An elegant house in South Wilton serves not only as home but also studio and art gallery for artist Brian Whelan, with walls filled with his art gloriously displayed and extending in all directions.

A program of the Arts at St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church this spring bought a large group to his home and adjoining work studio that occupies a former horse barn. They viewed the dozens of paintings on display and enjoyed the opportunity to talk with Whelan about his work.

Whelan is an outstanding artist and a charming raconteur of stories and of explanations of the meaning of some of his creations that are more subtle in their depictions.

His paintings cover a broad range of subjects, though one of his areas of focus is religious themes drawn from the New Testament and later Christian works and also from the Hebrew Bible.

Whelan relishes vibrant colors and populates many of his works with an array of figures: human, animal, and fanciful — often rendered in an engaging combination of realistic and semi-abstract fashion. His work opens the mind to new understanding of key figures and stories in Christian and Jewish faith traditions.

His art is also imbued with a wit that, while sometimes enigmatic, is invariably exuberant: a horse with endearingly large eyes but an otherwise horizontally compressed body, another painting with a slightly perplexed Noah surrounded by an enormous menagerie of colorful animals each with its own often comical rendering, and yet another with Noah preparing to release the dove that would bring good news of landfall after the Flood but with a cat perched on Noah’s opposite shoulder with its paw reaching around, clearly intent on that very bird!

This kind of whimsy is found throughout Whelan’s work, but many of his pieces are also quite serious with biblical figures with penetrating eyes and often unusual postures that draw the viewer. His art has been displayed everywhere from cathedrals and other church venues to major art galleries and museums in the United States and in Europe. He was recently commissioned to prepare a work presenting modern times in religious terms, and his work will be joined with works by a Jewish artist and a Muslim artist to form one giant piece. Some of Whelan’s work in progress for this project focuses on environmental degradation of God’s created order.

Whelan’s artwork ranges in size from very small (measuring perhaps 6’’-by- 6”) to huge (9’-by-12’ ) works composed of nine separate panels telling a biblically related story. Books with photographs of his artwork are engaging but cannot do complete justice to their vibrancy. He works largely in acrylics because they dry fast and yet have a luster that resembles the effect of oil paint, and his way of envisioning biblical scenes takes them in remarkable directions that open the mind even as they delight the eye. Children regularly supply him with their silver and gold foil from candy wrappers that then work their way into his artwork as such things as hilts and blades for swords or the sleeve of a biblical figure.

His artwork is full of dramatic allegory. For example, in his work “Dante’s Wild Wood of Error,” a hesitant Dante Alighieri, uncertain about which way to turn, faces a lion, a leopard and a wolf. In Whelan’s words, “The lion represents pride, the leopard represents lust, and the wolf represents avarice.” These animals, portrayed in caricature and in vibrant color, contrast sharply with the stark wooded landscape surrounding the dark image of Dante himself. As with so much of his art, Whelan’s work reflects his emotional state at the time of its creation. Of this painting he says, “I painted it when I was living unhappily in a house that happened to be in a deep wood … Dante’s move from hell to purgatory to paradise was echoed in my own experience, which it must be said was less dramatic.”

Whelan was born in Ireland, and he and his wife alternate their time between the United States and England. One commentator has said of Whelan that he is one “who seems equally at home in an Irish pub as he does at Sunday school or Mass,” adding that “Whelan’s paintings beg for conversation …bubbling up from places within yourself that you weren’t even aware of until the words came out.” His works serve “as a springboard into a wider and more holistic world view.”

Steve Hudspeth is an over 35-year resident of Wilton active in local matters.