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(scroll below for pictures)

 

Artist Patrick Stewart, a member of Madonna House for more than twenty years, has a passion to paint. Inspired by God and the beauty of nature, his oil paintings are filled with the radiant light of sunrises on the rivers, lakes, and landscapes of this area.

 

“The victory of beauty guides my eyes and hands as I craft often large canvases of figures and interior and exterior landscape.  Art and God are the two continuous threads that connect the days and years of my life.  I started my search for God when I was 7, at 12, I began to draw. 

 

Though I experienced much joy in my youth, I functioned in an often foggy grey interior atmosphere that had been laid over my mind and heart by childhood trauma.  Art has always served an inner function of helping me break through that murkiness into clearly lighted realities.

 

 I let my eyes guide me along the surface of each painting to the next brush stroke.  I do not ‘know’ the precise end toward which I am traveling, but trust my eyes, the eyes of my heart, to lead me there.  Real figures and features in real lands of meaning and wonder continue to catch me and take me to each next painting. 

 

Influences:  Eleven years of traveling the world on the seas with the US Navy and thirteen years of living on the western prairies of Canada have set my eyes across and up into broad expanses of land, water and sky.    

 

On New Year’s Eve of 1987, I found and claimed a new light onto the interior and exterior landscape of my life, the light of Christ.  The infinitely broad expanse of this life in God, the Holy Trinity, One God, and a family, my Madonna House family, to share a Christ centered life with, weave their way through each painting.  Serving the poor of Edmonton, Alberta’s back alleys from 1997 to 2010 brought me face to face with my own interior and exterior poverty, its ugliness and its beauty.  I am by nature a romantic, so each painting is also a flirtation with beauty, even the beauty within the apparent mundane or even ugly.

 

 I do not paint to sell but selling is certainly gratifying and especially so as all the proceeds from my art are donated to missions and missionaries around the world.  My personal fee is the joy of painting, the joy of those who love my art, and the joy of those poor who benefit from the sale of my paintings.

 

‘The Greek word for Man anthropos is connected with the verb anarthein, meaning “to look up.”  Unlike most of the other animals, humans stand upright, with their eyes toward heaven and their gaze toward the stars.  In Latin, on the other hand, the words for man and human, homo and humanus are linked to the noun humus, which means earth.  The human being, then, though human and related to the earth is created to look up to heaven.’
(From: Philokalia  The Bible of Orthodox Spirituality   Athony M. Coniaris   p.133).”

 

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[custom_font font_size=”35″ line_height=”40″ font_style=”normal” text_align=”center” font_weight=”600″ text_decoration=”none” text_shadow=”no” color=”#175f8f”]Patrick Stewart’s Paintings[/custom_font][custom_font font_size=”25″ line_height=”35″ font_style=”normal” text_align=”center” font_weight=”400″ text_decoration=”none” text_shadow=”no” color=”#175f8f”](click images for full view)[/custom_font][vc_separator type=”transparent” up=”30″ down=”30″] [vc_separator type=”transparent” up=”30″ down=”30″]

Write Patrick Stewart:

 

Patrick Stewart
Madonna House Apostolate
2888 Dafoe Rd, RR 2
Combermere ON   K0J 1L0
Canada

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Email Patrick Stewart:

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Marysia Kowalchyk has been a member of Madonna House since 1974. The Eastern Christian aspect of the Madonna House spirituality has been a source of great nourishment for her. In 1993 she began a study of icon writing / painting and has studied with several master iconographers. Her work can be found in churches, chapels and private homes in Canada, United States, and Europe. She continues to work in a studio in Combermere.

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[custom_font font_size=”35″ line_height=”40″ font_style=”normal” text_align=”center” font_weight=”600″ text_decoration=”none” text_shadow=”no” color=”#175f8f”]Marysia Kowalchyk’s Sacred Images[/custom_font][custom_font font_size=”25″ line_height=”35″ font_style=”normal” text_align=”center” font_weight=”400″ text_decoration=”none” text_shadow=”no” color=”#175f8f”](click images for full view)[/custom_font][vc_separator type=”transparent” up=”30″ down=”30″] [vc_separator type=”transparent” up=”30″ down=”30″]

Write Marysia Kowalchyk:

 

Madonna House Apostolate
2888 Dafoe Rd, RR 2
Combermere ON   K0J 1L0
Canada

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Greeting Cards Featuring Marysia Kowalchyk’s Images:

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“Painting is for me a response to the experience of light and color, and to the beauty I see in nature and in art. It is the search to know, to discover this visual and interior beauty through the act of painting a human face, a simple bowl, or a landscape. Living within Madonna House for the past twenty years, this response has come to encompass our communal life, our daily work and liturgical prayer, offering to me, and thus to the painting, a reflection on the inner harmony and tension of reality.”

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[custom_font font_size=”35″ line_height=”40″ font_style=”normal” text_align=”center” font_weight=”600″ text_decoration=”none” text_shadow=”no” color=”#175f8f”]Donna Surprenant’s Paintings:[/custom_font][custom_font font_size=”25″ line_height=”35″ font_style=”normal” text_align=”center” font_weight=”400″ text_decoration=”none” text_shadow=”no” color=”#175f8f”](click images for full view)[/custom_font][vc_separator type=”transparent” up=”30″ down=”30″] [vc_separator type=”transparent” up=”30″ down=”30″]

Greeting Cards Featuring Donna Surprenant’s Paintings:

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“When I joined Madonna House I did some carving as a relaxation. But when I was assigned to one of our mission houses, I saw that the chapel was in need of some art work: there were no representations of the saints in the chapel. So, in my spare time, I started to carve the saints and images for the liturgy. I began to see that the Lord wanted me to put images of the saints back into a few churches. I understood that we needed to be reminded of the Communion of Saints.

 

Some modern liturgical art is often a personal statement of an artist’s faith experience, using symbols very particular to themselves. Such images are often not accessible to most people. If I use traditional images in new ways, there is a better chance of their being understandable for the devotion of more people, as a living place of meeting with the saint, person to person.

 

I am amazed by what emerges from this process. I am not saying that everything I do is great; but it is usually better than what I expected. “Giving God space” is the key to giving birth to beauty. It is the Lord who gives the increase, the Lord who takes what little gestures we make and transforms them into something much better than we can imagine. As Scripture says, “It is you, Lord, who accomplish what we have done” (Isaiah 26:12). When I read this line of Scripture, it reminded me of these experiences I often have when I am carving, of how my own work comes about. When I finish a piece of carving, I am conscious that usually God has had a part in the work.”

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[custom_font font_size=”35″ line_height=”40″ font_style=”normal” text_align=”center” font_weight=”600″ text_decoration=”none” text_shadow=”no” color=”#175f8f”]Mark Schlingerman’s Wood Carvings:[/custom_font][custom_font font_size=”25″ line_height=”35″ font_style=”normal” text_align=”center” font_weight=”400″ text_decoration=”none” text_shadow=”no” color=”#175f8f”](click images for full view)[/custom_font][vc_separator type=”transparent” up=”30″ down=”30″] [vc_separator type=”transparent” up=”30″ down=”30″]
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