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Sisters' Murals Portray Scripture, Nature
(Photos by the Publisher)
Sisters Genny Hendricks and Dora Jane Duncan painted this mural in the toddlers' room at Duncan's church. The mural shows Jesus with small children.
Children at Ridgeland Drive Baptist Church in Six Mile can get up close with a kitten and a pig and other animals, as well as learn about Jesus and David, all through the allure of art.
The murals were Ridgeland Drive member Dora Jane Duncan’s first attempt at painting, which she completed with her sister, Genny Hendricks, who began painting in 1998.
“She had never had a lesson,” Hendricks said of Duncan, in an interview with The Christian View. “She’s artistic, but this was her first experience painting. She has a good eye for mixing colors.”
“The children love the murals,” Ridgeland Drive’s Pastor, Rev. Fred Sanford told this writer. “It makes it so much more inviting for them. I appreciate their doing this.”
The murals for the preschool children include paintings of a duck, a rabbit, a fox, a pig, a kitten with a butterfly, birds, flowers, a boy with sheep, and a boy and his father fishing in a pond.
“They wanted something on the wall where the children are looking,” Duncan said of the murals, which are painted close to the floor. “What was on the wall was too high for them, and you would have to pick up the children, for them to see.”
“We tried to make it where there was action, but not too much,” said Hendricks.
“It keeps the children focused back in that direction.”
“We didn’t want too many things,” said Duncan, “just enough variation.”
“You can talk to the children about God’s creation,” said Hendricks. “You can see the beautiful things that God creates. You could come up with a lesson for the children, just sitting here while they’re playing.”
Young David as a shepherd playing the harp
The mural for the toddlers’ room is a blend of the Old and New Testaments. “We first did one mural, with Jesus and the children,” said Hendricks. “We went through coloring books and story books and did a young David with a harp and three sheep around him. Instead of sitting on a stool, we have him sitting on a rock.” The mural is similar to one Hendricks had painted with Yvonne Waters and Betty Sue Putman at their own church, Rock Springs Baptist Church in Easley. For Ridgeland Drive’s version, Duncan painted the clothes and flowers and David and the sheep and rocks. Hendricks freehanded the mountains and clouds. They worked together on the hair and face.
“We started out with five quarts of paint, for both murals, with the primary colors, red, yellow, and blue, and we had light blue and white,” said Hendricks. “If we needed an odd color, I had an acrylic folk paint, and we would mix that.”
“Most of it is regular latex wall paint,” said Duncan. “For a few things, we would mix in acrylic to get some of our own colors. We used pictures from a coloring book. For some of it, we used an overhead projector and outlined it, and painted it from there. Some of it was freehand.”
While they were working on the murals, people would come by and “peek in”, Hendricks said, to see their work in progress. “Everybody encouraged us,” she said.
Since the murals’ completion, the children have enjoyed them tremendously. “The kids were amazed when they first walked in,” Duncan said. “We put a sealer on the murals so the children can touch them and the fingerprints can be wiped off.”
“But the murals look like they haven’t been touched,” said Hendricks. “The kids have a lot of respect when they see something like this. They appreciate the murals and don’t mark on them.
“Painting the murals has been rewarding,” she added. “And we had fun doing them. They give the kids a pleasant place to play when they’re in here.”
“I got a lot of enjoyment and learned a lot,” added Duncan. “It was interesting to learn how to mix the colors, to have the basic colors and come up with all of these other colors, and to learn about how using different types of brushes could affect how the picture turns out.”
“God gave us the ability to do it,” said Hendricks. “It’s a wonderful thing to do, and we think we appreciate it since we’re older. We wonder if we would use our talent if we had found out earlier that we could do this. But it just shows that there are all kinds of things a person can do.”
Duncan and Hendricks are open to teaching others how to paint murals in their own churches, or they are available to paint murals at other churches. For more information, Hendricks can be contacted at 864-855-9545.
