By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
Does art change us?
Does its effect linger and sink into our DNA beyond the mere moment of initial existential enjoyment? I don’t have scientific proof, but my anecdotal evidence suggests that it might.
Every Sunday for three decades, we’ve gone to St. Thomas More Catholic Church near our home in Cottonwood Heights, Utah. The Church is architecturally unique (as well as award-winning) and features lovely sculpture and other works by local artists. (Read more here.)
Just being there is a peaceful and calming moment. And yet, I think our family may have absorbed more than just passing bliss from the uplifting edifice.
Our three children grew up at St. Thomas More. Two were baptized there.
They all volunteered as lectors and altar servers. They celebrated annual church festivals there.
They enjoyed youth group socials and Easter egg hunts. They played basketball and attended vacation Bible school.
And much of that was done under colored light that danced in through stained glass on the towering eastern wall of the small neighborhood parish church.
A beloved Utah artist, Anna Campbell Bliss, designed the windows. Bliss (1925–2015) came to Utah with her husband in the 1960s after earning degrees in art and architecture from Wellesley and Harvard.
Having left behind a well-established perch in other vibrant arts communities, Bliss struggled initially to find her bearings in Utah. And so she sought out local inspiration.
She took screen printing classes. She studied computer programming at the University of Utah, something very few men did back then, let alone any women.
She learned about movement and dance at Salt Lake City’s famed Repertory Dance Theatre (RDT).
If what Bliss sought was integration with the local arts, her plan worked quite well.
RDT founder and executive/artistic director Linda Smith says Bliss had a tremendous influence on RDT. She served on the company’s advisory board, collaborated with RDT choreographers, and included computerized images of RDT dancers in some of her murals.
By 2012 Bliss, according to the Salt Lake Tribune, was “one of Utah’s cutting-edge artists — passionately experimenting in color and spatial relationships, while probing the intersections of painting, math, language, dance and music.”
When Bliss died in 2015, the Tribune proclaimed that “color and light” were the “prolific artist’s trademarks.” Her stained glass art at St. Thomas More—which she called “Light of Grace”—proves that proclamation true.
Rather than depicting a saint or a Bible story, her windows soar in geometric and linear sync up the wall, some 150 colored square panels in all. Even my untrained eye can detect Bliss’ unique blend of dance choreography and digital design in the masterpiece.
Maybe our children detected it too, by osmosis if nothing else.
Perhaps spurred on by a subconscious nudge from Bliss’ streaming digital light, our son Danny later built his own computer. Among other things, he uses it to advance his keen interest in the culinary baking arts, always searching for the perfect frosted banana cake recipe.
Our daughter Erin actually is a computer artist. She draws, blends colors, paints, crafts, designs, and creates calligraphy so very well that she started her own Etsy store and an Instagram influencer page called “The Lettering Fern,” which now has over 22,000 followers.
And our daughter Megan dances…for RDT, the same dance troupe that helped Bliss find her first steps in the Utah arts.
None of us met Bliss, and until recently I did not know anything about her. But when I mentioned Megan’s church/art connections to the artist, RDT’s Linda Smith observed: “We are all connected in so many interesting ways…especially in Utah.”
An MIT meteorologist once coined the phrase “the butterfly effect” to metaphorically explain how small variables can impact much larger and more complex systems. He speculated, rather poetically, that even the flap of a butterfly’s wings might somehow affect a tornado halfway around the world.
Similarly, I now often wonder if bursts of warm colored light, from church stained glass windows designed by a noted Utah artisan, might have helped our children seek and discover their own unique artist within.
I like to call it the Butterfly Bliss Effect.
(Photo of Bliss in front of her St. Thomas More stained-glass wall, from the 2021 documentary Arc of Light: A Portrait of Anna Campbell Bliss.)
*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Paraclete Press published his book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, in August 2021. The League of Utah Writers chose it as the best non-fiction book of 2022.
