NATHAN GUEQUIERRE: Clouds of Witness: 1996

Painting and church have long walked hand-in-hand.  An ironic footnote in the history if Western society is the fact that the Renaissance, the high point of that relationship, arguably marked the beginning of the end of religion as the central focus of human life.  The rise of humanism, of secularism, of faith in the scientific method that began with the Renaissance, is surely the source of the current marginalization of religion by the intelligentsia and the embarrassment of that body’s relationship to art with any outwardly religious function.

True, contemporary religious art tends toward thoughtless aping of received form and received content.  A gentle lamb, whitebread Jesus, craft-sale spirit catches dangling from the rearview mirror.  But it needn’t necessarily be so, and Karen Gunderson proves that.  Her murals recently installed in the chancel of Our Savior’s Lutheran Church in Racine prove that the relationship between painting and church can be ennobling even now, after nearly two centuries of dissociation.  There is an intense and quiet nobility to the project, so well are the paintings conceived, so sensitive are they to their space and their function of it.
Gunderson is a Wisconsinite who has lived in New York City for years.  Our Savior is a historically Danish congregation.  The sanctuary, built in the 1950’s, is inspired by the Danish tradition of church-as-ship, with polished wooden beams running like the ribs of a sailing vessel across the space and the entire structure coming to a point at the chancel’s prow, the focus of the congregants and the building itself.  Here above the altar, surrounding it, re Gunderson’s paintings.  The paintings, in content, are very simple: clouds, white and billowing, move through a blue sky, piling up at the very focal point of the church.  The paintings are very large, and the overall effect is one of the roof being removed from a church on the most perfect days.