intensity in worship and art

I have been intensely involved with art projects for my church. The Church of the Resurrection in Wheaton Illinois has moved to a new building, a re-habbed factory. The warehouse space has been transformed into a beautiful light-filled sanctuary. A wall of well-proportioned vertical spires of windows provides the best of natural light.

These past weeks I have poured myself into producing five more large paintings to portray the Easter Vigil readings from the Old Testament. I blogged about this before but just briefly. We have been working on a series of ten canvases to hang in the narthex of the new building. Above are the first five that were almost but not quite finished in time to display last Easter for the big Vigil service.

Here is the new narthex with paintings being installed.

And this past weekend we had our big Consecration services and the very first Sunday service in the new building. The staff wanted to hang all 10 of the paintings in the narthex for the big week. I wasn't comfortable with that because...they still aren't finished. Oh well, finished enough to share, but I must work on them a lot more in months to come.
I will write some more blog posts about the process in the next days.