events and projects

The school Convent of Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church was renovated in a Youth and Retreat Center in the fall of 2024.

The Pastor, Fr José Felix Ortega asked me to help for the renovation of the Chapel and the making of 7 big icons portraiting young saints for each communal room.

In 2022, when I was living in Newark and volunteering at the CFR Soup Kitchen, Fr Stephen, the local servant asked me to help them beautify the Kitchen soup room where our guests come to have lunch on Tuesdays. The project developed in the form of 5 big icons on birch plywood representing scenes where Jesus feeds the poor and disciples and the patron saints of the Soup Kitchen, St Martin de Porres and St Josephine Bakhita.

We were looking for something simple and poor but beautiful and I ended creating a new style of iconography by painting directly on the wood without gesso with very thin layers of egg tempera paint letting the wood veins shows through. The 'lights' were done in reverse, by scratching the paint layer to expose the raw wood.

I came to call this simple technique :" the Franciscan style". I also used my experience in calligraphy and ceramic geometric ornementation to refine the style of these grand scale icons. (4x4)

Father Cichon, pastor of St Christopher Church in Midland Beach contacted me in 2022 for two projects he had in his heart ; the Church of St Margaret Mary situated in his parish was recently closed and scheduled for sale and he wanted a memorial of it to be displaced in St Christopher's: so he commissioned me for an icon of St Mary Margaret that became an icon of the Apparition of Jesus showing His Sacred Heart to her with the New Jersey Church of St M.M. built on the model of the Chapel of the Apparitions in France between them.

This icon is now hanging in the Narthex of St Christopher