Evangelizing with Beauty and Story

Johannes: I’m Johannes Alb from ALBL Oberammergau woodcarving Studio from Oberammergau, Germany.

Tim: And I’m Tim Schmalz from Canada, and principally a bronze sculptor for the Catholic Church.

Johannes: Wonderful. Yeah, thank you for being here and thank you for having us. So today, the plan is that I give a 15-minute overview of our studio, of what we’re doing, our history, and then I hand over to Tim, and you can have a 15-minute presentation. The third part would be a session to ask questions.

The Craft of Wood Carving

Johannes: I would like to give you first a brief introduction—that means the craft of wood carving. I would like to give you a brief overview of our family, also into the Passion Play, just a brief touch. We are very famous for that. And our studio today.

So, the art of wood carving in ALBL can be traced back to 1111, where in a monastery just 10 minutes from us it was documented that the carvers of Oberammergau are so skilled that they can carve a nativity, an entire nativity scene, into a walnut shell.

And how this looks, I brought two pictures: a nativity scene and a crucifixion scene. You all know how tiny a walnut is, so it appears almost fake.

Between 1111 and the Baroque times, the art of wood carving was performed mainly in the winter, because they were all farmers in the summer. This was perfect work for the winter. This changed in the Baroque times when, all over Europe and especially in Bavaria, Baroque churches were built. The craft of wood carving became a full-time profession.

Back then, and still today, wood carvers had their own small workshops in their houses or garden houses. In 1850, it was more professionalized. Larger studios were founded, and carvers were actually employed. We had studios with up to 100 wood carvers as employees.

A Family Legacy

Johannes: This brings us now to the family. We can trace back our history until 1556. My brother and I are now the 14th generation of wood carvers. Theoretically, we could trace it back until 1111, but we had a severe archive fire in the 1550s, so all the documents until then were lost.

Two of my wood-carving ancestors survived the Black Plague of 1633. All over Europe, around 75% of the people of Oberammergau died. My ancestors took a vow to perform the Passion of Christ every 10 years in order to be spared from the plague. We started performing the Passion Play only one year later, in 1634.

Here are a couple of pictures I brought you. This is my great-great-grandfather, Alois Joseph, in his Passion costume as Caiaphas. This was actually one of the first photos of Oberammergau after the invention of photography. On the other side, you can see my family in the Passion Play of 1990.

One funny story: one year before the Passion Play starts, the mayor issues a letter that every man must grow his beard to look authentic. That’s why my dad had very long hair and a wild beard. This is still the case. I’m on the left, and this is my brother Marcus. He inherited the wood-carving talent from my dad. He is our artist and design leader. I’m the business guy—I keep everything together.

Over the years, the ALBL wood carvers were always small carvers. For example, you can see my great-grandfather carving a 4-meter tall corpus.

It was my grandfather who was the first not only a wood carver but also added a little store to his workshop, making it more like a business. He also added a painter. My dad made it bigger and had four artists working with him.

When my brother and I took over the business in 2015, we literally tripled the size. We had to build a new studio in 2020—a new art studio building where we have wood-carving workshops. Here is my dad in the wood shop, and here are two of our carvers. We also have our own painters, who learn the craft of master church art painting in Munich. Luckily, many of them come to us.

The Napa Tryptic Altar

Johannes: I brought you two cases I would like to briefly show, and after these, a small video of a statue we created for a church in Germany.

The first case is actually here in Napa. You’ve probably all seen it—it’s the triptych altar for the Cave Chapel. Tim Busch reached out to us and asked if we had an idea for it. He gave us specifications: it had to be travel-ready because of conferences throughout the year; it had to be dismantled; it had to be fire-resistant because of fire department policy.

So, we came up with the idea of making a triptych altar, and to make it as light as possible, instead of carving in wood, we made a painting.

Typically, as probably the same with you, Tim, we first create a sketch or a mock-up to get into discussion. Tim and Father Luke Mata gave us ideas: on the left, St. Dominic, St. Benedict, and St. Ignatius; in the middle, the Crucifixion scene; and on the right, St. Josemaría Escrivá, St. John Paul II, and St. Charles Borromeo.

