Local Models Simply Divine as Stand-Ins for Catholic Saints

Being friends with Ojai artist John Nava has its rewards. For Gerd Koch, it meant that his deeply lined, expressive face was put on a 20-foot-high image of St. Nicholas and hung in the enormous new cathedral in downtown Los Angeles.

Barring some catastrophe, Koch’s saintly visage will probably stare down from the walls of Our Lady of the Angels for 500 years.

“I was overwhelmed,” said Koch, 74, co-founder of Studio Channel Islands Art Center at Cal State Channel Islands in Camarillo. “It gives you shivers to see yourself in a project this extraordinary.”

Nava spent three years creating the 25 tapestries of 136 saints hanging in the cavernous cathedral. The entire process, from start to finish, can be seen in a special exhibit at Studio Channel Islands from Sunday until March 16.

“This is huge,” said Donna Granata, co-director of the show. “It will be one of the largest exhibits of its kind.”

The show will feature dozens of portraits, line drawings and tapestries done by Nava as he slowly homed in on just the right colors, patterns and proportions for his subjects. The finished work, called “The Communion of Saints,” is a collection of tapestries that put modern faces on some of Christendom’s most revered figures.

Aided by a casting director, Nava scoured Ojai and surrounding areas for the perfect face for each saint. In painting the saints who came later in the church’s history, he drew upon historical records for details of their appearance. For earlier saints, he relied on gut feeling.

He chose his model for John the Baptist on the strength of Ojai potter Richard Keit’s “wonderful, soulful face.” For St. Francis Xavier, he picked Mad magazine cartoonist Sergio Aragones, tousling his hair a bit to give him a holier look. Koch’s high forehead and prominent nose made him a natural for St. Nicholas, Nava said.

The saints run the gamut of races and ethnicities, a fitting tribute to the diversity of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles, with 5 million parishioners speaking 42 languages.

“I would say, ‘Look, we need an Asian 12-year-old boy or a 30-year-old woman who is Lebanese,’ and the casting director would go into Ojai and look,” Nava said. “But we had people from all over the world model. I wanted them to look like modern people dressed like saints. That is the historical tradition, people in the paintings looked like those using the church.”

Some people aggressively lobbied to be saints, though they were a minority.

“A lot of people who modeled were extremely devout,” said Nava, who was raised Catholic. “Most of the time they did not know what saint they would be, but most were thrilled to be included.”

After photos were taken, Nava painted intricate, individual portraits of the faces and hands of his subjects. He worked seven days a week, turning out 136 paintings in 20 months. His models ranged in age from 3 months to more than 90 years.

At least 48 of these portraits will be on exhibit at the upcoming show

Nava, a 55-year-old painter with no previous tapestry experience, put the images of his final product into e-mail form and sent them to a weaving company in the small Belgian town of Wielsbeke. The images were downloaded into a computer and the tapestries were woven from 16 colors of thread.

Some early failures are part of the exhibit. The first tapestry had saints with almost no color in their faces. One sported a purple beard. Contrasts in skin colors were rough and jarring. Faces lacked definition and heads were elongated.

Nava went through 160 test tapestries before getting the images he wanted on the cotton and synthetic fiber. It took just 45 days to weave the tapestries, a job experts say would have taken 20 years to do by hand. The average tapestry is 7 feet long and 20 feet wide.

Unlike many examples of modern art, Nava said, his goal wasn’t to create a bleak view of humanity.

“I felt like this was getting in touch with the ancient meaning of art,” he said. “Art back to the cave walls has always been connected to the spiritual life. Our work went in and people reacted so emotionally to it, they were weeping. You never see people react to your work like that in an art gallery.”

The experience moved Nava, too. “It was beautiful to be able to work in that world for three years. It changed the way I thought about things.”

The first exhibit of the test tapestries was held last month at the Judson Gallery in Los Angeles, but this show will be much larger.

When the exhibit ends, Granata said, the material will go into the archives of the archdiocese and probably will not come out again for years.

“It will be the last exhibit of its kind,” she said.