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In this painting she is seated with her lap open to all who are finding life difficult and seek her intercession. With one hand she is holding aloft a golden Monstrance containing the Eucharistic presence of Christ, representing when she held aloft the same Eucharistic presence when various marauding armies came to lay siege to Assisi during the 13th Century and from which shone so bright a light of heaven from the Monstrance that those same armies fled, leaving the city and convent of the Poor Clares safe from harm and destruction.
In recent times there have been social media testimonies of women being visited by St Clare when in deep difficulty, and saying, ‘here are my soft hands, here is my soft lap’. These graces have resulted in significant conversions. Vincent Cavanagh 3 July 2025 Comments closed |
| | After having received them from the printers this morning, I can announce that my 2025 Calendar is now available for the coming year. The 2025 Calendar is a return both to sharing my artwork as well as the saints (and not yet declared saints) of the Catholic Church. — Cost for the 2025 Calendars is $30 AUD each, plus postage (within Australia), with a deal for three (3) calendars at $80 AUD. — Postage is as follows: +$3 AUD for 1 calendar +$4 AUD for 2* +$6 AUD for 3* * delivered in the same envelope. — For International postal orders we will arrange Air Mail costs appropriately, on an order-by-order basis. You can place your order through the form found under the Contact page or by messaging me via Facebook, or talk to me in person. Vincent Cavanagh 28 Nov 2024 |
Eileen could not stand or walk for much of her life due to a severe curvature of her spine from having fallen out of her perambulator (pram) at a young age. The extent of her height was 3 feet 9 inches (115 centimetres) from which was given the affectionate nickname of The Little Mother.
She lived most of her life at Coogee, a suburb of Sydney, except for when God healed her enough to go to Rome to obtain approval of her fledgling religious order. Such was her determination, that the rigours of travel did not deter her.
Despite being bedridden most of the time, Eileen was the hub of the order. She co-ordinated much through telephone calls. At the end of the day, she welcomed the Nurses home, and received their confidences. Having been so chronically ill herself, she knew just how much kindness and tenderness were needed in caring for the ill and the elderly, and how important it was to maintain the dignity of anyone they ministered to.
She died at the age of 28 from chronic spinal tuberculosis and exhaustion.
On Friday 16 August 2024, Archbishop of Sydney Anthony Fisher OP officially signed off on the collated Australian documentation of Eileen O’Connor’s life for the Cause of Sainthood. And on Monday 14 October 2024, Archbishop Fisher formally presented the documentation in Rome to Cardinal Marcello Semeraro, Prefect of the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints.
For further information about the life and work of Eileen O’Connor and the story of the Sisters of Our Lady’s Nurse of the Poor, visit the website for the Cause of Eileen’s Canonization here.
And as a clarifier, this step of the Canonization process is seeking for her to be recognized and approved by the Vatican as a Blessed; the step before being named a Saint in the Catholic Church.
Vincent Cavanagh
16 October 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.”
Vincent Cavanagh
22 August 2024
| | 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. |
Speaking of substack pages, one that I’ve been gravitating back to of late—and isn’t as overly swimming in bar graphs or generally depressing as others—is the School of the Unconformed by Ruth Gaskovski. For about the past year(?) or so she has been doing shared essays with her husband Peco that they cross-post between each other’s substack page (Peco’s is Pilgrims in the Machine).
The general theme of their essays is regaining man’s [1] humanity from both the jaws and bowels of the inhuman Machine world we now find ourselves living in.
Of which this quote by Ruth from their recent article, ‘Building People with Three-Dimensional Memory’, is an example:
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
LLAP
‘Live Long and Prosper’ 🖖
rekt
Internet form of ‘Wrecked’.
🗿 Moai (Easter Island Head) emoji.
Used to communicate a deadpan or shocked/embarrassed-into-speechlessness expression.
Or alternatively—if in Japan—used to arrange meeting up with people at the Moyai statue near Shibuya Station in Tokyo.
IYKYK
‘If You Know, You Know’
Vietnamese “teencodes”:
Hixx or Hixxxxx – written version of 😢 (crying face emoji).
Huhu – written version of 😭 (loudly crying face – or as I know it, ‘waterfall tears’).