We create a sketch, then have discussions, multiple rounds of iteration, and then a final approved version. My brother decided the design, and we handed it to our wonderful oil master painter.

Our painter’s name is Horst. He lived in Amsterdam for 30 years, copying Old Master paintings with authentic oil-glazing techniques using real oil colors, like in the 15th and 16th centuries. Then he moved to a town near us, met my dad, and is now part of our team.

He not only creates using Old Master glazing techniques but also insists on authenticity in lifestyle. He works only in his living room, which is a 400-year-old farmer’s house, and he refuses to use artificial light, because the Old Masters didn’t have it. He works only during the day, which is probably very relaxing at night.

So here, this is Horst, our master painter. That’s my dad, my brother, that’s me, and that’s our recent hire, our project manager.

So yeah, this is case number one. Case number two is a little bit different.

Rebuilding a Church

Johannes: In 2019, there was a very tragic fire in Texas, the Church of the Visitation in Westphalia. It was one of the oldest wooden construction churches in the western United States, built by German immigrants in 1870. The father told me that when the church started to burn, it took only one hour to burn down the entire church.

They didn’t do the flame-retardant part—no. It would have helped probably, but it was just like, “Okay, you guys need to help with everything. We have to rebuild that.”

So they reached out to a German art studio to rebuild the church as it was. And we received literally thousands of pictures of how the church looked, and we were then able to do all kinds of drawings of the reredos, the side altars. We developed a new matching design for the altar of sacrifice, then we did the communion rails, 26 statues, Stations of the Cross, and for example, crucifixes.

Here are a couple of pictures from our studio.

Baptismal Font and Mosaic Work

Johannes: We also did a baptismal font, and this is a very fun story for me to tell Americans because this is an American business story.

During that process, they asked us if we would also be able to do the baptismal font with a bowl of mosaic work. We had never done that before. Typically, in Germany, you would first think about that for a very long time and then say, “Okay, we can do it like this.”

But I said, “Okay, yeah, we can do that.” I trusted in the Holy Spirit that He would help us. Then I asked my entire team, “Do we have any idea of a mosaic artist that could actually do that?”

So my brother did the design for the baptismal font, and then a wonderful thing happened. Out of nowhere, a carver from us said, “Hey, I know Christina. She lives only 10 minutes from here, if you want to believe it.”

She had worked for one of the two Royal Mosaic Societies of Munich, and she was actually looking for work at that time. This was the start of a new department almost, where we began integrating mosaics into all of our furnishings.

Here are a couple of samples: the Stations of the Cross, and this is the baptismal font.

This is our studio and our team. Yeah, this was a major, major commission. I just visited them in January, and it was absolutely fabulous to see the work in the sacred space. Really amazing.

Creating the Sheltering Cloak Madonna Statue

Johannes: So, in the last minutes, I would like to show you a brief video of how we actually create a statue. This was for St. Mary’s Church in Germany—which is actually quite rare for us, because in Germany there are not so many new church projects going on.

What they had in mind was a very German “Sheltering Cloak Madonna.” The concept was to integrate a lot of different topics: for example, doctors, the COVID crisis with the masks, Pope Francis, the local bishop, the priest who founded the church, and actually, the donor lady wanted herself integrated, like in the old days.

Then we have two altar servers, the refugee crisis, disabled people, and children.

When we start, after approval of the sketch, we begin with sewing four inches of wood together. Typically, we use linden wood. In this case, because it was a two-meter (80-inch) tall statue, we chose for weight reasons a Swiss mountain pine, which is very, very light. It also contains an etheric oil, so when you carve it, the entire workshop smells like this wood. It has a very calming and nice effect.

We laminate the wood slabs together. This is a 48-hour process. Then we start with the chainsaw for the rough shapes, which is actually quite fun. You can see the figure lying down right now. Yes, okay, see the head all the time.

