By Paul Dobbyn
BIG, bright and colourful, packing a spiritual message aimed at today’s sensibilities, Garth Jakovic’s latest mural on the wall of a Gold Coast school is certainly stopping people in their tracks.
Which is exactly what the Townsville-based artist has intended for this and other murals as he seeks to convey his hard-won faith.
Considerable effort was required to paint the giant mural of Saints Francis and Clare standing about 13 metres wide by 10 metres tall in the basketball hall of Assisi College, Upper Coomera.
Yet several short months earlier as 2014 opened, Garth had a brush with death in Townsville General Hospital after a catastrophic reaction to a massive dose of antibiotics.
We’d spoken to him the day before this near-disaster by phone from his hospital bed.
He’d not long completed a mural on Mary the Mother of God and I was preparing a story on that work.
It was painted on the wall outside Townsville Recovery Services, a Salvation Army rehabilitation clinic in Walker Street, and he said some of the men were coming to pray beneath the mural at night.
“I’ve got a serious infection in my sinuses which has travelled to my skull, eroding it in places and attacking the surface of my brain,” he said.
He’d also spoken of a newly-awoken faith which was getting him through his serious illness.
“It’s amazing how the Lord can be your shepherd,” he said.
That was in January this year. As it turned out he needed every bit of this faith to get through his next ordeal.
“The treatment for my infection wasn’t working so I was hit with a massive dose of antibiotics,” he said.
“I had a severe reaction and my body shut down.
“There was this sense of going ever deeper, down into darkness.
“I had to be resuscitated and have adrenalin pumped intravenously into me.”
Garth said he was “pretty sure” at this stage a “MET (Medical Emergency Team) Call” was sounded.
“You’re in real deep trouble when they do that,” he said.
When Garth regained consciousness, there was a big team around him. “Five doctors and four nurses – I’m sure of the numbers because I wrote a song about it,” he said.
This brush with death changed his outlook on life in many ways.
“At these times in life, it’s such a comforting thing to have God,” he said.
“You feel very alone in such a crisis; people can hold your hand but ultimately you’re alone, just you and God.
“I really don’t know how people get through such times without faith.”
Garth’s faith had not always been so strong, and at some points in his life, was almost gone.
He went to school at St Pius Chatswood Sydney. After school he started an interest in painting.
Eventually he moved into graffiti, going on to paint around North Queensland for about 20 years.
“I wanted my art to be in the street; after all that’s where everyone sees it,” he said.
Aged around 27, after some crises in his life, he left the Church.
In a sense, art brought him back to his faith.
He became interested in religious art after visiting a cousin painting icons in a monastery at Decani on the Serbian-Kosova border.
Garth also did stints of painting in South Africa and in Belgrade.
“In Serbia and Greece, I noticed iconography, but realised there was a gap of this sort of art in Australia,” he said.
“It made me very aware that Australia’s spiritual sensibility was dwindling, especially in young people it would seem.
“There has been a huge movement towards atheism.
“I had this major desire to reinvigorate a sense of the spiritual through iconography…to make it big, powerful and colourful.
“Then maybe I could help to bring back a sense of spirituality to our culture.
“After all these days many people, especially the young, are more into responding to images than words.”
By now in his late 30s and a single father to two teenage daughters, Garth had returned to the Church becoming a member of Holy Family parish, Gulliver.
His work Mary the Mother of God completed last year was another step into making an ever-deepening faith public.
Garth’s 15-year-old daughter Zara was the model for the face of Mary.
“The idea of the painting was to give the people at the clinic a bit of hope and inspiration,” he said.
“Some of them have told me they go and pray by the painting and it brings them peace.”
Late in January this year, Garth just out of hospital, experienced what he calls “the working of the Lord’s mysterious ways”.
The Catholic Leader’s story on Garth’s work had been seen by someone he’d known 20 years earlier.
“She contacted Assisi’s principal Dora Luxton to suggest it would be good to have me do a mural at the college,” he said.
“The principal was really keen and phoned me to ask whether I could do one of Saint Francis and Saint Clare.
“When I said I could, she asked: ‘Do you want a half or full wall to work on?’
“I said: ‘I’ve got a good feeling about this, so I’m going to go the full wall.’”
Soon Garth was riding a scissor lift up and down the wall of Assisi’s basketball hall as he laid out his vast vision.
Prior to this he’d researched the lives of Saints Francis and Clare.
“I was blown away by Saint Francis’ writings …like they were nearly 1000 years ago but so highly advanced.
“I mean, wow this guy was an environmentalist way back then.
“This inspired to think of the natural elements – water, fire, earth, wind – these are represented in corners of the painting.
“Then there’s the town of Assisi – it’s to the painting’s left.”
Then there was St Clare.
“I discovered, she’d been ill for a lot of her life but from her letters she was always very positive,” he said.
“I captured her as young and pretty which was the vibe I got from what I read about her.”
Then Garth threw everything he had to put the larger-than-life saints up on Assisi’s wall.
“It took me about three weeks working six days a week,” he said.
“I continue to discover that all sorts of people relate so well to this style of art … especially this latest one; it’s so bright and full of life.
“The good thing is lots of questions are being asked about these saints.
“I’ve also been putting photos of the mural out on the social network.
“People are asking questions like: I wonder why this guy is doing this painting?
“What’s the story behind it?”
For Garth though, the bigger story is the lessons he learnt about life earlier this year in his scrape with mortality.
“I came away with a sense that I don’t know how long I’m on earth for,” he said.
“It could be days, months who knows?
“We’re all living on a razor’s edge all the time … it’s just we don’t know, or choose to not think about it.
“It may sound strange but I also felt like I was here on borrowed time … so I started thinking: Best make good use of it.
“And that’s what I intend to keep doing through my art.”
