| Artist Paints Creation Week for PSAA | Email | Print |
by Maylan Schurch; Source: Puget Sound Adventist Academy
[News]
How does art get created?
Duane Childs and Sandie Beddoe have one answer. In the fall of 2008 the two volunteers at Puget Sound Adventist Academy, in Kirkland, Wash., had met in a downstairs hallway to hang a painting Sandie had provided. Duane glanced further down the hall.
"That wall is really bare," he said.
Sandie nodded. "We need something there, but I don't know what."
"What we need," Duane said promptly, "are big-panel paintings of the seven days of Creation."
"But who could we get to produce them?"
Duane grinned. "Me," he said. "I used to teach art at Auburn Academy." Now retired, Duane's lifetime of teaching included seven years in AAA's art department. During his first year, one of his students was a senior named Lars Justinen, who went on to found Justinen Creative Group, which has provided design and artwork for many Sabbath School quarterlies. "I'm proud of having had Lars as a student," Duane says with a smile, "but the truth is that he taught me more than I taught him!"
Duane produced preliminary sketches, talked them over with Sandie, and got to work. And over the next few months, as Duane painted in his living room where light poured in from the patio door, those creation days came alive.
"I wanted something between abstract and super-realism," he says, "so I decided on an ‘open color, broken line' style which challenges viewers to interact with the images and complete them in their minds. Though my favorite medium is oils, I used acrylics so the paintings would dry faster."
As a young couple, Duane and Emily Childs were converts from another denomination, and fell even more deeply in love with a God who not only created the world but also provided a satisfying Sabbath rest for its inhabitants.
"One of my toughest problems was the Day Seven panel," Duane confesses. "I mean, how do you paint ‘rest'?" He finally decided on a broken-line cross with an even more abstract outline of the Ten Commandments, with the painting's brightest glow over the Fourth.
Duane gets a special pleasure from knowing that students hurrying from class to class will pause to look at his work. "Those paintings are there to brighten up the hall, of course," he says. "But I want them to be more than that. I hope that they will help the students think about what God has done in making the world, and what He has done for them as well."
Duane Childs, a retired art teacher, paints panel seven of Creation to represent a “day of rest.”