“You don’t let the interns do this part?”

Well actually, they have to learn it as early as possible. He’s very experienced, but when they start, they use safety equipment.

The next step after the chainsaw work is performed: we start with chisels and knives for the carving. The first steps are usually with very broad and rough knives, and then, when it comes to the details, it gets finer and finer with the carving knives.

Typically, when we prepare a statue that is about to be painted in the old Oberammergau-style polychroming technique—which we still perform—that means you need to rasp the surface a little bit rough.

Why? I’ll explain in a second.

When the carving is finished, we hand it over to our painters. The first layer is three different types of chalk mixed together with glue. We call that gesso priming.

After the priming is done, we wet sand it and dry sand it, so that you have a very smooth surface. You need that rasped surface of the wood so that the gesso actually sticks.

After the gesso priming is done, we start with gold gilding. That’s the very old method. We use two different types of clay. After the clay is applied, we use a squirrel hairbrush. With that brush, you stroke your cheeks so that it takes up a very tiny amount of oil, and then you go on the gold leaf to pick it up and um on the area where we have that two different types of clay you add a water alcohol mixture.

When you get close with the  squirrel hairbrush and the gold leaf on it uh it would um it’s it’s almost like a static reaction so it really literally flies on the statue and then you can polish it with a semi-precious EG Stone and the and the final steps what you saw in that video is when we um when we paint the the statue with real pigment colors um when you when you would like to have a certain ornamentation on her mantle we use egg temper colors to cover the entire area of the ornament and when it is dry you use a hardwood stick to scratch off that color again so that the gold leaf shines through so it’s very elaborate and this is the finished statue.

So this is the um ornamentation work and this are a couple of pictures. It was around 4 months or 5 months from conception to finish. Painting took a long time.

Tim’s Early Work

Tim: I’m just going to use some visuals too. Hopefully this will work. Let me see if I—

All right. So, um, my name is Tim Schmotz. I’m a sculptor, and I think what I’ll do here—there’s so much that we could possibly talk about—but I’ll try to give you a very quick overview about what I believe as a sculptor who has spent most of my life doing sculptures. What I think of beauty, and perhaps I have more questions than answers in what I’m going to say. But if I bring you across my journey, maybe you’ll be able to understand a little bit about beauty, or my struggle with it.

So this is one of the first actual photographs I have of myself doing sculpture. I’m 19 at this point. I won a national prize, and you can see I’m very proud of my really abstract sculpture that I’m posed with beside me. I won a national prize at this early age.

Art School and Early Influences

Tim: I was doing stuff that they told me to do at art school. I knew, number one, I wanted to be an artist. I knew that when I was 16. But when I started going to art school, I realized this is not what I was really interested in.

These are some examples of the art that I was doing during my university, or my art school period of time. This is called Bag Lady, and you can see it’s a collage made out of bags—of a bag lady, right? A visual pun. And that’s about what the art schools were presenting. In fact, they were really against the ideas of beauty that were traditionally part of our culture. They were attacking that in a sense.

So this is very clever—not only is it a visual pun, but it’s also something ugly, a garbage bag. And so I had two points with the mainstream art culture with this piece. But I felt there was a very antagonistic attitude towards beauty that I was fighting with, in a sense.

This is another sculpture that I created during this time. I was 19. And you can see here I had developed some sort of—what I would consider within the forest of abstract artwork—some sort of idea of harmony, balance, and something that was very nice to look at.

I remember doing this piece and I thought, it’s just pleasing to look at. Even though it’s abstract, in a sense ludicrous with the small heads, there is some beauty to that form that makes you think that it’s nice to look at, it’s pleasant, it has harmony. And therefore, perhaps it has something like beauty.

Mainstream Culture’s Attack on Beauty

And again here, you have other pieces that are in our culture. You all know this one—this is the Chicago Bean, right? You did the Bean? No, no, I didn’t do it, but I was interested in it, right? Because it is a beautiful thing. You know, the clouds are beautiful, and you see shiny stuff going on, and it’s kind of pervasive in our mainstream culture.

