Tom Mayhall Rastrelli

Statesman Journal

Six years ago, Mount Angel Abbey's serene hilltop campus shook, as leather-clad Bobby Love rolled in on his motorcycle. Love removed his helmet revealing pierced ears and a mop of dreadlocks. With tattoos on his hands, arms and neck, he looked like an extra on "Sons of Anarchy" not a someone attending a retreat for those who might become Catholic monks.

"One of my biggest fears is being a cliche," Love said.

As a child, Love rebelled against his successful father, a successful businessman who didn't think art was a real career.

"I made a commitment to live by my brushes. I was going to make my living as an artist, and I wasn't going to compromise," Love said. "One of the first things I did was I got my knuckles and my neck tattooed, because back in those days, in the late 80s and early 90s, we called them 'job stoppers.' You are completely unemployable once you get your hands and your neck tattooed."

As he dismounted his bike at the discernment retreat, he was aware of the images on his skin and the absurdity of his arrival.

"It was pretty funny," Love said. "I rode up here on my motorcycle and was just like, 'What?' They were doing the same. They were looking at me like, 'What?' "

Prior of Mount Angel Abbey Vincent Trujillo remembers that moment.

"We tried not to be judgmental looking at his appearance, but it certainly makes an impression," Trujillo said. "We welcome everybody to those discernment retreats."

Love spent the weekend learning about the Benedictine way of life.

"The checking out worked both ways," Trujillo said. "He was observing and so were we."

"I stayed the weekend, had a wonderful time and then kind of went away," Love said. "With an idea that this is a option, not part of my options but an option for somebody."

Monk

Six years later, Love's lean frame sports a black tunic and scapular. His brown hair is trimmed close to the scalp. As he stands in his choir stall praying Noon Prayer with nearly 50 monks, John Lennon glasses and a 3-inch goatee distinguish him from the others. So do his tattoos.

Above the neckline of his black hood, his neck tattoos remain. His hands are marked with a spiderweb, women's faces, an alpha and omega, and "HOLD FAST" on his knuckles. A red heart marks his palm. His name is Love after all.

His first name is no longer Bobby. He's "Brother Andre," named after an uneducated man who wanted to join the highly-educated Order of the Holy Cross. They didn't know what to do with him so they made him the church's doorman. Andre prayed with visitors. His prayers were answered, and he's remembered now as a saint.

Curator

In 2010, Mount Angel's monastic leadership made Love assistant to the curator of the abbey's museum.

"I was supposed to unlock the doors and clean the toilet," Love said.

When the curator was transferred to Portland, Love realized that the collection needed care and stepped up. He had no idea what he was doing.

The abbey's collection is overwhelming and eclectic containing a taxidermy collection of North American animals and pottery from before the birth of Christ. Storage shelves are packed with statues of saints, Japanese artifacts, oil lamps and preserved snakes and puffer fish. There's even a gourd carved by Walt Disney.

"It's like a garden," Love said . "If you don't weed it, you get some crazy plants."

Since the19th century, people have been bequeathing collections to the monastery. Many items are unmarked. Others have been recorded in an old card catalog that was a good effort but is outdated.

Love separated the artifacts and museum items from the paintings and art. He discovered pockets of art stored across the campus in attics and basements. He consolidated the abbey's art into a separate basement.

"My main job is to try to interpret all of this and come up with some sort of theme of how it fits the mission of the monastery," Love said.

"Brother Andre is not one to balk a challenge. This is certainly a challenge," Trujillo said. "It's not something he's going to be able to be on top of in a year. It's going to be a long time."

Love consulted staff members from Hallie Ford Museum of Art, Salem Art Association and the Bush Barn Art Center. Some have volunteered time, teaching him to handle, catalog, photograph and store the artifacts and art properly. He's building a digital database for the inventory he hopes will be a tool for public scholarship.

"A singular kind of devotion permeates everything he does, including his curatorial responsibilities at the Abbey," Catherine Alexander, former curator at Bush Barn Art Center, said. "He isn't content just to be a custodian of curiosities. He wants to raise the bar with respect to how the Abbey museum interprets and exhibits its collection."

Intercessor

"Curator is what keeps me busy and keeps me out of trouble," Love said. "The prayer is my real job."

At 5:20 a.m., 6:30 a.m., 7:55 a.m., 11:55 a.m., 5:15 p.m. and 7:25 p.m., the abbey's bells ring. (Love also cares for the bell tower.) When they sound, nearly 50 brother monks go to the chapel.

"We're not just praying for ourselves. We're praying for the world. This prayer is constantly going on," Love said. "It's just this ongoing flow that we jump into when it's our turn."

They sit in pews in opposing choirs. Those who have been in the order longest sit in the back. The newest entries sit in front. Love is still in the front row. Trujillo said the community's median age is between 55 and 60.

Five of the gatherings are for the Liturgy of the Hours, in which they pray the Psalter. Over the course of two weeks they chant all 150 psalms. The sixth time they meet is for Mass.

Many monastic orders base their lives on the Rule of Saint Benedict. Some maintain a strict observance focused on prayer and contemplation. They practice silence and rarely leave the monastery. Others interpret the Rule loosely focusing on active ministries, such as teaching and service outside of the monastery.

"Mount Angel is a nice middle ground," Love said.

They run a seminary and interact with the outside world. They observe silence during the Grand Silence, between Compline (night prayer) which ends at 8 p.m. until after Mass around 9 a.m. During this time, they only speak in prayer. They also are silent during meals while one monk reads. They just finished "The Great Comeback" about Richard Nixon.

