About · The Road Home
I am ☩FANE☩.
Lumen Dei is Latin for "Light of God." The studio works at the intersection of faith and fine art, where sacred tradition meets the visual languages of the present.
Born into a Jewish family, I lived inside the questions Isaiah 53 leaves open for thirteen years and didn't know it. Like many of my peers, when I left home after high school, I also left behind my religion, traditions, and faith.
I hunted for meaning through the secular life - New Age thinking, crypto art and NFT spaces, podcasts, self-help books, politics, diet fads, gym trends, nootropics+ and so much more. There was a deep hunger that none of it could fill or fulfilled.
Going to the School of Visual Arts in NYC '17, and being in a place where God was rejected and slandered, is where I made the decision that God had to be real - and that there could only be One.
On April 28, 2024 - my late grandmother's birthday, and my own Bar Mitzvah date - providence struck. I closed the book of Isaiah and said
"This is undeniable. He is undeniable." It was a long and winding (and bumpy) road Home from there, but my wife and I were received into the Catholic Church in 2025. I now call myself a Cashew (Catholic of Jewish roots), a term my friends and family now love.
Because of my not-so-typical journey and talent stack - I am now on a mission. A mission to not only bring God back into the forefront of the Arts and cultural discussion, but to also bridge the gaps and heal the divides among the faithful. Many would say that it is an impossible mission. I might tend to agree. But with Him, anything is possible.
"God made man from dust. I use every tool He allowed man to make. The feeling is the medium."
☩FANE☩
The Mission
The New Sacred.
The New Sacred is the counter-Reformation for our time. Every visual language invented in the last hundred years — Pop, Abstract, Street, Appropriation, Grid, Collage, Meme, internet vernacular — belongs to God. Lumen Dei exists to "seize the memes of production" and reorient them back toward the Divine.
We do not compete with Byzantine icons or Renaissance altarpieces. We do what those traditions didn't know they would one day face: baptize the irony, humor, satire, profane, irreverent and chaos of modernity and make them vehicles for His grace and resurrected joy.
Joy is the most underused apologetic in modernity. The sacred interrupting the secular is our animating force. Beauty lifts souls.
Core Convictions
- I.Art exists to glorify God and move souls upward toward Him. Beauty is not optional or subjective. It is objectively evangelistic.
- II.Every visual language the modern world has created belongs, ultimately, to God. Our work is to seize these languages - pop, street, meme, grid, collage - and baptize them for the Kingdom.
- III.We make the sacred interrupt the secular with joy, truth, and grace. The feeling is the medium. The laughter is the theology. The pondering is the price. The conversion is the commission.