Rare is the studio or an artist team that raises today’s religious art into the realm of the Renaissance Masters. Rarer still are these artists working together, a real brother-sister team.
Yet both cases are true about the devotional paintings, murals and altarpieces from Goretti Fine Art, founded by George Capps and Polly Capps Paule.
Their show-stopping paintings range from monumental size, such as the 5-by-6 feet Apotheosis of John Paul the Great; to remarkable renditions of familiar subjects such as in The Consecration of Carlo Acutis picturing the 8-year-old saint consecrating himself to our Blessed Mother; to outstanding events such as Maid of Orleans memorializing Joan of Arc’s heavenly and earthly vision, or La Prairie de la Messe, portraying Jesuit missionary Father Pierre-Jean De Smet celebrating the first public Mass in Wyoming territory in 1840 with reverent Indigenous attending.
In each of their works, the team surprises with new perspectives or emphases for familiar subjects. For instance, while St. Thérèse of Lisieux is usually pictured holding or dropping a small handful of roses, in Shower of Roses she is depicted letting fall a continuous flow of roses streaming from heaven to the earth as our Blessed Mother and many angels look on approvingly. As in all their paintings, George and Polly include details that recall important connections. Here, an angel holds the picture of the Holy Face of Jesus that was so dear to St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus and of the Holy Face.
Polly shared how this vision came about. George decided, “Let’s add some exuberance. I think she really would have just this joy-filled shoveling of blessings and roses down. It’s something that he really wanted to emphasize.”
This fall marks four years since this brother-sister team founded Goretti Fine Art in St. Louis. “We have a very aligned creative vision and very complementary skill sets,” George explained. “Things came together, and we felt that God was calling us to do this at this time.”
“We both grew up having some natural proclivity towards art,” Polly said, adding that she always enjoyed art class, “and George was such a wonderful source of encouragement when I was growing up and really decided to take it seriously.” He was on his artistic journey already at 12 years old. After receiving an art degree in college, Polly studied with sacred artist Gwyneth Thompson-Briggs. Polly credits “a lot of what I’ve learned over the years from her. She’s been such a valuable resource and friend to us.”
Polly pointed out the bonus working with her brother: “It’s so much fun to be able to work together now.”
How does their family partnership work for each painting? “We have two parts of the artistic process that I think we both excel at and actually enjoy the most,” Polly said, describing their teamwork. “George takes a lead on a lot of the upfront compositional work, which in my opinion is actually far more creative and more difficult.” Taking the initial idea, he starts to build what the image will ultimately look like. Then Polly makes that “image into a physical painting.”
“There is a lot of back and forth in both of those elements,” she pointed out, adding that they “have very similar creative visions. And to have another set of eyes that you trust as much as your own is unbelievably helpful.”
Style of the Masters
George shared that “most of what we do is in the Baroque tradition, broadly defined and inspired by the late Southern Baroque. “But we’re not limited to that. We can adapt our style to the needs of the project.” For instance, the brother-sister team’s newly unveiled historical painting of Father De Smet’s Mass required a style reminiscent of 19th-century realism “appropriate for that project.” At the same time, “We carved out our own unique artistic voice.”
The studio also recently finished a mural project called a “marouflage” for the Carmel of St. Joseph in Clayton, Missouri. The request was to fill gothic arch-shaped spaces in the preexisting wood paneling on the wall with the figures of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross. “The challenge was to figure out what to do with all that vertical space without elongating or distorting the figures like El Greco,” George said. “We ended up having to create this trompe l’oeil architectural element around the figures. Once the paintings were installed in the space, it really gave a compelling illusion of niches inset in the wall there that really integrated the painting into its architectural setting.”
George and Polly meet every challenge in such commissions where solving the problem can also be fun, they said, such as a recently completed painting of The Dormition-Assumption for a private home. The client requested “that we depict Christ carrying his mother’s body to paradise,” George said. “It suggested to us the opportunity for a fascinating interplay between the Western artistic tradition relating to Mary’s Assumption and the Eastern artistic tradition relating to the Dormition.” The team found a way of bridging these “in a way that’s respectful to both traditions,” he explained.
George described the painting. “Christ is cradling his mother’s soul depicted as a newborn baby wrapped in swaddling clothes. It’s intentionally a role reversal with respect to the Nativity icon, where when Christ is being born into the material world, Mary is cradling him. Now Mary is being born into eternal life, and Christ is cradling her. You think of the Pietà, and Mary is like tending to Christ’s body after his death, and now Christ is tending to his mother’s body following her death.”
