CONTEMPLATIVE ARTIST

 

A fascinating artist of many of my favorite saints is KREG YINGST. 
Kreg is obviously a very contemplative man, as he uses his art for prayer.
He is both a painter and a self-taught printmaker. Through a series, or “body of work,” he has a personal vision of his subject.

One example is  his reaction to the school shooting at Sandy Hook in 2012. He had two young daughters at the time and was deeply moved by the loss those parents were enduring. He decided to carve one prayer a week for the entire year. Those images became “Light from Darkness: Portraits and Prayers” ($29.95). All proceeds  he donated to orphanages. 

He started out as a printmaker. His initial printmaking influences were the book illustrators and WPA artists of the 1930’s. All of his original works are created from carved blocks of wood, linoleum, or other materials, and printed onto paper, board, or wood using an antique Showcard proof press. 

A native of Illinois, Kreg studied art at Trinity University in San Antonio where he received his BA after attending the University of Texas (1978-’80).  In 1996 he received an MA in painting from Eastern Illinois University. After graduation, he taught art for thirteen years and has been a full time artist since 2003.

Trained as a painter, Kreg developed a passion for relief block prints, after discovering the black and white wordless woodcut novels of Belgian Illustrator Frans Masereel and his American counterpart, Lyd Ward. He was inpired by works of the German Expressionists and Mexican Social Realists.  Like these movements, he makes “message art,” informed by issues of social justice. 

His larger works are hand-burnished using the back of a spoon. Some of the images are printed multiple times with different blocks to create colored layers, or in some cases, are individually hand-painted using watercolor. He says of his work: “I like the fact that someone can receive something made directly from my hand.”

During the pandemic, Kreg found a large audience for his body of work on sacred themes, ranging from portraits of the Virgin Mary and Celtic saints to illustrations of the Psalms and the life of Saint Francis of Assisi with special suites of prints on the Passion of Christ.

 Creating block prints by hand is a way for Kreg to engage with the world and with God. He set up Starving Artist Books in 2005 to publish his own titles, including illustrated editions of the Psalms, a history of blues music, and the writings of Brother Lawrence, using the proceeds to support international charities. 

His church-sponsored volunteer work with marginalized people in Pensecola, Florida, where he now lives, inspired "Glory among the Ruins: The Homeless Project", a portfolio of 15-linocut portraits of homeless men, accompanied by meditations on their life stories.

 Kreg believes his slow and tedious artistic method nurtures his contemplative side, “keeping him centered and introspective”. Before he begins work each morning, in a bedroom in his home converted into a studio, he pauses for a prayer, a connection with God that continues into his art-making.

His book, Everything Could be a Prayer: 100 Portraits of Saints and Mystics, with portrait prints of saints and mystics who developed disciplines for living in isolation relevant to our own time in and out of lockdown, can be found at Amazon. He says: “I’m studying people who have wrestled with their passions and triumphed with God.”  The title of the book comes from a quote by St. Martin de Porres.  The book features a a mixed bag of people from various spiritual walks, from hermits to Harriet Tubman, but all have in common some point of contact with Christ.

 His art is found in numerous international private and corporate collections, including Purdue University and the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art in Charleston, SC.

It seems Kreg puts Christ at the center of not only his work but his life. “I feel like I’m the one to bridge the gap, to educate myself, and to find people who are wrestling in their own faith, and have found this connection in their own right, and to share that. I look at it as the tree.

 Jesus is the roots, and the stump began to grow when the Church was birthed. You have the schism with the East and the West and another split with the Protestants, and now you’re looking at a tree with a hundred tiny branches. But I like to think they can all trace back down to the root.” (Quote “Our Sunday Visitor” July 20, 2023 -  Simcha Fisher)

 “My whole lineage goes through Jesus. He was my contact point on that day 35 years ago. I called out, and he was that one that answered. He was the one who was my friend, my savior, and everything else. I come from a Christology, a cruciform. I see God through the cruciform Christ. He becomes the center of everything else.”

He has a great love of the Desert Fathers as well as the Celtic saints.  Here is an artist who knows the saints and in his "primative" art, conveys their spirit.