c. 2000 Religion News Service

VANCOUVER, British Columbia _ An eclectic Vancouver artist known as Padam has won $10,000 by creating a distinctly spiritual new face for Benedictine, the famous 500-year-old French liqueur.

Padam’s multiple images of the hooded head of St. Benedict, the founder of the religious order after whom the liqueur is named, was chosen as the best of 250 submissions in a global logo-design contest sponsored by Benedictine, whose recipe was concocted by a monk during the Renaissance.

“The people at Benedictine’s wanted their image of the new millennium to pertain to St. Benedict and refer to the agelessness of the Benedictine order. A lot of the other entries didn’t really do that … so that might be why I won,” said Padam, whose given name is Morley Wiseman.

“It was a great 2000 surprise when I was told on New Year’s Day that I’d won this. It’s nice to be appreciated with a monetary award,” said Padam, a former dancer with the National Ballet of Canada who now paints, sculpts and teaches ballet and top-level Canadian figure skaters.

Padam, 64, came to create the rainbow-colored, stained-glass-like new logo for Benedictine, one of the most expensive liqueurs in the world, after a convoluted artistic and personal religious journey.

He was raised a Roman Catholic in Saskatchewan and, after his ballet career wound down, spent two years in the early 1980s as artist-in-residence at a Benedictine-run monastery.

As well as working with the Christian artist Father Dunstan Massey, Padam chose to live the Benedictines’ rigorous monastic life, complete with the monk’s hood that became the inspiration for his contest-winning logo.

“The men at the monastery … are very excited that I’ve received this,” Padam said during a mid-January interview in his small apartment in Vancouver’s West End, which is filled with paintings and sculptures of everything from naked dancers to the Virgin Mary.

Padam will be flown to France in March to receive his prize money and witness the official launch of the new logo.

The Benedictine Web site tells how a Venetian monk invented an elixir based on 27 plants and spices that was produced by monks until the recipe was lost during the French Revolution. It was rediscovered in 1863 by a French notable, who then created the renowned drink he christened Benedictine. It’s prepared today in a palace-like distillery in Fecamp, a town north of Paris.

Although Padam is no longer a Roman Catholic, but a follower of the late Indian religious guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, he believes he was closely connected in what he calls a past life, or an earlier incarnation, to St. Benedict.

The 81 miniature images of St. Benedict’s head that Padam used for the Benedictine liqueur logo, which will be unveiled in ads under Padam’s suggested slogan, “A Head of Its Time,” were taken from a life-sized bust Padam sculpted in the 1980s of a stylized St. Benedict.

Padam created the original bust as a way to meditate on the spiritual life of St. Benedict. Even though Padam is now a spiritual teacher within the movement begun by Rajneesh _ his full title is Swami Deva Padam _ he doesn’t see any contradiction between his so-called New Age beliefs and his admiration for the early Christian leader.

And while not much of a drinker, Padam said he also appreciates the irony that he won a major international design prize by inventing a logo for a high-end type of liqueur he doesn’t drink.

“Benedictine is beautiful stuff. I drank some a long time ago when our ballet company traveled through Europe. But I don’t drink it now because it’s just too expensive.”

Eds: Padam’s winning logo can be found at http://www.benedictine2000.com or http://www.wiseman-padam.com)

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