Painting is a place to express various parts of my psyche, parts of my inner self not exposed in daily life. Painting, like spirituality, is liberating.Father Jerome Tupa, O.S.B.
A native of North Dakota and Benedictine monk of Saint John's Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota, Father Jerome Tupa has spent more than fifty years painting the world's sacred landscapes, producing some of the most vibrant oil paintings in contemporary religious art.
Father Tupa's interest in art began at the University of North Dakota under professor Luella Raab Mundel. His doctoral studies in French Literature at the University of Paris (Sorbonne) deepened his vocation, and painting became inseparable from his scholarship.
His first show was at the Librarie St. Séverin in Paris, a modest debut that started a fifty-year career of increasingly ambitious work. While directing the French Studies program in Aix-en-Provence, he ran mornings below Mont Saint Victoire, Cézanne's landscape.
“I paint what I cannot say with words, the presence behind the landscape.”
He returned to Saint John's Abbey in 1982 to be ordained and receive his Master of Divinity, going on to serve 34 years as professor of French at Saint John's University. Monastic life and artistic life became one sustained discipline.
A pivotal 1987 sabbatical in Rome produced 35 new paintings. Then came the moment of breakthrough:
“I just made a high circle on the canvas. With one gigantic stroke, I moved into abstract painting.”
Father Jerome Tupa
Father Tupa in his studio at Saint John's Abbey, surrounded by fifty years of work
Father Tupa's pilgrimages through Italy, Spain, France, Greece, the Holy Land, Turkey, Syria, and Egypt produced hundreds of oils and watercolors charged with the energy of sacred encounter.
His Road to Rome series was exhibited at the Pope John Paul II Cultural Center in Washington D.C., one of the most notable venues for Catholic art in the United States.
“His art fuses in an original manner ancient and modern times, transcending time and space to reach an artistic, religious, and human universality.”Giancarlo Guarnieri, International Art Critic
His work has been shown at the Getty Center, the Minnesota Museum of Art, the Naples Philharmonic Museum, the National Museum of Catholic Art in New York, and Marshall Field's State Street Gallery in Chicago.
In 2025, Join the Pilgrimage opened at the Basilica of Saint Mary in Minneapolis.
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