KEITH DRURY'S 20 years as a Presbyterian minister are over and a new life as a full-time artist is beginning, writes MARGARET CANNING
But the 44 year old points out that, strictly speaking, he has been an artist longer than a minister.
His journey to full-time art started with his father.
“We went to a gallery one day. Afterwards I said, rather arrogantly as you do at 20 years of age, ‘Anybody could do better than that’. He said nothing and appeared a couple of days later with this wee canvas and a wee set of paints. I remember him throwing them on the table. He said to me, ‘Do better’.”
Do better he did through his 20s while his interest in Presbyterian ministry also grew. That materially modest path, after a degree in economics and two years working in airplane maker Shorts, came as a shock to his parents. They hadn’t even given him as much as a gentle push towards living the family faith in full.
“Mark Twain said you don’t see Presbyterians getting in a sweat about religion and trying to massacre the neighbours. Mine was a very regular, normal Presbyterian upbringing – Church on Sunday morning, Sunday school and everything in moderation.”
He explains his move to ministry in the simplest of terms. “I think I felt called at that time, simply. It was a vocation.”
Now he is immersed in an art movement he invented himself. In artobiography, he embeds the forms of words which have marked a person’s life, such as newspaper articles or love letters, onto canvas, then paints the subject’s likeness over the canvas.
“Leaving ministry to do this is a calling. I don’t think you leave a vocation just because you’re sick and tired of it. It’s because you realise there are layers to be built on top that you can go further, do more, achieve more.”
He also feels his change of direction could be interpreted as a sideways move, a new vocation building on the old.
“The motivation behind my art isn’t purely commercial. There’s another layer, an academic aspect, a philosophical aspect.
“It can help people discover themselves . . . I want to tell stories, which I think is quintessentially Irish.”
He has created some stories of his own in his career in ministry, particularly in the past five years when, as Belfast’s Presbyterian director of mission and minister in May Street Presbyterian Church in the city centre, he toiled to bring the church into the heart of city life.
He opened Urban Soul, a cafe in the church's basement, held live music evenings, prayers for the city, recreated a Georgian Christmas in May Street every December – and even permitted scenes from low-budget zombie film Battle of the Boneto be shot outside the church.
There was some shock that he was leaving, though “some in May Street were aware I was on some kind of journey where I was less settled”.
“Others in the wider church were shocked. You don’t leave ministry. It’s not the done thing.”
If the story of Rev Drury and May Street is now over, his new story promises many twists. One unexpected invitation he may take up in the future is to share his views on a united Ireland with the Ancient Order of Hibernians in New York.
He may work with the Franciscans on a commission. Another commission is an artobiography of Fr Damien of Molokai, the leper priest of Honolulu, who will be canonised this year.
To embrace these new challenges, he has left behind a large, modern manse in east Belfast and a healthy salary. On this ostensible quandary, he draws a striking comparison.
“I was chatting to a criminologist and there are a number of parallels between criminology theory and ministry.
“If you want to deconstruct a person in the criminal system, you take away their clothes and give them a generic uniform.
“You take away their identity and give them a number, their freedom and give them a house they must stay in.
“Strangely, there are many parallels in ministry. They take away your name and call you reverend. They take away that and give you a uniform.”
Senior figures in the church are “probably aware” of his position.
But he hastens to add: “I don’t leave with any sense of grievance whatsoever. I’m leaving because I feel there’s so much more to be done. Put it like this, there are plenty of Presbyterian ministers, Methodists, and Roman Catholic priests. We have a fair abundance of clerics.
“But I don’t think we have enough artists who are coming from a sense of wanting to celebrate people’s lives.
“If you ask the question where are you most useful, then probably art would be my answer.”
Not enough questions are asked when it comes to ministry, a way of life he likens to a straitjacket.
“I think I would be much harder on people thinking of going to ministry than people were on me. The problem is, ministry itself is too much like a straitjacket. It’s too regulated. A box is a box. Even if it has a steeple on top of it, it is still a box.
“I see too many opportunities and too many things which we can do for the good of communities.
“There are opportunities to celebrate our Irish culture, to understand who we are, to celebrate the world around and about us. But there was no way to do that and take those opportunities as a minister.”
His wife of two years, Deborah, an English teacher, is “very encouraging”, he says.
“In many ways English teachers who have a passion for literature and words are actually artists. It’s really an artistic marriage. Maybe if I’d married a maths teacher, it would have been different,” he jokes. “They might have looked at the budget.”
But his move from the bricks and mortar of May Street has not been easy to make. “It hasn’t been easy leaving as I’ve invested so much in it – even the very floors at times as I was into woodwork.
“I’ve worked on the floors, on the shelving and the coffee tables and the counters. There’s almost every little bit I know something about it or have worked it. It’s like leaving a baby behind. It is hard to leave it. But life is a journey and sometimes you have to move on.”
Now begins a working life like that of any artist – looking for commissions and projects. He painted Barack Obama for Belfast’s Presidents’ Club and has been working on a Titanic collection. With enviable timing, he interviewed Titanic survivor Millvina Dean a few weeks before her death for a piece inspired by her life.
So he is keen to emphasise he is about more than “pretty pictures”.
“There’s a deeper question to be answered about life using art and if you want to do that you have to go further. And that’s my real pursuit.”
As for future church observance, he says: “You can’t leave the Presbyterian church, once you’re in.”
But he adds: “Church isn’t what happens in a box with people in it. Sometimes what happens in a box with people in it is the furthest thing away from church.”
- www.artobiography.co.uk