kaos

Professor Steczynski’s
Apocalypse
APOCALYPSE: Meditations on the Visions of John
http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/cas/relarts/apocalypse/index.html
reviewed by Joel Biroco
When I came across this website in a search on the Great Whore of Babylon, I was
astounded by Professor John Steczynski’s gorgeous drawings covering the entirety of
the Apocalypse, 42 in all, and his imaginative rendition of Babylon’s Beast and the
Great Red Dragon and sought permission to reproduce two of them at high resolution
in KAOS (see pages 2 and 108). The intricacy of the style of fine-line hatching and also
the intensity of the colour, particularly the red of the dragon in otherwise monochrome
images, comes out more than it does in the low resolution scans on the website. Prof
Steczynski, of Boston College, has for the past twenty years made pen and ink drawings
and painted liturgical hangings. He states that his work comes out of the modernist
rejection of explicit religious imagery that has occurred since the 1950s, that has, as he
puts it, “begun to give way to a post-modernist absorption of ethnic traditions strongly
imbued with religious themes”. His choice to focus on the Apocalypse of St John during
his sabbatical leave in 1997–1998 was inspired by the forthcoming millennium, given
that many people associate “millennium” with the Apocalypse. He expands on this:
There was a more pressing impetus, however. The extreme right might try to find ways
to manipulate the appeal that the Apocalypse already has for Christians of a more
fundamentalist orientation to promote its own political agendas for the millennium. I
wanted my Apocalypse to remain true to John’s vision, manifesting its full intensity. At
the same time I wanted to embody a broader, more humanitarian understanding than
others might, avoiding vindictive divisions into black/white, good/evil, us/them. I wished
to affirm a God of love.
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