Art and Soul

With a Vancouver Art Gallery show at age 16, William
Harold Massey was destined for artistic fame. Instead he chose monastic life—and became one of the world's great frescoists.

By Meg Johnstone; photographs by John Sinal

Perched high on a scaffold, the stooped figure dips his brush into blue pigment. Arched ceiling beams frame him against a luminous fresco that covers a wall 20 feet high and 31 feet wide. Below, a group of arts students watches. As the artist cuts a line of deep blue against yesterday's ochre, students edge forward. Shutters click and camcorders whirr. The stooped figure spins to face the lenses. "I'm just drawing a line," he says, brows furrowed but eyes gleaming. "You guys are expecting too much."

Father Dunstan Massey's modest response is characteristic; he prefers to work outside the public gaze. For nearly 60 years, mostly unnoticed by the outside world, he has been producing world-class works of sacred art at the Westminster Abbey Benedictine Monastery in Mission, east of Vancouver. His work in resurrecting the nearly obsolete art form of fresco is, in part, why this arts class has come to see him at work on what will probably be his last large-scale fresco.

Titled The Heavenly Banquet, the fresco has been a long time in the making, and represents the culmination of a life that merges religion and art. "People will be impressed by the variety of media he has worked in," says Dal Schindell, Director of the Lookout Art Gallery at Regent College, which will show Massey's work next month, "and by the large scale of some of his works, even if they don't understand the specific imagery."

The religious imagery grows out of a fascinating combination of influences. Born William Harold Massey on April 16, 1924, Father Dunstan is the only child of an east Vancouver family with deep Canadian roots. Grandfather ran a garage behind the old Strand Theatre (in which Massey remembers riding an elephant housed there for the theatre's vaudeville
circus) and father was a marine engineer who ran a taxi fleet that Massey believes was the first in town to use meters.

As a child growing up near 10th and Main, Massey showed great promise. At 15, he began art classes under Jack Shadbolt at the Vancouver School of Art (now Emily Carr). He read through the entire art and philosophy sections at the old Vancouver library. And he drew constantly—flying machines, cathedrals, mythological creatures—catching even Shadbolt off guard. "I was a little greenhorn in art class," Massey recalls. "Jack was teaching us linocuts, and I did a linocut of a figure struggling with a serpent—kind of mythological. Jack said, 'Where'd you copy that?' and I said, 'I didn't. I got it out of my head.'"

His talent also drew the attention of contralto Isabelle Burnada, who took Massey in tow, introducing him to the Vancouver upper crust and eventually convincing influential Amy Buckerfield (of Buckerfield Seed Company) to finance his art education.

"My mother almost lost patience," Massey remembers. "Every five minutes [Burnada] would phone up and say, 'Bill must go and see this group of people,' and so I'd have to cart all my paper bags with my pictures. But she was absolutely fearless." She also engineered his one-man show at the Vancouver Art Gallery at the age of 16; Massey's the youngest person to have had that honour.

Amy Buckerfield took Massey to meet Group of Seven founder Lawren Harris. The Buckerfields regularly visited Harris' home near Bellevue and Blanca to listen to the painter's impressive phonographic sound system. "He was kind enough to let me have a look in his studio," Massey remembers. "It was the most immaculate studio—all plain white, northern exposure, big plate glass work tables: spotless. His paintings were very careful in that way, too. I showed him my work, but of course I wasn't operating on his wavelength. He was doing his famous landscapes and verging toward abstract art. He was quite a progressive modernist."

Massey's extensive reading had brought him in contact with mystic Bernard of Clairvaux's On the Love of God and Montalembert's Monks of the West. For Massey, these works presented a "unified vision" of life in 12th and 13th century Europe, where the highest aspirations of every human skill—science, art, economics, all the crafts and trades—were brought together under the umbrella of God. This picture of wholeness offered an antidote to modern society. "I saw modern life as disjointed and haphazard," Massey says. "I wanted to do something more serious with my life. I wanted to give a spiritual goal to my life, and I could see that art could figure into monasticism, because art was traditionally practiced in monasteries."

