from neighbors and relatives. An artistic vein runs deep in the clan, producing a professional decorator, a budding architect, and relations whose talents run the gamut from antique collecting to dress making.

“The idea of beauty hasn’t been forgotten, but it has been lost to some degree. It’s very undermined in our culture today,” Fr. Iain says, sitting in his sunny office behind the gallery. “The frenetic pace of life today means there is less time to do things well. Beauty is forgotten because of the demand to perform in so many other ways, and we forget that these details make a difference. A lot of the reverence is gone; there’s even a cynicism about beauty, a trivializing of it in our society.” The chores he was assigned growing up—sanding and painting shutters, gathering greens, polishing silver, even washing the car and mowing the lawn—“That stuff was all art. I loved doing those things.”

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8