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One-Line Bio

This is the official site of the SAINT of the MONTH CLUB where you will find the archives of all the SAINTS that have been beatified since January, 2001.

Biography

Beatified by E-Mail:
The Lives of a New Collection of Saints

By Andy Young for the NEW YORK TIMES

JOSH GOSFIELD, an artist living and working in Manhattan's West Village, was going about his business two and a half years ago when he was transported by a vision. It was a saintly vision, the likes of which he had never experienced. Stranger still, it was a saintly vision of an old friend, and it came to him when she stopped by his studio for a visit.
He photographed her "for no good reason," he recalls. "I didn't really know what I was doing. Or why." But the Lord works in mysterious ways, and the Muses even more so. Mr. Gosfield found himself playing around with the image — centering his friend's face in a spiky halo, surrounding it with blocks of color that looked like stained glass. Before he knew it, he had transformed her into what he called the "patron saint of Mexican revolutionaries, cab drivers, dog walkers, and zoo keepers."
At first, he says, he was drawn to "the visual aesthetics of creating a saint — the closed eyes, beatific expression, airbrushed tones and symmetrically radiating graphics." But something more than aesthetics made him return to the project again and again. He had e-mailed his Santa Isabella to a group of friends, and that direct connection — the ability to show his art to a wide audience of his precise choosing, on his terms and at his pace — got him hooked. Since the beatification of Santa Isabella, he has turned all sorts of friends and strangers into holy apparitions, as well as vehicles for his cultural obsessions, political gripes and artistic experiments. And he has found an ever-larger audience for these experiments, now distributed via e-mail through what he calls the Saint of the Month Club.
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