St. Louis Bertrand Church, Oakland, California, 1962
Stations of the Cross.
The irregular areas formed by the paintings’ outline are protruding one centimeter from the surrounding wall. This is because the materials used to make those areas were different than those used for the rest of the walls; a mixture of sand and lime as support requirement for ‘al fresco’ painting technique, It didn’t need to be made in two levels but I wanted to emphasize the paintings as irregular in shape.
The paintings occupy a space in between 1 .5 meters and 3 meters from the floor, very much at people’s touch level, and follow two walls, one at each side of the central altar of the church, measuring each approximately 20 meters horizontally.
There are seven stations of the cross in each one of those two walls forming a frieze all along them, and there is a small wooden cross -some 20 cm.- attached to the top of each painting to fulfill the requirements of the Catholic Church for a Via Crucis.
For the same church I made the Baptismal Font, two sculptures and many stained glass windows. There are two books concerning this installation: “The Creation” describes the windows of the “Sacraments” and those of the Creation (the latter have been destroyed); “Via Crucis” describes the mosaic Stations of the Cross produced for this church.
