Father Jerome Tupa

A native of North Dakota and Benedictine monk of Saint John's Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota, Father Jerome Tupa has spent more than fifty years painting the world's sacred landscapes — producing some of the most vibrant oil paintings in contemporary religious art. His interest in art began at the University of North Dakota under professor Luella Raab Mundel; his doctoral studies in French literature at the Sorbonne deepened the vocation, and painting became inseparable from his scholarship. His first show was at the Librairie St. Séverin in Paris — a modest debut that opened a fifty-year career of increasingly ambitious work. While directing the French Studies program in Aix-en-Provence, he ran mornings below Mont Sainte-Victoire, Cézanne's mountain.

He returned to Saint John's Abbey in 1982 to be ordained and receive his Master of Divinity, going on to serve thirty-four years as professor of French at Saint John's University. A pivotal 1987 sabbatical in Rome produced thirty-five new paintings — and the breakthrough that has shaped his work ever since: one high circle swept across the canvas in a single gigantic stroke, and his painting moved into abstraction.