Mr. McCaffrey was born on 29 March 1957 in Weehawken, N.J., the youngest of six children. His father was a well-respected local family doctor and rather good amateur painter. At the age of 12 one of his sisters introduced him to art, taking him sometimes to upper Manhattan to sketch The Cloisters.

After local Catholic high school he attended Columbia College in New York, where his interests were in literature and theater (acting, directing, and producing). Broad intellectual horizons opened up to him at this time.

There followed a couple of errant years of temp work and budget travel. He worked as a librarian for the New York Public Library for a number of years before accepting a vocation to the priesthood and religious life.

Given his background as a librarian, his first, and only, permanent assignment as a priest was to the Ecole Biblique et Archéologique Française de Jérusalem, where he ran their wonderful research library. In preparation for this he spent three months in Paris studying French at the Sorbonne. He lived and worked in Jerusalem for nine years, where he began to cultivate his long buried passion for drawing and painting.

He returned to Weehawken in 2004 and is leaving the priesthood to pursue his artistic interests, studying and learning as much as he can at the Art Students League of New York, primarily with Sherry Camhy and James McElhenney.

My artistic aim is to create works of art that appeal to all, both the aesthetically sophisticated and those who luckily have only their intuition to guide them. I create in a realist manner for this reason, and also because there is ample beauty and mystery in the world as it appears to us that need no elaboration or distortion, only the simple, sincere, immediate and personal reaction of the artist. I seek a contemplation of the real here and now. There is a long and dominating artistic tradition that seeks to challenge and even to shock the viewer. I believe that today’s world confronts us with enough challenges, stress, questions and shocks as it is, without having to go to a gallery or museum for an added dose. Rather, my art tries to bring beauty and consolation to people’s lives, and through Beauty, lead the viewer’s spirit to a deeper appreciation of Life and Being.