Design by St. Andrew’s Monk Inspires Venice Church Mural

While driving away from her church in Venice, Heather Davis was wondering what might have a visual impact on the flow of people passing by the familiar Spanish-style Lutheran Church on Venice Boulevard.

The idea suddenly hit the former advertising copywriter: “Jesus Roller Skating with Friends at Venice Beach!”

That seemingly incongruous image was not her idea. Davis was remembering a ceramic artwork created in the early 1980s by a Belgian monk at St. Andrew’s Abbey in the Antelope Valley foothills. But she envisioned it reproduced much larger and mounted on an outside wall of the First Lutheran Church of Venice.

After two years of effort, with the delighted cooperation of the monastery artist, Father Maur Van Doorslaer, a four-panel mural measuring nearly 5 by 13 feet will be dedicated today by the 250-family congregation and its neighbors.

Van Doorslaer’s abstract white-on-shades-of-white paintings hang in European galleries, but when he summers at the California monastery, he creates big-eyed angels and other figures on ceramics.

By showing Jesus roller-skating hand-in-hand with other skaters, Van Doorslaer said, Jesus can be identified with ordinary life.

“I’m sure he was helping his father Joseph as a carpenter,” he said. The artist-monk created the work after several visits to the busy scene at Venice Beach. He said he was reminded of 16th-century paintings that captured a variety of activities in one picture.

Heather Davis, who lives in Mar Vista, had seen a copy of Van Doorslaer’s “Jesus Roller Skating” in the study of her church’s pastor, the Rev. Kenneth Frese, a former UCLA chaplain.

The mural says that “Jesus is very accessible,” she said. “Isn’t that what people want to hear?”

The mural that will be unveiled in 3 p.m. ceremonies today was created with the help of Donna Petersen of Venice, a sign designer by profession. A digitized image of the mural was transferred to vinyl and mounted on aluminum panels, which were attached to the front of the church near the entrance.

The billboard-like statement to Venice denizens will be made paradoxically by a congregation affiliated with the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, a theologically conservative denomination not known for contemporary styles.

“I’m new to the church, so I don’t have a lot of baggage about what you should do and not do,” said Davis, whose son is enrolled in the church’s school.

Nor, it would seem, does First Lutheran Church of Venice, which has maintained a presence for more than 50 years in the beach community that symbolizes the pleasures of Southern California and attendant social problems.

Despite the historical antipathy of conservative Lutherans toward Catholicism, Abbot Francis Benedict of St. Andrew’s Abbey at Valyermo said that Frese is “a good friend of the monastery who has been here many times.”

Befitting the whimsical character of the Benedictine monk and artist, “Jesus Roller Skating With Friends at Venice Beach” will resemble the original version created by Van Doorslaer some 15 years ago--except for a couple of details.

The sign showing orange juice for $1 has been changed to $2 in the mural to account for inflation.

And although Jesus and friends in the foreground remain on roller-skates, those in a small group in the background are wearing roller-blades--a reflection of the newer style of skating.