"It's awesome," Love said. "I get to read as many as a half a dozen books per year that I never would have read just by going to meals."

They have 30 minutes of recreation after lunch and 90 after dinner. They play cards and discuss life. They occasionally go to movies, restaurants and coffee shops.

"He gets the work done but knows how to let his hair down even though he doesn't have any anymore," Trujillo said of Love. "He knows when the appropriate times are for being deliberate and for letting loose a little ... Just because we're monks doesn't mean we don't know how to have a good time."

Artist

Art has been in Love's life for as long as he can recall. He grew up in Texas and Mississippi, with two older and two younger sisters in a Catholic family. His mother painted.

"I loved watching her paint. She would paint murals on the sliding glass door in the summer time to make sure we didn't run through it," Love said.

He took to painting but quit high school and church in 11th grade, joined the Army and served five years during Operation Desert Storm. He left from the military disillusioned, swore to live by his art without a conventional job and got his job-stopping hand and neck tattoos.

Living in New York, he discovered he could make $100 per hour tattooing. To exhibit his designs, he painted with watercolor.

"There's a lot of correlation between the techniques of watercolor and tattooing as far as the layering of colors and translucency of colors," Love said. "It's basically the principle of trying to push around the puddles of pigment without damaging the paper or skin."

But he still didn't consider himself as the "real artist" he aspired to be. He was an applied artist. Everything he painted — airplanes, boats, murals, clothing and furniture — had a function.

"I'll paint your toenails, anything," Love said. "Just don't make me get a real job."

He developed a reputation as a tattoo artist. He moved every few years — New York, New Orleans, Seattle, Austin. He had friends and material comfort.

"Everything said I should be happy, but I felt very alone and adrift. I looked at myself and realized that I had become a product," Love said. "I was doing art not as personal expression but for what the kids want, what the kids would shell out the coin for."

It had become about money, brand and ego. It had become about drugs and booze. He'd left his family and divorced three times.

"I had no clue what love was. I had no clue how to love or how to let other people love me and that's why I was miserable," Love said.

He admitted being an addict.

"The addiction was only a symptom of a greater problem ... spiritual bankruptcy," Love said. "I came to the realization that I need God. I needed to be a whole person in the sense that it's not just about the material or the physical, but there was a whole spiritual dynamic that I had completely ignored."

He withdrew to treat his addiction and took "normal" nine-to-five jobs that allowed him time to think. He tried to reconcile his life.

"I looked down at my arms and realized I had nothing but hate and anger on my arms. It was a self-defense mechanism, and it worked," Love said.

He had changed, but his appearance hadn't. Because tattoo removal then wasn't very good, he had his arms tattooed black. The ink poisoned him making him sick.

"I did it, because I wanted people to ask me, 'What does that mean?' rather than assuming something that wasn't true about me," Love said.

After joining the monastery, he asked the abbot's permission remove the tattoos on his hands and neck. The abbot asked him to keep them.

"It's not so much a reminder," Love said. "It's part of who I am."

In 2006, he moved to Salem and returned to the Catholic Church. He had investigated a number of religions but decided to see what his childhood religion was about.

"I basically had to relearn the faith as an adult," Love said. "I had a lot of questions as a kid that I didn't understand. When you're raised in the faith you just do it. I just wanted to know why we did it."

He recorded 25 years of his sins and took the pages to confession. He completed the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults learning the basics of his faith. He apologized to those he'd hurt. He lived in Newport for a year.

"I sat on the beach for two years trying to figure out what just happened," Love said. "What does this all mean now that I'm back in the church? How do I live my life according to my faith?"

He lived a hermetic lifestyle in a simple studio discerning what it meant to be a Christian artist.

"And again, without trying to be cliche," Love said. "I don't want to just sit there and just paint all those saccharine sweet images of Christ and the saints in the same styles that has been done. Especially with all the emotionalism. I was trying to find my voice again."

Iconographer

Today he paints in a studio at the monastery in 20-minute increments between responsibilities.

"I had to let go of everything I thought about work and production," Love said. "It's not about what I can get done but about my relationship with God."

He is working on a Byzantine icon of Saint Stephen's stoning and a Beuronese icon of the Seven Sorrows of Mary, one of which has been commissioned by a parish.

"In both of these, there's an element of anonymity," Love said. "It's not about the artist."

At his superiors' request, he studied iconography. He embraced the ancient methods of depicting stylized religious figures with symbolic colors and postures.

"The way he's developed has been remarkable," Tujillo said. "There's a real sensitivity to what he does. His use of color, his us of expression has been very refined. There's something that's very sensitive about the way he presents the figures in his icons and his painting."

Love spoke passionately about the story behind each icon he was painting and each piece of art he was cataloging. He continues to reflect upon his own story and his first visit to Mount Angel when a friend brought him to see an image he wanted tattooed on his chest.

"I was introduced to the place and it sort of stuck in my head because of the architecture, the art, the beauty, the serenity. The seed had been planted," Love said.

Looking back at his story, Love sees that his uncompromising passion for art led him into spiritual desolation, but ultimately, it led him to drive his motorcycle to a discernment retreat at Mount Angel Abbey. His one word explanation for how this happened is "God."

While his first commitment is to God, prayer and the Order of Saint Benedict, he remains an uncompromising artist who is anything but cliche.

TRastrelli@StatesmanJournal.com, (503) 983-6030, facebook.com/RastrelliSJ and on Twitter @RastrelliSJ

If you go

What: Mount Angel Abbey's museum

When: 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday

Where: 1 Abbey Drive, Saint Benedict

Information, online galleries of the art and directions: (503) 845-3030 or mountangelabbey.org