Want to see the works of Christopher Santer? Look anywhere. His commissioned paintings and drawings are displayed in churches and galleries in 46 states plus Canada, Australia and England. 

Santer, who teaches art at the K-12 Providence Academy in Plymouth, Minn., spoke with Register correspondent Joy Wambeke about the challenges and opportunities of being a Catholic artist and a teacher of his craft.

Does art run in the Santer family genes?

I get a bit of the art bug from both sides of my family: My grandmother on my dad’s side and my mother both have a natural sense about drawing and painting. It has settled among my siblings in an eclectic manner. My younger sister and brother both can draw pretty well but their artistic interests have led them to the performing arts. Another brother has applied his gifts quite successfully in areas of business and technology.

When did you first feel like God was calling you to be an artist, and what was the experience like?

I don’t remember a particular call to be an artist, but I do remember experiences of God calling me. These experiences have been more about trust and surrendering to his will, and were not very easy for me. God’s call to me, repeatedly, is for me to recognize and accept that I am his son and to trust him. Some stones need to be chiseled for a long time. The call to be an artist was always there. From as early as I can remember, art was in me.

Pope John Paul II called artists co-creators with God. How do you connect your painting with your Catholic faith?

To me, the best art contains, in equal measures, beauty and mystery. One could argue that the faith journey also contains these mutual components. It really doesn’t matter the art form; all of them have the ability to reach right inside a person and grab the heart, touch the soul. Music, sculpture, theater — they all can do it. The ability to create beauty and mystery in any art form is definitely an experience of being a co-creator with God.

I seem to have adopted drawing and painting as my artistic outlet because it is the most contemplative and transcendent form of art for me. A person could argue that point for a different form of art and it could be equally true. That would be their reason to be a sculptor, musician or poet.

For me, music is the most emotional, theater the most tactile, sculpture the most defined, poetry the most elusive. Architecture? Well, I must admit, that may be the most transcendent art form of all to me, but I require more immediate results. (Laughs.) Again, to me the best art contains both beauty and mystery. The best paintings will draw me back again and again, each time revealing more mystery but never completely emptying the well.

You teach art to children of all ages. Tell me about these young Christian artists.

They have been an incredible blessing to me. I teach in some capacity in the lower, middle and upper schools at Providence Academy. Working with the students in grades three through five, I have been struck by their love of beauty and their enthusiasm to create. That human impulse to create beauty is in all of us and seems to come out in its purest form at these young ages.

The seventh- and eighth-graders I have in class have surprised me the most. It is an age where the raw enthusiasm to create is clearly overlapping the rapid physiological changes they are experiencing. Energy plus emotion plus the increasing ability to understand adds up to some of the most interesting, enjoyable and sometimes unpredictable classroom experiences.

In the ninth through 12th grades, Studio Art is an elective class at Providence Academy. It attracts the students who have a heightened interest in the visual arts and, often, those with the greatest natural ability. I have been impressed with how rapidly this age group is able to develop, both in technical and intellectual capacities, and with their ability to work through a (technical or compositional) problem in their art.

Do you have any advice for artists who are now only practicing their craft on the side but want to go full-time?

This is a tough one because the realities of working as a full-time artist are so unique to the temperament of each person. If someone has an overwhelming [motivation] to make art every day, I would say that person should go for it. The intense desire to create can often trump the instability and financial roller-coaster of such a career. Artists with that kind of drive find a way to make it work.

In contrast, the four-year period in which I worked exclusively as a studio artist was rather out of balance for me. I found that the more time I had, the less efficient I was with projects. I naturally tend toward a rhythm of intense art-making or none at all, often in cycles as short as two weeks or as long as four months, like a farmer working the field, harvesting and then leaving it fallow.

Personally, I need a counterweight to the isolation of the studio. This is what I mean by the uniqueness of each artist’s situation and temperament.

The non-studio work I have had over the past 10 years, from working full-time for Net (Catholic youth) Ministries, to part-time work at the Minnesota Historical Society, to full-time teaching at Providence Academy, have balanced my career as an artist and have provided fertile ground for the interaction with other people and ideas. I have found this to be essential.

Joy Wambeke writes from

St. Paul, Minnesota.