Brentwood Presbyterian Church is located in Burnaby, BC. They wanted an appealing image that somehow showed both the inside AND outside, simultaneously, and my Panto set backdrops were pretty close to that. With that idea in mind, I designed this painting. The image will be used online and in brochures while the painting will hang in the space itself.

Reverend Fraser is a jazz aficionado and quickly realized the church was built with unexpectedly excellent acoustics. The Brentwood Sanctuary has weekly Jazz Evensong performances on Wednesdays and services on Sundays, which means availability on all the other days and nights for arts to thrive. The church community wants to invite and inspire more artists to use the space as a venue because the building is so well suited for intimate musical, dramatic, and visual performances. Not only does it have excellent sound (you can hear a whisper right to the back row) but also a stage, a dressing room, a kitchen, lots of parking, and big expansion plans. The nearby Shadbolt Centre—the only other nearby art venue— is often at capacity so this “Space of Grace” would be a great alternative to connect audiences and performers.

The overall sense of the picture is that is that the building is swelling full of sound and light and everything is dancing, including the chairs. There are the three representative dancing chairs up on stage, of course, but also all the ones in the audience that look like wiggling toes on warm people. The building’s edges are shaped like clapping hands. The warm interior colors are framed by the flame-like trees on both sides and the firework-celebratory van Gogh stars above. Everything looks uplifted, like a smile, with lots of warmth and light, and maybe a few implied jazz musicians in the architecture, too.

Acrylic on canvas, 24″ x 30″
Located at: Brentwood Presbyterian Church, Burnaby, BC