Religious art tells a sacred story, functioning as education, history or as a kind of visual preaching. Often, it attempts to encourage right behavior or sustain faith.
The religious art of Walter Rane does all of the above while also managing to be highly engaging.
Each of Rane's paintings demonstrates the artist's mastery of dynamic composition, manipulated surfaces, color and anatomically correct figures; each painting tells its story with narrative poignancy and visual flair — qualities often missing from much of the religious art produced in Utah.
"We haven't seen an artist like Walter Rane in the (LDS) church for many years," said Robert Davis, senior curator of art at the Museum of Church History and Art. "Actually, he does things that Harry Anderson didn't even do, especially in the aesthetic, the psychological penetration."
Rane decided to become an artist at a very early age. "Like any child," he said in a recent interview, "I was fascinated with art, and I never lost that fascination; I've always wanted to be an artist."
Because Rane "wanted to be able to draw and paint the human figure like Michelangelo and Rembrandt," he studied at the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles, one of the only schools in the country during the early '70s that still taught anatomy and classical drawing.
"Even though Art Center was (and still is) a commercial art school, they had a faculty that taught the discipline of drawing like the old masters." The program, however, trained him to be an illustrator, "which was good because at that time I could make a living."
After college, Rane went to New York to work as a free-lance book and magazine illustrator; he remained there for 21 years. Some of his clients were Random House, Reader's Digest, Bantam Books, The Rockefeller Group, Time-Life and National Geographic.
"Instead of wanting to be like other illustrators, I've always wanted to paint like Rubens, Rembrandt and Michelangelo," said Lane. "Not that I could ever approach them, but that's what my standard is and that's what I look at all the time.
Six years ago, Rane gave up living on the East Coast, along with the headache of painting on deadline, and moved his family to Oregon.
"My wife's from Oregon," he said. "I figured I would be a landscape painter so I could still make a living."
But Rane longed to paint the figurative subject matter the masters painted. When the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints announced an art contest, he entered a painting of his wife toweling off their baby daughter after a bath. (This work is now on loan to the State Department in Copenhagen.)
"We were very impressed," said Davis. "I told him how much we liked his work and might be interested in purchasing some."
Soon thereafter, the LDS Church commissioned Lane to do a mural for its Visitors Center at Winter Quarters, Neb. "I enjoyed the project so much, it just sort of slapped me in the face," Rane said. "This is what I should be doing; it was what I'd always wanted to do."
On his own, he began producing paintings based on scriptural passages. One day, Rane called Davis at the museum in Salt Lake City. "He told me he had some religious paintings that he'd like to show me," said Davis. Because Davis' daughter lives in Oregon — not far from Salem, where Rane lives — he agreed to stop by when he visited her.
Davis said he was "blown away with all his commercial illustration and his art of many, many categories." Then Rane showed him the religious pieces he'd been working on. The painting of Peter healing a lame man impressed Davis so much, he presented it to the committee, they accepted it, and the Museum purchased it.
"After I did the Visitor Center's mural for Winter Quarters, it kind of opened the floodgates, and I started thinking of all these ideas," Lane said. "I did 'The Last Supper' and 'Christ Healing the Blind Man.' I had a lot of fun."
Lane has been commissioned to do other paintings for the LDS Church, but none has the visual energy or the spiritual power of the ones he conceives and paints by himself. Lane believes this is because the selection committee worries that somebody might be offended by something in the painting.
"I'd never want to paint something that would offend anyone," said Lane. "But I do want to widen people's appreciation of things while enlightening them. Sometimes when you worry so much about offending people, nobody gets enlightened."
In Rane's painting, "Alma, Arise" (oil on panel) — a work the church used in its August Ensign magazine, inside front cover — the visiting angel appears to the five rebellious Nephites in a dramatic flash of flowing robes and vigorous limbs. This is the only way Rane can see it. He has never been able to understand why angels painted in the LDS Church are always standing straight up.
"I don't quite understand it," he said. "When I look at the works of Peter Paul Rubens, I love how he would create emotions through different compositions of diagonal and swirling lines. But I'm just trying to do things that are beautiful and not compare myself to others who are doing the same subject matter."
Rane hopes people will find his religious paintings interesting. But because the subject matter is so familiar, he's fearful people will say it's been done before.
"It's true," Lane said. "They have been done before. Rembrandt did 'Dinner at Emaus' probably 20 times. Well, I saw it slightly different, so I did it. I'm not trying to compare myself with Rembrandt, I just wanted to do my own version."
But Rane's versions of scriptural stories are eliciting comparisons to the masters as well as inspiring viewers. Nothing could make him happier.
E-MAIL: gagon@desnews.com