George and Polly Capps
Painters
CONNECT WITH GEORGE AND POLLY CAPPS
Sacred Art LIVE! Artist 2024, 2025
We, George and Polly Capps of Goretti Fine Art, have both been active in the visual arts from a young age. Being siblings, we encouraged each other and were aware of our respective areas of expertise. We have also long been passionate about the restoration of beauty in sacred worship. Knowing that we had similar creative visions and complementary skillsets, we joined forces and launched Goretti Fine Art in 2021. The studio’s focus is on creating original sacred artwork for churches as well as devotional paintings for private patrons, and its mission is to evangelize the world by filling it with beauty.
We are inspired by the truths of our faith and the richness of the Catholic sacramental worldview. Artistically, we aim to stand on the shoulders of the giants of our Western Christian heritage. While we ground and inform our aesthetic in a tradition stretching back to the Middle Ages, we find particular inspiration from the dynamic style and epic vision of the masters of the late Italian baroque, such as Corrado Giaquinto and Francesco de Muro.
One of our favorite pieces that we have made is Maid of Orléans, our recent oil painting of St. Joan of Arc. Large, multi-figural compositions are our specialty, and at 6’ in height and involving some thirty soldiers, horses, saints, and angels, this commission gave full rein to our penchant for visual drama.
At Goretti Fine Art, we work almost entirely on a commission basis. Some artists dislike commissions because of the inevitable constraints on absolute artistic freedom imposed by the client, but we find that these constraints stimulate greater creativity as we encounter and develop solutions to the resulting compositional challenges. In the case of Maid of Orléans, the patron left the general look-and-feel of the painting up to us but made a number of specific (and occasionally idiosyncratic) requests, ranging from Joan’s appearance to the incorporation of a French quote from her inquisition trial.
Meeting these demands led us to a classic heaven-meets-earth compositional structure, in which a historical scene is blindsided by the breaking-in of the event’s spiritual significance. In our painting, a highly universalized and symbolic depiction of the celestial realm features tumbling cherubs and Joan’s special patrons, the Archangel Michael and St. Catherine of Alexandria, all bathed in an ethereal light and shimmering with idealized perfection. Below, a detachment of foot-sore infantrymen, the “thousand-yard stare” in their eyes and stubble on their chins, trudges through a dreary landscape. The emphasis here is on the particularity of the individuals, the details of their torn, dirty, and sweat-stained uniforms having been carefully researched. Joan, who alone has access to the vision of heavenly glory, acts as the visual bridge between the two realms. The mud-caked hooves of her horse are firmly planted on the road, while her radiant face is illumined by celestial light as she glances upward to the martyr’s crown of victory that awaits her.
The resulting depiction pays tribute to the teenage mystic’s bold faith, heroic devotion to her mission, and ultimate spiritual triumph despite earthly adversity and even execution. The final oil painting is now in a private collection, but giclée prints are available on our website.
Our vocation as artists is to promote beauty as an expression of the sacred, and we are excited to connect with a community of people who share our love for original artwork and our passion for the restoration of culture through beauty.
One of the baroque artists who most inspires us is Gian Lorenzo Bernini, famous for The Ecstasy of St. Teresa and other powerful marble statues. If we were not focused on oil painting, we would love to try our hand at monumental figurative sculpture. Our style of painting requires an in-depth understanding of three-dimensional form, so from a conceptual standpoint the transition would be natural. From a technical perspective, on the other hand, it would require a lot of learning!
