The Discipline of Looking
In the middle of a conversation, Fr. Iain is struck by the color of the late-afternoon light outside a window. The shade of someone’s jacket, the pattern of shadows on the snow, or the face of an old woman waiting on a city street corner, bring him up short. He doesn’t just notice these things; he gives them his full attention; he takes pleasure in them and invites others to share his enjoyment.

Whatever Fr. Iain is doing, painting is just under the surface. “I never leave it,” he says. Often, he finds time for his own painting after evening prayer, when he gets a cup of coffee and returns to his studio. Everything he does feeds his compositions—going for an early morning run, arranging flowers for the Abbey Church, picking up a van load of Iranian tribal rugs for an exhibit, scouting New York galleries, even saying Mass.

He is passionate about art and about his main subject, the figure. “The human figure in nature is one of the most astounding creations in the world, the most elusive beauty there is,” he says. “With the figure, you’re really getting to the beauty of human existence.” For him, painting is a profoundly meditative religious practice: “a poetic interchange in which a human being discovers truths about oneself, and the powers outside oneself, that won’t be discovered any other way. It’s really a sacred sharing, a true epiphany. It needs to be handled in a sacred manner, with the greatest skill and delicacy, so the beauty will come through.”

If he’s seen as a taskmaster—insisting on his students’ best efforts—it is because he wants to instill the same kind of reverence in them. Learning an artistic discipline, he says, is like going through the skinny part of a trumpet, before the sound comes out right. “You have to pass through the discipline, but be brilliant enough to contradict that through careful acquisition of artistic skill. You follow the rules, but your own hand is there, and no one else’s is like it.”

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