PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST AS BELIEVER
WORDS fatima measham
IMAGES peter casamento
In September 2000, artist David Rastas was robbed at gunpoint by a stranger whom he had trusted implicitly.
It is an event that looms large in his life, both as a traumatic experience and as a turning point. David’s story was challenged by the police—to see if he would ‘crack’. It aggravated the stress. A psychiatrist suggested that he might have had a psychotic episode—even though this was later ruled out.
It is telling, then, that on his website, a list of exhibitions to which he has contributed accounts for every year from 1994—except 2000.
‘I couldn’t do art for a long time because I was scared of what might come out in the art work’, David says quietly. ‘I was scared that what [the psychiatrist] said was true, that maybe I did have a psychosis’.
The experience that helped him overcome this sense of paralysis occurred, fittingly enough, through his own art work. He brought a stained glass installation that he had made in 1999 to his room at Melbourne University’s Newman College.
Titled My Refuge and My Strength, it had been produced for a dying uncle, with the intention of adding a bit of colour and life into a sterile hospital room. David designed it with a sense of hope; he wanted it to be something that he himself would like to see if he were about to die.
He remembers breaking down as he gazed at the illuminated images he had created. David found new meaning in his art by experiencing it in a way he couldn’t have foreseen. He refers to this moment as the beginning of an awareness of the power of art, his art.
In the aftermath of this frightening experience, David has become a much more spiritual person, with a closer relationship with God and a new sense of purpose. ‘It was like God grabbed me, shook me around and said, listen you’ve got to get on the path, you’ve got things to do’.
For David, 21, art has been as much a personal journey as a means of expression.
His parents recognised his interest in art early on, sending him to pottery classes when he was eight and to Geelong Fine Art School soon after. Despite strong support from his parents, however, initially David only sustained his interest with great effort.
‘I hadn’t really met any artists so I didn’t know how it worked’, he says. ‘I thought maybe all the art that was around was just done in people’s spare time’.
In high school, when he and his classmates started looking into future careers, the possibility of becoming a full-time artist presented itself. ‘I certainly thought it would be great, but I always thought I needed to do something different’, David recalls. ‘Something a bit more clever, maybe’.
He entertained ideas about becoming a doctor or an architect. ‘There was too much pressure to give up art, mostly from myself and from what I perceived as what the rest of the world expected of me’.
Amid the inner struggles, David has not been without mentors. In particular, encouragement from an art teacher at Christian College in Geelong resonates to this day. In a school report, she had referred to David as a ‘true artist’. He believes that her comment was meant to haunt him through his short-lived foray into Commerce at Melbourne University.
Today David is interested in finding ways to express his experience of God through art. He finds that music lends itself greatly to this process. While he sometimes paints in silence—a kind of music, he says—he also works to the sound of baroque classical music and Christian praise songs.
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To view a larger version of David's artwork, click
on the image to the left.
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‘I usually try and make sure I’ve got a fairly extensive range of music so I can find something that’s most appropriate for the work I’m doing’, he shares. ‘If I’m doing something that might be used one day for a devotional purpose, I might listen to Gregorian chant’.
When David realised that music could be accessible in a way that visual art—often coded—could not, he also began experimenting with integrating music into his art. An installation he produced while in Japan had a hole in a sheet through which his hands could be seen playing the harp.
When David launched his debut exhibition in 2002, the theme was ‘Sacred Work’. Held at his gallery studio in Point Lonsdale, his art work was viewed by an estimated 300 people over four weeks.
‘I wasn’t expecting too many people to come’, David confesses. ‘It was really a statement to the world that I’m now an artist, and this is the kind of art that I’m most interested in’.
He has also explored the spiritual aspect of different forms of art. Last year, he stayed with an Aboriginal community in Central Australia and learned the dotting style of local artists. He describes the exercise as ‘getting into a kind of zone’, a meditative state.
Recently drawn to iconography, David spent some time at a Finnish Orthodox monastery to learn icon painting. One of the things he finds fascinating about icon painters is the amount of time they spend in contemplative prayer before they even start painting. ‘While they’re painting the saints’, he adds, ‘they would actually be in prayerful conversation with the saint that they are painting’.
It is a creative process that he has happily imbibed. ‘I’ll often try to develop the ideas that are in my head when I’m in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament, in the chapel’, David reveals. ‘That’s very important to me because I feel like there is a temptation to compromise. I’ve got quite a good theory base of art and art history, and I understand what the world’s paying money for’.
Even his favourite medium at present, stained glass, is informed by this spirituality. Speaking about stained glass windows in churches, he says, ‘There’s something about those images that comes to life when the light hits behind them. That they rely on this light, to me it has a kind of meaning in it’.
David says he would like to offer something more, that is, he’d like people to see that his art comes from a spiritual place and be affected accordingly. ‘I’d like to somehow share some of this gift of faith through my art work’, he explains.
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