Vincent Cavanagh © 2024

On this Feast Day of The Queenship of the Blessed Virgin Mary (22 August), I am relieved to finally reveal my attempt at portraying the apparition of Our Blessed Mother in 1798 to gathered Vietnamese Christians taking refuge from the persecution by the Nguyen Dynasty in the jungle forest in central Việt Nam, near the village of Quang Tri. The origins of this project go back to November last year (2023) with a visit to the seminary used by the Diocese, but research for this painting started in earnest on 5 July 2024. For more information about the apparition and Pope John Paul II’s later involvement read this detailed summary about Our Lady of La Vang at The Miracle Hunter website here.

One evening, according to tradition, a lady of great beauty appeared to the refugees in the jungle, clad in white and surrounded by light, holding the infant Jesus in her arms, with two charming boys holding torches at her side. The lady walked back and forth several times in front of the Christians, her feet touching the ground.
Even the non-Christians who were there witnessed the vision.​”

If only that were my jawline.

Apart from a small handful of photo-edited pictures that will never be seen outside of its intended audience in a group chat of my peers, I’ve been in a creative drought since about the end of March/start of April this year (2024). Being sick at home for the last three weeks of May with whatever strain of influenza is going around this winter didn’t help my creative juices either. Also, this drought overlapping with my general backwards slide into doom-scrolling and wasted hours poured away to YouTube videos. ​Let’s be honest, the act of “doom-scrolling” is not the sole purview of life-sucking social media applications.

The incessant distraction of interfacing with devices leaves us feeling as if our brain and our body are forever in a different place. It almost seems as if we are in a race to upload our life into the virtual universe. Our desire to capture and share the present is numbing our ability to form natural memories of the moments we want to actually treasure. By excessively documenting our lives artificially Marshall McLuhan might say we are “autoamputating” our memory.

When we use our devices as memory keepers, we not only interfere with the formation of long-term memories, but we also flatten our experience and personal identity into a one-dimensional digitized version of ourselves.”

Some segments of the culture might experience a carefree insouciance as they become largely forgetful of what has come before—the wisdom, knowledge, and traditions of history—and more gripped by the here-and-now stimulation of their screens.
​
As real Alzheimer's progresses, there is not only memory loss, but disorientation, anxiety, depression, aggressive behavior (…) Reliance on a support system of machines to hold our collective memories is a formula for docility. When Steve Jobs brought us [the] Apple computer we were promised bicycles for the mind, but many of us feel we’re ending up with cognitive wheelchairs.”

I know the more palatable answer here is to speak of digital well-being and balance and how to successfully navigate the algorithm in a way that we can consume the good without the bad. But we can’t. Just like any mind-altering drug we might ingest, social media makes it so we are not in control of the experience we’ll have immediately after. And I can no longer see any potential reward in delivering our God-given brains to a [tattooed] group of tech bros in Silicon Valley.”

~ (emphasis my own)

Keepin’ Up wit’ Gen Z

Jubilee 2025