Young at art

A profound faith experience led John Young to offer his artistic talents to the Lord . . .

Legatus member John Young has been drawing acclaim for his art since grammar school when his pictures of Easter bunnies would routinely take the top prize.

By the time he went to college, he was able to put his talent to work creating posters for campus events, earning enough money to cover tuition, room, board and books.

But it wasn’t until he completed a successful career in business that art became a passion.

Humble beginnings

More than a decade after his debut solo exhibit at Toronto’s Gallery Gevik, Young’s work is in 100-plus collections in North America and Europe and can be seen at the Toronto Congress Centre;  St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia; and Legatus headquarters in Ave Maria, Fla. His paintings also are reproduced in executive gift wall calendars available through Young’s website.

In 1992, after a 40-year hiatus from brush and canvas, Young resumed painting part-time while still working in the food brokerage and distribution industry. By the time he retired in 1995, Young was ready to paint full-time.

“God gave me the natural talent,” he said. “It’s a gift and it’s one I readily admit to gladly. How he makes my brain work and my imagination work, I don’t know.”

At times, Young says, he senses God’s hand guiding his brush, like the time was commissioned to paint a five-year-old girl who had lost her mother. He finished the painting, but felt it was “the worst painting I ever did” and threw it away. But three days before the deadline, he said, “God took over my hand.” The experience was so profound that he couldn’t accept payment from the girl’s grandmother who had commissioned the painting. “I didn’t paint it, God did,” he explained.

Young’s early paintings were oils in the “realism” style, but a 1997 trip to Bali inspired him to try surrealism and to work with acrylics.

He credits Legatus with introducing a greater degree of spirituality into his art and his life. Up until he helped start the Toronto Chapter in 1999, he would have described himself as a “Sunday Catholic,” but Legatus expanded his understanding of the faith. Before that, he said, “there was very little religious content to my paintings.”

John and Trudy Young

Another major influence on his painting was a near-death experience in 2000 while undergoing an appendectomy. Because of a serious infection, Young was given only a 50% chance of surviving the procedure. Just before he was anesthetized, he said, “God, I am in your hands.”

When he regained consciousness, Young remembered his experience. “I had seen God,” he said. Young recalled a sense of traveling very quickly along a river and reaching a beautiful, white-yellow shimmering light. He saw 200-300 people engaged in quiet conversation, but couldn’t make out their faces. “One in the middle who was taller than anyone else stepped forward and said, ‘Trudy needs you for a little bit longer,’” he recalled.

Spiritual influence

His near-death experience was followed by “a mysterious turning point” in his art. Images of Christ occasionally appeared in his work, though he hadn’t put them there deliberately.

Young also began painting more religious themes, and his work took on a mystical dimension. Over the next two years he started experimenting with mixing acrylic clear gels into the paint, giving his work a more luminous quality.

Although he once believed that not even Michelangelo could have captured what he saw while unconscious, he completed “All Souls River” in six weeks — a work he says he will never sell. The work is true to Young’s style, which he calls “surreal impressionism — a method of painting layer over layer,” he explained. “Things that are not intended to be there develop in the painting.”

He has been further inspired in his work by Fr. Thomas Rosica, CSB, chaplain of Legatus’ Toronto Chapter and CEO of Salt + Light Catholic Television. “In his homilies and in his addresses, he has never ever failed to take all of us closer to God,” Young said.

Father Rosica, who met Young 10 years ago, has high praise for the artist.

“John’s work bridges the gap between art and faith,” he said, adding that it embodies many of Pope John Paul II’s thoughts in his 1999 Letter to Artists. “Real art invites people to ponder beauty and goodness that are ultimately God himself.”

Father Rosica said he’s often heard people say that Young’s artwork is “beautiful and filled with light” and that his paintings lift their “minds and hearts to God.”

“What better words could one desire for a Catholic artist who participates in the work of creation by bringing order out of chaos, meaning out of senselessness, hope and beauty out of the despair and disfigurement around us?” Fr. Rosica said.

His personal favorite of Young’s works is “Transfiguration,” a piece the artist gave Cardinal Marc Ouellet of Quebec City for the 49th International Eucharistic Congress in 2008. It hung in St. Joseph Chapel of Quebec City’s Notre-Dame de Quebec Basilica Cathedral throughout the Congress. It’s now in the salon d’accueil of the archbishop’s residence where guests are received.

Through a spokesman, Cardinal Ouellet said that the painting is a precious gift he has tried to share with as many people as he can.

Young said “Transfiguration” took two years to complete and is his “most magical painting.”

Except for two months Young takes off to ski and go to Florida, he paints almost daily in his home studio. As he reflects on all that has transpired over the past decade, he said, “I have to wonder if much of this would have happened to me if I hadn’t joined Legatus. I think I would still be a Sunday Catholic!”

Judy Roberts is a staff writer for Legatus Magazine. Learn more about John Young’s art at his website: youngart.ca