But what I would say is that it’s almost too broad to have any meaning whatsoever. I can’t really see any deep meaning for it. You can look at a puddle and see the same reflection and say that puddle is a beautiful work of art. I don’t know.

So when I was this age here—when I was 21—I quit doing abstract artwork and I started doing Christian artwork. Realizing that you had to have an epic subject, you had to have some reason for creating artwork that was bigger than yourself, or bigger than just doing visual puns like the Bag Lady. You could do those ad infinitum—what are you accomplishing? What are you contributing to culture, to society?

Oftentimes, you hear contemporary artists saying, “It challenges the way you see things, it challenges the way you perceive reality.” I don’t care about that. And I think most people don’t need any more challenges about how they see reality, right? Optical illusions—that’s about it.

So I stopped doing that. I started doing Christian artwork, and this is a piece that I find beautiful. It’s so simple, it’s very quiet. And I think—and this is one of my first life-sized pieces that I did—I remember approaching this at night. I lived in my studio. A photo was me in my studio at nighttime. I would walk around my sculptures and just examine them.

This piece here was just the quietness of it, the peace of it, what it did to myself emotively. I felt that it was something that was beautiful, but hard to really pin down what it was. But I think it’s more the subject matter than how I designed it. I think it’s because it’s a pregnant Mary who’s very peaceful-looking. So I think that’s why it’s a beautiful piece, not necessarily any other way.

Symbols and Harmony in Sculpture

Tim: So I started doing bronze sculptures. And this is really fascinating, because I was asked to do a baptismal font. Instead of doing just the text “Father, Son, Holy Spirit,” I actually carved where you can see the dove—you can’t really see the fish very well, there’s a fish—and in the hand of God. So I took the symbols and I created this swirl.

I really do believe that one of the reasons why this is beautiful is, like those other two people together, it’s pleasing to look at. It’s coherent. The forms flow into one another, and it looks nice.

So I created some big sculptures, but I wanted to bring attention to this, because this is a Holy Family that I created. It’s almost exactly like the baptismal font, where it swirls. You can see each little fold of the fabric is bringing your eye into that center.

I do believe that this is a very beautiful piece because what it is, is the harmony of the family. And then I’m taking that harmony of the family and I’m using different lines and forms that are harmonious to actually present that nuclear family—nuclear with the baby in the center, the feminine, and then on the margin, the protector male.

I thought that was a very beautiful piece. And again, it’s because of the subject.

Where True Beauty Is

Tim: Actually, I had the honor of having Pope John Paul II bless the sculpture the year before he passed away in Rome.

And The Homeless Jesus is another piece that I created that some people have said is beautiful. And this goes right opposite to the idea of forms and harmony, because I don’t necessarily think there’s anything in here other than the beauty of the Gospels.

Matthew 25: “Whenever you’ve helped the least, you’ve helped me.” And so I think this flies in the face of that.

Other than that, I think the most — and I do believe this is a very beautiful sculpture — I do believe it’s beautiful simply because it’s such a touching, beautiful passage of scripture. Anything, you know, to bring that to life in any way — a song, a piece of artwork, or a painting — it’s going to be beautiful.

I think that’s the key: in order to get a beautiful piece of artwork, you need to have a beautiful subject matter. It’s all about the subject matter. I’ve created many different variations of this, and I think they all have that haunting, forlorn beauty about them.

Discovering Beauty in Scripture and the Saints

Tim: Moving forward with my art, knowing that the idea of beauty actually comes from the subject matter, the more beautiful the subject matter is, the more beautiful your art piece is. It’s almost like you have to be a discoverer of some of the beauty that’s found in the saints and some of the beauty that’s found in scripture — and there’s so much of it.

To pull that out, or actually pull it down from heaven and give it form here in the world, is one of the greatest ideas and responsibilities of a sculptor. To find those gems. The fascinating thing is, I think there are so few representations of some of the eternal truths found in the Bible.

