The Pew Next To You
Many of the St. James parishoners will remember the delightful art
cartoons drawn by Steve Harrold during the renovation. His panels
of cherubs kept growing longer and longer in Cathedral Hall during
the Sunday coffee hours. We watched as his lofty cherubs from their
on-high view of the Cathedral led us through the transformation and
restoration of our now highly acclaimed and award-winning house of
prayer.
Harrold is a concept artist for Boeing Company and still is telling
stories with his drawings. He just completed his part in the lengthy
and complex process of the Boeing and McDonnell merger. Harrold did
murals for the companies' employees to take them through the coming
transition in their workspace and careers. He did extensive research
on the culture and local backgrounds of all facilities. The murals
were used in presentations, displays in plant and office locations
and some will be placed on line. He calls them "visual interpretations"
and "storytelling."
Harrold looks forward to a similar project coming soon with China.
He anticipates it would require far greater time in research and
preparation in drawing interpretive explanations to break down
cultural and racial barriers. Even though Harrold's murals may seem
a new concept for major worldwide companies he refers to his work as
"back to the cave walls," the origin of storytelling.
Mary Larson is another artist and St. James regular whose gentle
caricature of Archbishop Raymond G. Hunthausen in tam-o'-shanter
and knickers, was the logo for the first Archbishop Hunthausen Rainy
Day Golf Tournament , the annual St. James Cathedral fund raiser.
Mary says she has always enjoyed drawing since childhood, so much
so that she now teaches art to a young friend. She graduated recently
from Carroll College in nursing and spent the following year volunteering
at Christ House in Washington, D.C., a 24-hour facility serving homeless
men. Now back in Seattle, Mary is a nurse assigned out of Harborview
Hospital serving the homeless in downtown Seattle shelters.
The first-ever Cathedral University Millennium Forum is drawing to close
this month and the jointly sponsored program between Seattle University
and St. James Cathedral was conceived and produced by, yes, another
parishioner, Perry Lorenzo. Lorenzo has been director of education for
Seattle Opera since 1992. After studying philosophy and the classics at
Gonzaga University, he taught at Kennedy High School for 10 years.
Lorenzo said his choice of music as a youngster was the classics and he
saw his first opera when in high school. He chose the Seattle Opera's
production of Wagner's The Ring. In all, Lorenzo has attended 39 Ring
series.
While teaching at Kennedy, Lorenzo would take his students to Seattle
Opera productions. The general director, Speight Jenkins, kept seeing
him with his students and in 1992 asked Lorenzo to join the opera staff.
In addition to producing over 200 educational events each opera season,
Lorenzo has been teaching at Seattle University in the Matteo Ricci
College and in the Honors Program. Experience Opera is an outreach
program developed under Lorenzo into a 36-school project that reaches
more than 7,000 students a year in the Puget Sound area, both bringing
the study of opera into the classroom and the students into the program.
Lorenzo also runs the opera's own singers' training program, The Young
Artists Program. He and the opera's principal vocal coach, Dean
Williamson, will soon audition hundreds of singers in Seattle, Chicago
and New York.
Lorenzo has become one of the most sought after speakers on opera in
the country and lectures frequently in New York, San Francisco, Los
Angeles and at the Richard Wagner Festival in Bayreuth, Germany.
Joan McDonell, a Seattle Times' editor, is a parishioner of
St. James, a volunteer and member of the Cathedral Development Committee.
Back To Dec 97 Issue