PRINCETON, Ind. (AP) - The four Gospels of the New Testament chronicle the life of Jesus Christ. When Charlie Hunt reads them, he sees a story and he puts it on the walls of Princeton’s First Baptist Church.
Hunt’s first paintings were inspired by cartoons he saw on television when he was five years old. He never made a career of it. Instead, he spent 22 years in the military, then worked as night manager at the Princeton Walmart.
But then, FBC Pastor Mark Massaro asked for volunteers to paint Bible stories on the walls of the youth Bible education class space. Some children of the church painted a mural depicting the birth of Jesus. And another group of volunteers painted another scene from the life of Christ.
Then Hunt volunteered. “I hadn’t painted for 20 years,” he said on a Friday morning as he applied acrylic paint brush strokes to depict scourge marks on Christ’s body in the scene of the crucifixion. He found, he said, that painting can be just like riding a bicycle.
“I’ve got 39 pictures in mind, from Mary and Joseph and Jesus crossing the desert, to Christ’s ascension,” he said. “I’ve got 11 completed.”
Hunt does his painting in his spare time. He started in 2015, and he estimates he has another two year worth of work ahead of him before the life of Christ is told in mural form within the church. It’s a good way to bring the words of the biblical books of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John to life in a visual form for children and adults, he agrees.
Hunt estimates he spends about 20 hours per week working on the murals. He first sketches a Bible scene on paper, then makes a scale grid. He free-hand sketches the same scene in larger dimension on a grid on the particle-board walls that divide the FBC youth education classrooms. Once the scene is sketched on the wall, he can start to paint.
“I come in early and work to midmorning,” he said. Those wooden walls eat away the art sketch pencils and absorb a lot of acrylic paint. Hunt estimates he started out with about 300 bottes. It’s hard to say how many he will have used before the project is completed.
He climbs down from the ladder where he’s been painting the crucifixion scene and walks down the corridor of the building where he also volunteers with the children’s ministry. He points to the mural the children started with, and across the aisle to a corresponding scene of Jesus in the manger that he painted. Next to it, a scene of Jesus as a child in the temple in Jerusalem, and across the aisle in a corner, the fluorescent light casts an appropriate glow upon the rays of light emanating from the top of a mural that shows a dove depicting the Holy Spirit in the scene of Christ’s baptism by John the Baptist.
Hunt walks along the corridors, where more scenes are complete, and some sketches are taped to blank spaces where the next scene will be painted. Directly across from the crucifixion scene, which is nearly complete, is a pencil sketch of Christ’s ascension.
“I enjoy doing it. It’s something I found a passion with. When I was in school, I helped teachers in art classes. I got through biology by drawing pictures of dissections of bugs.
“This, to me, is just like basketball or baseball is for other people. It’s something I can do. This, I can do.”
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Source: The Princeton Daily Clarion, https://bit.ly/2o33tkV
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Information from: Princeton Daily Clarion, https://www.tristate-media.com/pdclarion
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