In 1958, St. Mary’s made a major renovation to the church space by adding a Sunday School wing on the south side of the building. It included a bathroom and classrooms on either side of a long hallway.
After graduating from high school in 2009, Claire Elam, a member of St. Mary’s, was motivated to fill that hallway with color and kid-friendly stories by designing and painting a mural depicting the story of Noah’s Ark. She wanted to include as many animals as possible, and make each object or person in the story easily recognizable.
Claire began by drawing a sketch of the mural on a grid, and then transferred the grid to the wall where she hand drew each square to line up with the original drawing. An easier and common practice for murals is to project the image on the surface, but the hallway in which she had to work was too narrow to use the projection accurately. Claire used the grid method for all four murals.
Mural sketched on grid. Claire used this process for all of her murals.
Grid transferred to wall.
Claire painting the figure of Noah
Noah and the Ark Mural, 2009
In the summer of 2011, Claire painted a second mural in the Sunday School hallway depicting St. Francis of Assisi. Many of the stories that surround the life of Francis say that he had a great love for animals and the environment. One account describes how one day, while Francis was travelling with some companions, they happened upon a place in the road where birds filled the trees on either side. Francis told his companions to "wait for me while I go to preach to my sisters the birds.” The birds surrounded him, intrigued by the power of his voice, and not one of them flew away.
Another legend tells that in the city of Gubbio, where Francis lived for some time, there was a wolf "terrifying and ferocious, who devoured men as well as animals". Francis went up into the hills, and when he found the wolf he made the sign of the cross and commanded the wolf to come to him. Then Francis led the wolf into the town and, surrounded by startled citizens, made a pact between them and the wolf. Because the wolf had "done evil out of hunger", the townsfolk were to feed the wolf regularly. In return, the wolf would no longer prey upon them or their flocks. Both of the animals in these stores, the birds and the wolf, are incorporated in Claire’s mural of St. Francis. The children attending St. Mary’s Vacation Bible School that summer helped painting the mural by adding their handprints to the tree trunk.
St. Francis of Assisi Mural, 2011
In August of this same year, Claire painted a mural of the Nativity depicting Mary, Joseph, and the baby Jesus in the manger, surrounded by animals.
The Nativity, 2011
Claire’s fourth mural, The Creation, was completed between December 2012 and February 2013. This work was part of a “Field Work Term” that the college she was attending, Bennington College in Bennington, Vermont, held each year. The term included working or interning at organizations or completing work associated with their majors. At the time Claire was considering early childhood development and art as a career focus, so completing a fourth mural in the children’s Sunday School wing fit in perfectly with her college work.
It was important to Claire that the Creation story included rich foliage, and that Adam and Eve had a different ethnicity/race from the other murals she had painted.
Adam and Eve in the Creation story, 2013.
Claire graduated from Bennington college with a Bachelor of Fine Art in Painting and Ceramics, and currently works as the arts education manager for all ages at a local arts center.
