Saint Joseph Hospital
Oil on Birch Ply
70″x96″
2013
A commission for the lobby of Exempla Saint Joseph Hospital, Denver CO, this painting features…
the hospital’s 19th-century stone twin-towers buildings. Saint Joseph has served as a faith-based hospital in Denver since 1873. For my proposed painting I chose to use an earlier building, created in the late 19th century, to symbolize the presence of the hospital in the community. I also included elements of distant and close landscape. And I included Sisters, symbolic of the four Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth Kansas who came out to Denver in 1873 and create this Hospital, which they still own. I composed the image with a cubist-derived drawing system to suggest the ways that history, memory and community are a multi-layered creation. The painting was also designed on an irregularly-shaped substrate in order to make the piece “uplifting, warm, inviting.” The distinctive shape also serve as a “way-finding” device, hanging over the front desk, as requested in the RFP.