Sacred and Religious Art Still Matter: Where Faith Meets Contemporary Art
- Jacqueline Gilvard Landry
- 8 minutes ago
- 5 min read
In the second installment of our series on sacred and religious artists, the Denver couple reflects on vocation, marriage and creating beauty for God.
As a graduate student in theology at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome, Mark Thomason bought himself some brushes. He combed the Italian streets, looking for anything he could paint on, often rough scraps of wood he found outside workshops. He loved to create from his tiny room at the St. Cosmas and Damian church monastery, which was so crammed with art and supplies, he had to stand up his small mattress so he could paint.
His now-wife, Nicole Thomason, also an artist and theology student in Rome at the time, was seeking a way to reconcile the secular and the divine in her vision of the universal Church.
Both Mark and Nicole had always been artists, and both grew up Catholic — Mark in Denver and Nicole in Minnesota. They met as students at Franciscan University of Steubenville in Ohio, and both took advantage of the school’s semester abroad program in Italy during their final semester.
They married in 2007 and officially established Thomason Arts in 2010, which sells their original artwork, with subjects ranging from saints to events in Sacred Scripture and Church history.
“As contemporary artists who are Catholic, we’ve been drawn to create sacred and religious artwork over the years,” Nicole said.
Along with their Catholic art, Nicole and Mark paint and draw subjects like bunnies, horses and buffalo.
“It’s very nature-driven, because God is the great creator,” Nicole explained.
The couple has five sons — Mark calls them their greatest collaboration — ages 8 to 16. They have two studios, one in downtown Denver and the other at their home. They host and participate in local shows and sell in some retail spaces. Their work is also displayed in churches, private chapels, and homes.
‘Messy’ art, like life
The Thomasons, whose home parish is the Cathedral Basilica of the Immaculate Conception in Denver, like to think of their contemporary art as “messy” because “life is messy,” Mark said.
However, that poses challenges in bridging the gap between the secular and the religious.
“The art world and the Catholic world are very fickle on both sides,” Mark said. “Sometimes our secular stuff is too secular for Catholics, and our Catholic stuff is too Catholic for secular people, so it’s this constant dialogue.”
“It’s a real dichotomy that challenges people. Because we’re artists who are Catholic, it’s a means of evangelization … because we’re in the secular world as well as the Catholic world,” Nicole added.
People grow, and subjects change
From graduating with their theology degrees to now, both Thomasons said their art is constantly evolving.
“If you’re growing in your holiness, the art is going to grow as well,” Nicole said. “You’re going to change and work with the Lord in the body of work that you’re doing.”
For instance, Nicole has switched gears from her prior watercolor series and is now creating a series of saints that also employs charcoal.
For his part, Mark once rejected the Western art that drew on his Colorado roots as a “cliché for a postcard,” but he realized that “God has me here in this time and this place … so painting a picture of a saint is not in conflict with painting a buffalo. Both those things are who I am,” he said.
Today, Mark, who works for a construction company, said he is working on some old window frames with stretched canvas and a new series of saints, with St. Philip currently on the easel.
Nicole, a K-8 art teacher at St. Vincent de Paul Catholic School in Denver, is putting together an art curriculum for Catholic students.
Praying for guidance
Uniting the secular and Catholic worlds was a struggle for Nicole before she read and prayed on St. John Paul II’s 1999 “Letter to Artists” in graduate school, which she said was pivotal in both her academic and spiritual careers.
“I realized there’s such a profound connection between the life that we live and the world that we live in to the spiritual,” Nicole said.
That’s part of the reason the Thomasons pray over their work and ask the saints for their guidance.
“Honestly, they speak to you. They call us before we call them,” Nicole explained.
Mark said he asks the saints, “How do you want me to tell your story in a different way that’s not a documentary or a photo,” trying to capture their emotion and essence instead.
“We’ve cleaned up the saints too much. I wanted to make them dirty and messy. Life is hard,” Mark said.
His subjects include unknown Western or American saints and holy men and women, such as St. Frances Cabrini, Servant of God Julia Greeley, and Servant of God Leo Heinrichs, among others, to increase the faithful’s devotion to these potential saints-to-be.
Projects yet to be created
Both Thomasons said their favorite projects are those they haven’t done yet. They’re always eager to discover a new creation, but some stand out.
For Mark, it was his little 4x4 watercolor-on-paper landscapes — diverging from his usual style — that a good friend had to have.
“I love that he wanted these because he saw that I pushed myself, and they are a part of me,” he shared.
Nicole said her favorite experience has been working on her own art while her students work on theirs. She was creating a charcoal piece of St. Theresa of Calcutta, and the children were enthralled, she said, which allowed her to talk about both the artistic process and the saint’s life.
“It was beautiful, inspiring these beautiful little people with awe,” she recalled.
Inspiring awe is one of the things that drives the Thomasons, seeing the Holy Spirit at work in how they affect others.
Mark recalls a woman brought to tears by a fourth station of the cross he created with just the eyes of Mary and Jesus seeing each other, and Nicole remembers a woman who said she could not stop staring at a charcoal and gold lamb and dove piece Nicole had created.
“It touched her in her moment, in her time, in her space, in her story, in her hardship, in her joy to say, ‘I need this art piece in my home because it reminds me of the things I need to be reminded of in my faith in this life,’” Nicole said. “That’s the moment as an artist that you realize that’s why I do what I do.
“Being an artist is a vocation, a gift and a calling to be shared so others may be inspired in their faith, have an encounter with the divine and be drawn into beauty,” Nicole continued. “A quote I love and live by: ‘He is the beauty to which you are so attracted’ (WYD, Address of the Holy Father John Paul II, August 2000). Our marriage and partnership deepened and grew our passion for contributing to culture and community through our sacred and religious artwork,” Nicole said.
To see more, visit Thomason Arts at www.ThomasonArts.com.
