Vol. 44 No. 1 March 30, 2005 The Long Island Catholic
Local Sister finds perspective
through her art
By Lena Pennino
Staff Reporter
Amityville — In Queen of the Rosary Mother-house, a convent for the Sisters of St. Dominic of Amityville, Sister Barbara Schwarz creates her art in a sprawling attic turned studio. Her paintings, drawings, sculptures and woodcarvings, known for their bright colors and feminine shapes, convey symbolic messages of hope, social justice, and Gospel values.
“If you would have told me (30 years ago) that this is what I would be doing today,” said Sister Barbara Schwarz, “I would have said, ‘You’re nuts.’”
When she first joined the Sisters of St. Dominic of Amityville in 1973, she soon was doing what many Dominican Sisters did during that time: she taught.
“I thought I was going to be a teacher for the rest of my life,” she said. She taught at Incarnation School in Queens Village, St. Hugh of Lincoln School in Huntington Station and Queen of the Rosary Academy in Amityville.But in 1982 something put a kink into her predictable plans. She contracted viral encephalitis, an infection of the brain which causes the organ to swell and push against the skull. As the swelling increased, she lost various functions including perspective and coordination. She began living in a flat world with no depth.
She could no longer walk without tripping, throw or catch a ball; she couldn’t fill a glass of water for herself. Her loss of coordination affected her speech.
Healing colors
One day while resting in bed, she gazed at a prism dangling in the window. She was mesmerized by the rainbow-colored lights dancing on the walls. When she realized that she had been watching the colors for hours, she felt childish at first.
But then she asked herself, “What do children do to gain coordination? They do art and poetry!” She began to dabble in art.
When others saw her artwork, they encouraged her to continue her work.
As her symptoms cleared over time, her new hobby helped to get her through the ordeal. “Art healed me,” she said. “What I realized later is that I used art as a meditation; I was doing art therapy.”
Recently, Sister Barbara knelt down on the wood floors in her studio and pulled out a giant canvas folded like a jellyroll. She unfolded it across the studio revealing a 74-foot pictorial timeline of creation: darkness, explosions of color, and whirlpools of white stars. She painted thunderstorms, a fire that nearly consumed the Earth, green land, the seas, animals and on the edge of the picture she drew an arrow pointing to the beginning of human life.
Although it is the story of humanity, it is also “Barbara’s story,” she said. “Sometimes, it seemed like there were a thousand million years of lightning storms,” she said, referring to the trials in her life.
“If you look back and see that it took millions of years before an atom was created,” she said, “You began to think that if so wondrous a creation took that long, I can allow myself time to continue to try and fail.”
Still teaching
Sister Barbara is still a teacher. She works at the diocesan Pastoral Formation Institute and also leads workshops, retreats, conferences, parish missions, and prayer days. The difference now is that, more often than not, her art helps her to convey the message.
Recently, during a week-long retreat at Our Lady of Grace Church in West Babylon, Sister Barbara spoke of forgiveness. On a small table, she placed a not-yet-fired clay sculpture of feet.
After reading and reflecting on the story of the woman who washed Jesus’ feet with her tears (Luke 7), she asked parishioners to drip drops of water onto the soft sculpture.
The result was powerful, she said, as the congregation imagined their sins washed away by their “tears” accepted by Jesus.
“These feet are so different from when I first sculpted them,” she said. “The clay has been smoothed by tears and imbued with the prayers of hundreds of people.
“Sometimes, art can do what words cannot,” she said.
© Copyright 2004 The Long Island Catholic
