Christopher Alles, aged 33, is the father of five kids under the age of five, including triplet girls aged 2. So you might think he was describing his home life when he said it’s “everything everywhere all at once.”
But he was actually speaking about art and how to understand it.
“You have multiple things going on at the same time, and it takes a while to get comfortable managing them: Composition, representation, abstract form, the expressiveness of the character. You have to be juggling everything at the same time,” he said.
The New York-based sculptor sometimes feels the magnitude of that “everything everywhere all at once” task on a cosmic scale, especially when he’s carving; and it’s an experience he finds immensely satisfying.
“You’re taking something that’s meaningless and incoherent, and bringing order, separating things,” he said.
He describes forming a sculpted foot, first separating it from the base of the statue, then forming the front and sides of the foot like simple walls that gradually take on definition and meaning.
“It’s like God separating the land and the water. You’re making distinctions. Gradually things come together,” he said.
But if Alles shares in God’s creative process, he’s definitely not omniscient like God, or totally in control of what he’s making.
“As you go along, things change and emerge. You feel like you’re not in charge,” he said.
“It’s like God separating the land and the water. You’re making distinctions. Gradually things come together.”
There is a mysterious element to making art, and even as he proceeds along the thoughtful and laborious process from making sketches, to miniature clay figures, to full-size armatured clay sculptures, to mold, to final cast poured in resin and marble, he’s sometimes surprised at how various elements work themselves out.
Sculpture, an incarnational artform
He points to a recent secular commission, “Apollo and Daphne,” a startlingly explosive figurative piece that seems to fly out from a central point suspended in the air, rather than from the ground.
“The composition was just playing around. The sort of geometric form of angles and lines just sort of emerged; it was spontaneous,” he said.
It invites the viewer to feel, rather than just see, the tension between the energies of the covetous god and the hapless nymph, who becomes rooted in the earth as a tree to escape his assault.
But Alles focuses mainly on sacred art, and he recognizes that another thing that’s out of his control is what the viewer actually sees.
“It’s hard, as an artist, to see your own work in the way other people see it,” said Alles. “Other people read things into my work that I didn’t see.”
Alles recalls a statue of St. Joseph with the young Jesus. When he’s planning a new piece, he begins with a sketch, and then makes various versions in clay. His father-in-law pointed out that, in one iteration, it looks like Joseph is patting his foster son on the back affectionately; but at the same time, Jesus appears to be holding Joseph up. In one sketch, St. Joseph’s hand almost but not quite touches Jesus, and that tiny space between their bodies expresses a father protecting and guiding his son, while trying to give him space to learn and grow. In that gap is also, perhaps, the strange tension of being the mortal foster father and protector of the Son of God. Everything, everywhere, all at once, must be kept in balance.
Alles welcomes these unexpected interpretations of his work.
“The viewers kind of complete the work. The circuit is not fully activated until it’s viewed,” he said.
Yet another area of tension is finding the balance between the vision of the artist, and the desires of the person commissioning the piece — and this, too, affects how the final work emerges. In a statue of St. Clare, which Alles describes as being in almost a pyramid shape, it was through a lot of back and forth with clients that the final form of the statue emerged.
Sometimes the person who commissioned the work will say they want the figure to be holding something, but the artist has already designed it to be empty handed.
The viewer is primarily concerned with the subject matter, with what’s literally happening in the piece. But the artist must also take into account the form and the flow of the work.
“You can’t just swap elements in and out; you have to redesign,” Alles said. “There’s a bit of tension there.”
Ultimately, all art is abstract in some way, he said. Ideally, form and subject matter will inform each other simultaneously, and speak to the viewer in a language he can discern.
Alles said that sculpture continues to be a popular form of Catholic sacred art, especially in western churches, in part because it is intrinsically incarnational.
“It’s very tactile, very present,” he said.
Conveying spiritual truths in art
Sculptures are often designed as part of the church, part of the architecture, and so form and subject are uniquely united. They occupy space in a way that recalls how Christ, in his incarnation, occupied space. Sculpture, representing the human form in three dimensions, is a natural expression of the centrality of the Incarnation. It is a language viewers readily understand, at least on some level.
But if an artist were to simply replicate the human body with slavish accuracy, it would look all wrong. An artist who wishes to express a sense of presence must distort and exaggerate the human form in subtle ways, in order to make it convey something true.
“If a Greek statue came to life, we’d be horrified, because of the proportions. The back will be really big, and you can see the sides from the front, because when we see a real person, we’re interacting [with it] and moving. We have a way of seeing the person as a whole,” Alles said.
It’s a matter of finding the balance between subject matter and raw design, and also of understanding the audience who will perceive it.
Alles said that, when he begins a new work, he simply has to accept that he can only do his best with the skills he has.
“I remember going to the Met and seeing Reubens’ little preparatory sketches. There’s hardly any paint; you can feel the brushstrokes. It looks like he spent 20 minutes on it, but it’s unbelievable,” he said.
“The viewers … complete the work. The circuit is not fully activated until it’s viewed.”
An artist must simply strive after that greatness as best he can. The same is true when a sacred artist faces the monumental task of conveying spiritual truths.
“If you’re doing the work to the best of your ability, and also emulating those you admire, that’s the goal for making it worthy,” he said.
He compares his task to that of a carpenter making chairs for a church. If they are skillfully and cleanly done, that’s what makes them worthy, he said. It’s not as if a carpenter needs to make good chairs and then, as a separate concern, he needs to make spiritually worthy chairs.
“The concerns are still operating within the language of carpentry; that’s what makes it worthy. The two are not mutually exclusive. They are united,” he said.
Alles said that one of the challenges of an artist today is figuring out how to make good work that also speaks clearly to audiences who may have wildly disparate opinions, or maybe only vague ideas of what beauty and truth actually are. Modern audiences have been steeped in postmodern ideas of subjectivity and self expression, so an artist cannot lean on the assumption that they agree on what is beautiful or true, even in sacred art.
“It’s hard to both respond to the call [of the Church], but also understand what art is,” Alles said.
He wants to speak in a language people will understand, but he can’t assume there is much common ground to start from.
This struggle is not new.
“All artists struggle with that,” Alles said. “We’re all trying to figure out what art is.”
