There has been a fundamental change it the very way we look at created images. Modern Art has taught us to see paintings just as panels covered with color. Don’t bother searching for hidden messages. If a work of art expresses anything at all, it’s whatever preoccupied the artist, the day he or she stood in front of an easel. All is subjective, so concentrate on your own sensory experience. Make up the context. Be free in your interpretation. Whatever meaning you attach to a work of art is just as valid as any other.

As an aesthetic guideline for understanding the modern art scene, this theory works well enough. But what about art from earlier times, which clearly does have something to say? We can appreciate its color and composition. Maybe, even experience warm feelings for the artist. Yet, we often sense we are missing out on something significant. These works have stories they want to tell us. Hidden messages conveyed in signs and symbols for which we’ve lost the code book. We know an icon of Christ is not the same as a portrait by Van Gogh or Picasso. But why?

For most of the course of Western civilization, art was viewed with a different kind of eye. Images were more than just creative arrangements, which might or might not resemble the apple on your kitchen table. They pointed to universal truths, especially, the central narratives and teachings of Christianity. For many believers, images of the sacred served as windows to heaven—and still do in the Eastern Orthodox tradition. Unfortunately, these divine portals have closed for the majority of art lovers in our secular age. Is it possible to re-open them? Are there modern artists who have taken up the challenge?

This website is both the travel journal and “souvenir” collection of one modern art lover turned sacred art pilgrim, who set out on a journey ten years ago to rediscover this lost way of looking. It has taken me to the basilicas of Ravenna and the Pompidou Art Center in Paris, to the medieval cathedrals of England and the Coptic monasteries of Egypt, to concrete chapels by Le Corbusier and adobe pilgrim shrines in the American Southwest. What I have discovered along the way has intrigued, excited, and even moved me to make religious imagery of my own. Contrary to my expectations, there is sacred art worthy of attention from the modern era, (dating, here, from the turn of the 19th century). It is being made, even as you read these words.

The artists represented in the Sacred Art Pilgrim Collection come from every continent, from America and Australia, Ethiopia and Japan, Germany and Panama. Many are anonymous artisans. Some are familiar to you. There are creative greats of the modern era who have or, at one time, had a significant following, artists like Georges Rouault, Otto Dix, Lovis Corinth, Eric Gill, Jacques Villon, and Jean Charlot. Other names from the past like Frank Humphrey Allen, Karnig Nalbandian, and Miguel Deveze may be new to you. The inclusion of some, like Harry Anderson and Warner Sallman, may even surprise you.

It is sacred art-makers, alive and working today, whom I especially want you to meet. People of creative energy, genius, and faith whose names you may not know. Artists like Peter Howson, Edward Knippers, Rudolph Valentino Bostic, Charles Aldrich, Mike Vargas, Madelene Purdie, and many others, whose works you will find in my on-line galleries.

This is not a commercial website. The commentaries presented here have not been written with art historians or theologians in mind. They express my personal opinions and beliefs. Please consider them as the record of one pilgrim’s progress in recovering a sense of the majesty, meaning, and mystery of sacred art, something I’d like to share with other art lovers on similar quests. I invite you to pause, rest, enjoy, and reflect. Then, God speed you on your journeys!
John Alan Kohan