Migrants and Refugees

This is a sculpture Pope Francis installed in St. Peter’s Square. You see the wings there. I was asked to do a sculpture on the idea of migration, immigrants, and refugees. For three years I was thinking about Hebrews 13:2: “Be welcoming to strangers, for many have entertained angels unawares.”

So this raft, with all these migrants from all over the world — in the center there’s an angel, but you can only see its wings because of the crowd of people. I said, this is one of the most beautiful passages in the Bible. Let’s go on the internet and see what artists have done with it in the past. And I couldn’t find very much with Hebrews 13:2. My jaw dropped — I just saw it on coffee cups and little plaques. I thought, there’s so much to do here.

Human Trafficking

After I did that, a couple of years later I actually tackled the same subject matter again. This is another piece on the theme of human trafficking. The Vatican, actually Cardinal Czerny, asked me after I did the Angels Unawares piece in St. Peter’s, if I could do a sculpture to celebrate St. Bakhita and to promote her as a patron saint fighting human trafficking.

This sculpture I spent a year working on. It’s almost like the Pied Piper, where in this case St. Bakhita is lifting up the ground, and the children and the oppressed — the modern-day slaves — are coming out of the ground. It was a haunting year of me studying human trafficking to give form to all these people. There’s a child bride, a beggar, organ-trafficked people in here.

I don’t necessarily know if I can say this is beautiful. It’s haunting. The subject matter is so horrific. The five-foot model bronze is in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City.

Beauty and Abortion

Tim: Other ideas on these themes keep me busy, keep me always thinking about the idea of beauty. I remember I was at the Museum of the Bible, and Cardinal Pierre actually blessed one of my sculptures. He quoted Dostoevsky’s famous line: “Beauty can save the world.”

I went back and thought about it. It was Christmas time, so I created this sculpture of a pregnant Madonna. I thought, if beauty can save the world, if Dostoevsky’s quotation has any truth, shouldn’t we put beauty onto the problem of abortion?

So I started to create a pro-life monument that I would consider very beautiful. It’s a mother and child — or Madonna and Child — except the child happens to be in the womb. I thought about this when I designed it: if I could design a piece that is so unoffensive, so welcoming in its beauty, then just like the baptismal font or the Holy Family, the swirl of it brings your eye into the center part where the child is.

My hope is to use this as a tool that would warm people’s hearts to the idea of children. If I could put it out there in as many places as possible — big, small, whatever — if it could become part of the landscape, this beauty, I think it could really have some power.

It’s interesting — being a Catholic sculptor, I often compare it to other professions or industries. I thought about McDonald’s. If the government said to McDonald’s: you can sell your hamburgers, but you can no longer use visuals — no billboards, no commercials, no fancy fries and hamburgers — but go ahead and sell. They’d probably say, “We won’t make it without visuals. We’ll vanish.”

Then I thought about how the pro-life movement, myself included, has been guilty of using the horror, the horror, the horror so much. Maybe what I have to do is create pieces more like this — celebrations of life. Maybe if that kind of advertisement is pushed out there, that’s how we could come to change.

One last piece I wanted to share. Hebrews 13:2 — the sculpture I did with all the migrants in St. Peter’s Square. I looked at that scripture again and thought: it’s still so beautiful, it deserves more than one sculpture.

So I started to work on other pieces. This is one that was just installed at the National Eucharistic Congress, at St. John the Evangelist Church. They permanently installed it there. “Be welcoming to strangers, for many have entertained angels unawares.”

On one side you see the stranger, and so you can reflect on that beautiful scripture. It’s bringing that scripture onto the street, which I think is splendid, because it’s beautiful — the scripture itself. There’s also one in St. Juan Diego in Rondo, in front of St. Paul’s Shrine.

Beauty is Mysterious

Tim: Anyway, the idea of beauty — it’s a mystery to most people. Artists always struggle with the idea of what is beauty. But I think both of us here are devoted to putting positive images out into society, and I do believe that helps society very much. That’s really our mission.