Such one-of-a-kind artistic visions that multiply sacred messages happen over and over in the sibling’s paintings. There is the magnificent Our Lady of the Chariot picturing Mary driving a chariot as she rescues souls from purgatory. In St. Christopher, who is usually shown carrying the Christ Child and wading across a gentle stream, their robust version has a muscular, determined Christopher easily victorious in battling a raging river.
Devotional paintings also capture the essence and beauty of saints like St. Joseph, Louis and Zélie Martin and Charbel Makhlouf, plus Blessed Solanus Casey, and, of course, exceptional visions of the Eucharistic Heart and Immaculate Heart.
Faith Is Essential
Faith obviously plays an essential role in inspiring the siblings’ paintings.
Polly emphasized that being sacred artists is in many ways a calling. “It’s actually very distinct and in some ways the opposite of a modern secular artist whose work, for the most part, even if it’s not explicitly intentional, is always self-referential self-expression.
“But as sacred artists, we are called not to present our own, lower-case-‘t’ truth, but to present God’s capital-‘T’ Truth that exists beyond and totally separate from us. So our role is never self-aggrandizing. It’s self-diminishing and really calls to point to God as opposed to us. There’s some humility with that, and very different than the secular artist. We really take that seriously, where it’s not about us, but about God.”
George said that “having an active prayer life purifies the imagination; studying the Scriptures and Church teaching informs your creative vision. Faith in the Incarnation is so foundational to what we do. The Incarnation means that the material creation can serve as a vehicle for encountering God. … And coming to know God starts with perceiving and creating things with a glimmer of their divine source. I think the job of the artist is to draw that glimmer out.”
He further added, “The vocation of the Catholic artist is to represent sensible things in a way that communicates the deeper spiritual realities that lie behind them.”
Devotions play an important part for them, too. “We grew up loving the Rosary very much,” Polly said. “In the studio, we pray the Angelus at noon, and we pray our three o’clock prayer as well together. So there’s a rhythm to that. “
“When you are really committed to living your life liturgically and sacramentally and receiving the sacraments, and when you go to Mass, and you really think about what’s really happening there, you just start to live your life more aware of these deep spiritual realities and the angels that are around you all the time. You see the everyday miracles, and we want our art to elevate and inspire the viewer to see those miracles in everyday life as well,” Polly said, adding, “I really think that, whether it’s whatever novena we’re doing at the time or the everyday rhythms of Catholic life, it’s keeping us in tune with the spiritual truth that we’re trying to depict.”
George agreed. “We’re fortunate in the Catholic tradition to have such a strong history of contemplative and meditative prayer that has an imaginative element to it.”
He pointed out that St. Ignatius of Loyola, who was not an artist, “was so insistent that an important part of prayer is exercising your imagination and putting yourself in the scene from the Scripture. And really, that’s what the Rosary is, right? The vocal prayer is a background rhythm for the main attraction, so to speak, which is imaginatively reliving these important things in the life of Christ and Mary. There’s a creative element to that. And like any exercise in the imagination, it’s helping to feed that and inform and form in a healthy sense that creates a process that we then bring to our art.”
Polly mentioned that a particular painting of Our Lady was commissioned specifically to encourage prayer for the poor souls in purgatory. “The image has taken a life of its own,” she said. “It’s really encouraged a devotion to prayers for those souls. Knowing that maybe something we created can have that effect, not only on people on earth, but people on their way to heaven, it means a lot.”
More Inspiration
Benedict XVI’s writings on beauty and the arts have definitely also inspired George and Polly. “We think of beauty as being the attractive power of the truth,” George said. “If our faith journey is to be oriented toward God, then we must, in some sense, be drawn to goodness with a capital ‘G,’ truth with a capital ‘T.’ And we call that draw Beauty. So our vocation as artists is to use beauty as a means of drawing people to goodness and truth — and thereby to God. We want our art to reflect those three elements.”
Thus their sacred art has a paramount goal. Polly summed up their work by saying, “It’s really to evangelize the world through beauty and to build the kingdom of God as best we can with the gifts we’ve been given. We want our art to help people to see the deeper spiritual realities that our material world points to. Our hope is that people will then take that insight and share it with others. That’s our main goal — use our gifts and talents as best we can to build the kingdom of God.”
LEARN MORE
Visit their website and see more works at GorettiFineArt.com.