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Murals
and Restoration Gallery G: St.
Joseph's Cathedral
To date, I have not personally seen the final product of
this project. Evergreene simply assigned me to work on the
ceiling panels that now adorn the ceiling of St.Joseph's
Cathedral in Wheeling, West Virginia. A van sent by Evergreene
pulled up one day and delivered several hundred of these
panels to the home I was then living at in Takoma Park,
Maryland. The panels must have been installed originally
in the late 1800s. They were all burlap squares and the
paint was just barely hanging on. Tom Moore and I went out
and bought new canvas and I spent an entire winter tracing
the original designs and re-painting them on new canvas
squares.
Here you can see some of the process at work, as well as
some of the original squares. Because there were so many,
I sometimes had to lay them on the floor, and my faithful
chow chow dog Zoe would occasionally step on them and leave
painted paw-prints, which, of course, I had to paint over,
but they, like her, are up there somewhere. Seeing these
images of the final product, recently taken by my brother
Mike, I recognize each and every pattern. We have speculated
that there are some Asian religious symbols in there. If
anyone knows the story behind the art of this cathedral,
please contact us to let us know about it.
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