Palette of Light on a Canvas Grand

My wife has a cool job. She is the Director of Creative Arts at our church. Her responsibilities are numerous and varied, covering basically all of the worship service elements except the spoken message. She works closely with the pastoral staff and with Steve Mathews, our Director of Worship and resident musical powerhouse. One of her principle duties (and joys) is the set and lighting design for our main sanctuary. She is really good at it and continues to come up with fresh, new, and engaging ideas to complement and integrate all of the musical, multi-media, visual, and dramatic components in order to help communicate the Gospel in our little corner of the kingdom.

This is what our sanctuary looked like last week. Those illuminated orbs are Chinese lanterns. They are lit from within and without. One of our best and most gifted volunteers, Phil Lafuze, wired them up and is able to control them from our lighting console. The two large globes on the stage are connected to hoists in the rafters and can be raised and lowered.

This was from a sermon series some months back on technology and it's effect on the family and culture. The Cubist wall hangings are actually paintings. One of our artists, Ben Kenworthy, created several canvases with a "paint-by-numbers" outline drawing. Then, volunteers from the congregation painted in the colors.

This was Christmas 2006. One of the coolest things was the way we had the lights on the trees are wired into the light board. There were actually two colors of light strands on each tree, white and red, if I recall correctly. At different times within the service, the lighting on the stage would change and so would the trees. Pretty cool.

This one, a little harder to see, was for a series called "The Ripple Effect" and utilized a variety of water effects in video and lighting. But the most interesting element was the four illuminated recirculating waterfalls that lined the back of the stage. Conceived by Nancy and brought to reality by Randy Davis, our video department director, and the aforementioned Phil Lafuze.

Here's a picture that shows the waterfalls a little better, behind the guitarists.