Arthur Lismer of the Group of Seven invited Massey to study in Toronto, but his path lay elsewhere. "I didn't want to become a Group of Seven painter of landscapes, and I didn't want to become an abstract modernist. I wanted to paint religious works. I was very much influenced by the old masters. Some of the great masterpieces just put me into an ecstasy."

His decision to join the monastery was, in part, a rejection of modernism. "Art has a deeper substratum of meaning. I never believed that the artist's techniques should be equated with the whole meaning of a painting, so early on I rejected the modernists' position of 'art for art's sake.' One of the problems with modern artists is that, no matter how much they want to communicate, their intensely subjective approach often is a barrier. I wanted my art to widen out and be open to all the significant things in human life. And besides," he adds with a twinkle in his eye, "where else would I find someone to finance a fresco?"

At 18, Massey began Grade 9 at the Seminary of Christ the King, housed at the time, ironically, in the building now known as the Jack Shadbolt Centre. Four years after graduating from high school, he made his first profession of the monastic vows of poverty, chastity, obedience, stability and conversion, and received the religious name Dunstan.

In the 57 years Massey has been living out his monastic vows at the Abbey, he's created dozens of works across a spectrum of disciplines, including his two large-scale frescos, murals and paintings, stained glass, high- and full-relief sculptures, books of illustrated poetry, plays and film. He also designed much of the furniture and adornment found in the monastery's many buildings.

He first drew sketches for the fresco nearly 30 years ago. Soon after he received approval for the project, in 1978, Abbot Eugene Medved, the Abbey's first abbot, asked Massey instead to begin 22 high relief sculptures for the interior of the new Abbey Church, which delayed the fresco project until 1997. After eight years of solid work, The Heavenly Banquet was finally completed last November. But there would be further complications. The sudden death of Abbot Maurus Macrae brought a new abbot, Father John Braganza, who felt that a public dedication of the fresco would be disruptive to monastic life. And so, after 30 years of struggle, conflict and heartache, Massey's pièce de résistance quietly graces the wall of the monks' dining room, seen only by the monks and a few seminary students.

Light streams in the refectory's high windows, giving the fresco unexpected depth. The piece, which covers the entire back wall, mimics the flow of the arched beams of the hall; the ever-receding sea behind the apostles effectively extends the room infinitely, into an unseen realm. The Heavenly Banquet, says Massey, is a "projection of The Last Supper into eternity.
"I've kept the apostles in the traditional order, except I replace Judas with Matthias. You see the figure next to Jesus—I've portrayed John as a young man, in keeping with tradition, but he's a man—not a woman!" Massey laughs, revelling in this small chance to refute The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown's fiction phenomenon from 2003. "That book's so full of errors," says Massey, "it makes your head spin."

Massey's fresco and Da Vinci's Last Supper have two things in common: both are painted on the walls of monastic refectories, and both have the Last Supper theme. But, says Trevor Carolan, arts writer and director of Literary Arts for the Banff Centre, Massey's work is in a "rugged, modern style—there's weight and gravity to it—it doesn't have that fine classical edge." He calls Massey's art "rustic, worker art that comes out of a life of discipline and service." Carolan says that in Massey's earlier fresco, The Temptation of St. Benedict, "he was cutting his own path, working in a modern, futuristic, geometric style similar to today's computer games. It strikes people as unusual that a religious person, in a very traditional sense, would still be so progressive."

The concept of resurrection and the life to come is a constant in Massey's body work; his recently published book of illustrated poetry, The Mystic Mountain, probes the same theme. All this creative energy has made him something of a challenge to the three abbots under whom he has served at the monastery. Even now, at 82, he's full of ideas: a cast bronze crucifix for the chapel, suspended in mid-air, viewable from either side because the figure of Christ will be in profile. Two more cement sculptures for the church, one of the Entombment and one of the Resurrection. A series of fourteen stations of the Cross for the cloister walk. Plus he has a redesign for the screen, choir stall and furniture of the church. "Oh, there's no stopping the visionary," Massey says, almost apologetically. "An artist has very little control over it, in a way. He gets these inspirations, and he'll try to bring them about."

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