St Mary's

Faith and Art; Living with Tough Convictions in an Easy World

Hi I’m Peter Breen great to be here. I am married to Mavis – for 37 years with 4 children, 4 in law children and 6.5 grandchildren and a dog named Pilgrim. I work part time as a radiographer at RBWH and am Cofounder, Chair and Administrator of Jugglers Art Space in the Valley – a social enterprise with a social justice, arts and spirituality focus.

I have been coming to St Mary’s with my wife Mavis now, off and on, for about 5 years. We walked with you all down the hill with candles burning at Easter time nearly 2 years ago, amazed at the humility and wisdom and respect and groundedness and determination that emerged and anchored you all in the process of navigating the dissonance between St Mary’s and the Vatican. We miss the sense that came with being in that building and find this space a long way from inspiring but as we all know, spaces can be deceptive and void of what really matters. Every time i come to Mass – I find there is no deception here, there is no pretence only a sense of being on a lighted spot on a path in the fog of life.

I was first invited to give this talk “Tough convictions in an easy world” to a group of evangelical Protestants late in 2010 and even though their paradigm is very different from most of us here, and even though I was stuck in much of that paradigm for a long time, there are some aspects I still share. My experience is that many evangelical Protestants share some values and passions with us here around their determination to live with tough convictions in what for many of us is a fortunate life, an easy world.

Let me posit to you some of the people I know who I think live with tough conviction in an easy world. People who are marginalised and often despised by large sections of our society. People who can make us think about our choices.

Piece of paint that has fallen off the wall at Jugglers  - an accretions of 8 years of aerosol paint from the walls of Jugglers Art Space in the Valley – a symbol for me, of tough conviction in an easy world.

The young men who practice street art   live with tough conviction in an easy world. Their art is executed in a world and even in an art world sometimes determined to be clean, straight and beige. A world that is predictable, readable, understandable, saleable, controlled and full of boundaries. Their art is not readable, clean, straight or beige.

I watch these young men of tough conviction – week after week choose colours and execute forms that make the free legal street art space at Jugglers a kind of sacred space where nothing ever stays the same, nothing is ever predictable, and nothing is ever readable or controlled. It is as if it is some kind of momentary static impression of the collective creative spirit.

Why am I involved in these peoples’ lives? As with all of us we are the product of so much and the same is for me. I come from a family of evangelical preachers, artists, writers and social activists including my grandfather, father, mother, brother, sister, sons. These have impacted my own convictions. And so too have these young men that I have been around for 16 years.

So I have a few streams flowing in and out of my life – social activism, art and spiritual hunger. And there is a never ending sifting and sorting going on. My ongoing journey of faith and art and activism finds a lot of meaning though in my engagement with both the young men in the street art sub culture and world of visual art and artists.

In November last year,  I met with 6  year 9 boys at a north Brisbane high school over a few weeks talking about art and design to prepare them for  the successful pilot program we set up for them in the last week of school in 2010.Boys on the margins of Year 9.  It was the first one we ran with marginalised high school students. Over the past 6 years, we have run 5 – 6 other positive development courses for lads in their late teens from the street art and illegal graffiti scene. And we have just this past month begun a brokered agreement with the Special Circumstances Diversion Court to run a 12 week half day course with charged offenders. In these mentor based courses, these lads are given the opportunity to develop new art skills in screen printing and canvas painting and to explore the cultural values of society they live in and how their actions are viewed by the society. It is about positive reinforcement of what they are and what they can become. It about engagement and education. Who else is doing this?

There are a whole lot of reasons Jugglers Art Space struggles and we keep doing things like this  along with the letters of advocacy we write for young men facing court for graffiti charges, the 750 artists we have  shown over the past 8 years and the 20 subsidised studios we offer to artists in the Valley, Woolloongabba and Norman Park.

I think the values or the motivators or the fuel that ignites me week after week include investing in the development of human potential, of wanting to build a better world, of being captivated by the mystery and the understated but very present spirituality that comes with the arts. And in all this somehow I continue to be inspired and undergirded by the Jesus story, hungering to experience the presence of spirit, to be aware of epiphany.

In the last few years of the 19^th century a young man in Europe and the son of a Lutheran pastor, was desperate for the church to endorse him as an evangelist and pastor to work among  marginalised farm labourers and their families. His favourite teacher of the time was Charles Haddon Spurgeon a great Baptist preacher in London. But to this young man’s dismay the church hierarchy turned him down, citing his identification with the poor and the marginalised people as outside their pastoral guidelines.

That young man was devastated. Depressed and lonely he spiralled into depression but found painting to be his love. In the 4 months he spent in a Mental Health institution in France he produced one painting/day [that nobody wanted.] Vincent Van Gough was that man and he was dead at 39 with a self inflicted bullet. I wonder if Vincent Van Gough would have survived today and if the evangelical or orthodox or Catholic church would stand with him and listen to him as having the voice of God? I wonder if some of our outsider artists will find hope through what we are doing? I know already that they are.

In 2002 not long before I left the pastorate to go back into radiography and to work with my sons and a mate in establishing Jugglers in the Valley, I had been coordinating Jugglers as a fortnightly event at the church I was pastor of on the north side of Brisbane. At every Jugglers event we scheduled aerosol artists to put pieces up on mobile boards. The pieces that were produced became part of the Jugglers story and part of that church’s story. One Sunday morning one of the church members came to me before the church service and told me he had just smashed up a piece of graffiti because it was evil and demonic. I had no words for him or his action. The clash of values and paradigms that day was almost a van Gough moment.

For me, the arts, including outsider and aerosol/street art are in part the multimodal expression of the soul, the cry for love,  the search for meaning, the longing for understanding, the representation of beauty and ugliness,  the visit of the spirit.

Let me hear your voice

Let me know your love in here

In these forms of blue,

In these forms and lines and light,

In the red green mixes.

Let me know you now,

Far removed in sermon,

Absent in a prayer,

Silent in a song or hymn,

Let me feel you, canvas born.

In the paint appear,

Not an apparition like

But dropping unseen

Into consciousness. Slide,

Shout silently, live in me.

When my son [Randal] was director of Jugglers he went to Melbourne in about 2007 to give a talk at a Vic State Government task force on graffiti. His point in that speech was that in all the tough talk and art talk, graffiti [like all art] doesn’t grow like moss on a wall. A person is attached to an aerosol can and it is only as we have a relationship with each artist and are present to them over long hours that understanding might begin to emerge – for both people.

Art is a time, energy and resource investment. Art is story telling. Art brings people and ideas into collision and into harmony. Art is a medium of spirit and spirit inspires art. Art unexpressed damages the soul and stunts the culture. Art is the nerve end of the culture.

As indigenous dancer Stephen Page said: “The great medicine for humanity is art.”

Peter Breen 2010 ©

• SUPPORTING JUGGLERS

We are not funded by any church, organisation, or government body. We are a social enterprise with the four pillars of spirituality, creativity, social justice and community and need partners who will make regular donations to our Public Fund. [Donations over $2 are tax deductible]

We are looking for Corporate and Family Trust organizations and individuals who will partner with us in any or all of the following ways:

• Hire the space for band rehearsal, weddings, parties, functions
• Attend an exhibition opening
• Make a tax deductible donation via PayPal or EFT

For further information contact us at info@jugglers.org.au

www.jugglers.org.au