TIL
‘Today I Learned.’
ily / ILY
‘I Love You.’
Not to be confused with illy, the Italian Espresso company.
bby / BBY
Internet alternative form of ‘Baby’. (ex. ‘Woohoo BBY!’)
More often used when using ‘baby’ as a term of endearment.
RTFM
‘Read The … Manual!’
Often used within the Linux user community forums.
Jubilee 2025
More information about the pilgrimage can be found here.
I do—and I ask that you reading this likewise—not expect this to in any way be a regular or (dear God save me) quarterly affair. It is my estimation that RANDOM Things be more of an ‘every now and then’ or just ‘I haven’t painted anything, but here’s what’s been kicking around in my head recently’ type of blog post.
So until the next one of these not-newsletters eventuates; Peace and Happy Feast of St Peter and St Paul.
Vincent Cavanagh
29 June 2024
[1] As in the genus man (mankind) of which both men and woman, male and female, make up the whole category (ex., “earth men” and “Men of Earth”) – for the peculiarly post-Age of Aquarius pedants out there.
Painted 14 March 2024
Vincent Cavanagh, 2024
Leaving the histrionics aside, the photograph that this picture of St Joseph and the child Jesus is based upon was taken at a local church just before mass. A father was sitting with his family in a pew, about three rows over, holding his sleeping youngest son over his shoulder. One of those “take a photo or regret it”–moments from God.
In the end, very little actually changed from the photograph—well, apart from changing clothes to robes, adding head coverings, and including hair on the back of St Joseph’s head, of course.
| Holy Family (detail), William Holman Hunt, The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple, 1860 ( Reference ) | Colour–wise, I do admit taking a very strong inspiration from Pre-Raphaelite artist William Holman Hunt’s The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple, his effort of producing an ethnographically correct depiction of “Christ Among the Doctors” (of the Jewish Law), for which he travelled through the Middle East searching first-hand for information about Jewish customs and finding models for the figures he wished to depict. He was very specific in including Biblical symbolism in his work: the colours of Jesus’ robes being the same blue, purple, and crimson that God instructed Moses to use for the veils in the Tent of Meeting as well as in the robes for Aaron the High Priest (Exodus 26 and 28, respectively). The one–and–a–half day deadline (getting back to the histrionics) was because the whole reason behind this rush was the intention to gift a printed version of ‘St Joseph and Jesus (2024)’ to the housemates of the Joseph House, a men's discernment house in the Diocese of Broken Bay, at a youth event on the night of the day after the day I had left to paint the picture by. |
In the end the picture was printed (Thank God!) and present to the housemates, and it should now be hanging somewhere inside Joseph House.
Vincent Cavanagh
19 Mar 2024
Ask God before you leap into things whether you should be leaping into them at all.
P.S. Also, the writing was the reason that I only had a single day left to paint Joseph and Jesus. (Face palm) Oi vey!
| St Andrew Dũng-Lạc was a Vietnamese Catholic priest who was martyred under the Nguyễn dynasty in Việt Nam (Vietnam) with his fellow priest and countryman St Peter Phạm Truong Vǎn Thi by beheading. They were both named among the 117 Vietnamese Martyrs who were canonised by Pope John Paul II on 19 June 1988. Fuller histories of both St Andrew Dũng-Lạc and St Peter Thi can be found on the Santi e Beati website: St Andrew Dũng-Lạc St Peter Phạm Truong Vǎn Thi The Memorial of St Andrew Dũng-Lạc and his companions, Vietnames martyrs, is on 24 November. Vincent Cavanagh 25 Nov 2023 |
Painted 18 Jul 2023.
| St Charles Lwanga, one of the Ugandan Martyrs. He was a strong protector of young men from sexual predation and advocate of chastity. He was martyred at the age of 26 when he refused to renounce his faith in Christ Jesus, in the year 1886. For a far more in-depth look at St Charles Lwanga than I could ever attempt, read this reflection by Bishop Robert Barron on Word on Fire here. And for the histories other Martyrs of Uganda, visit the Basilica of the Ugandan Martyrs Catholic Shrine, Namugongo, website here. Vincent Cavanagh 20 Jul 2023 |
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