‘WINDOWS TO HEAVEN’
Dome’s artwork reflects devotion of congregation
Forty-three feet above the pews, the dome of St. Anthony the Great Orthodox Christian Church may be a little lower than heaven. Still, the height is dizzying, and when one cranes to peer into Christ’s face at the apex, the effect is breathtaking.
With their vibrant array of prophets, evangelists and angels — modeled after centuries-old Greek images — the painted icons would be any church’s crowning glory. But for the Spring church’s 150 families, the artwork — finished just in time for the 2016 Christmas season — is much more.
It’s a milestone for a church that, starting as a 20-family group meeting in a neighborhood community center, has become the pre-eminent worship space for Ortho- dox Christians in a vast expanse of northern Harris County.
St. Anthony’s priest, the Rev. Anthony Baba, vowed the dome’s spectacular sacred images are just the beginning.
Eventually, every bare space on every wall will be adorned with colorful, sacred paintings.
“Our worship is about affecting all our senses,” said Baba, who has led the 33-year-old church since 2010. “When we worship, we don’t just worship with our minds. We worship with our hearts, our souls, our bodies. We use material things to connect with what’s immaterial. We take bread and wine and they connect us to one who cannot be touched. We say that our icons are the windows to heaven.”
The dome paintings are the product of three years’ labor by Bostonarea artist Erin Kimmett, whose Orthodox priest husband mentored Baba for a year during semi-
nary. Painted in acrylics on canvas, the unwieldy icons — Christ’s visage is 10 feet tall — were installed by Kimmett and her assistants in a monthlong gluing marathon of seven-day weeks and 15hour days.
The St. Anthony project was the largest for the 52-year-old artist, whose work has been featured in Orthodox churches in Lebanon and throughout the United States.
“Let me tell you,” she said, “in the upper dome, the space was so tight. Much of the gluing was done with us on our backs. Oh, my God. It was physical.”
Kimmett practiced for the task by climbing onto the fire escape of her Norwood, Mass., studio and looking down.
“My studio is in an old industrial building. It’s on the third floor, up six flights of stairs,” she said. “I’d go out and stand on the fire escape, and come back in with my knees quaking. My mind was ready, but my body wasn’t.”
The paintings were funded by church members’ donations.
“People are deeply invested in this church,” Baba said. “They truly believe the church is their home.”
St. Anthony the Great, an Antiochian Orthodox church, began as a mission sponsored by an established Houston Orthodox congregation. After meeting first in a neighborhood community center, then in a strip shopping center storefront, members in 1987 built — literally with hammers and nails — a multi-purpose building in Cypresswood.
“It was a small building with a worship space and Sunday school classrooms,” Baba said. “After liturgy, they’d move the chairs and roll in the tables for coffee hour.”
The congregation’s current architect-designed sanctuary at 7202 FM 2920 opened in April 2011. Additional church buildings are planned for the church’s 11-acre site.
The new church’s first sanctuary paintings were created by an Orthodox monk from Colorado. The congregation commissioned Kimmett to paint the dome icons in 2013.
In preparation for the project, the artist and her husband toured Greece.
“We covered Greece from one end to the other, seeing as many churches and monasteries as we could,” she said. The opportunity to study at close distance the icon paintings of masters whose work she previously knew only from books was inspirational, she said.
Back in her studio, Kimmett constructed, in replica, a portion of the Spring church’s dome to better determine the ap- propriate size of the component paintings. “It was hard to know how something would look from the ground,” she said. “It was hard to view in a studio that’s only 15 feet wide. Sometimes I’d put an icon in my hallway and stand at the other end. … Every moment of painting was a moment of prayer.”
Days after Kimmett and her crew completed their work, Baba walked visitors through the newly adorned sanctuary.
“There’s a general theme,” he said. “Each icon has a certain place. Christ — he belongs at the top of the dome.”
Christ’s visage, against a dark blue background that Kimmett borrowed from paintings she saw in Greece, is encircled by the legend from the Book of Psalms: “Oh Lord, look down from heaven and behold and visit this vine and perfect that which thy right hand hath planted.”
Below Christ, 12 prophets grace the 12-sided wall. Below them are a band of angels — seraphs and cherubs. “Then on the columns,” said Baba, “are the evangelists — Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. They are holding up the word of God.”
St. Anthony the Great, like other Orthodox churches, favors domes rather than steeples.
“Steeples seem to point to a God in heaven,” Baba said. “Our God, we believe, became a man — a man who knows what it is to be man, who experienced everything except sin.
“We know he hasn’t forsaken us. All we have to do is look up. He’s there.”