Virginia Episcopalian Magazine Summer 2013 Issue | Page 19

Art programs for adults began soon after the Art
Camp was established. Artist Emma Lou Martin, the first
director of the Art Camp, recalled that when the campers’
parents saw what their children had been doing, they
asked Shrine Mont to offer something similar for adults.

At about the same time, when art curator Sue Rainey
picked up her son from the Art Camp, she noticed that the
John Douglas Woodward collection of paintings from the
late 1880s needed to be restored. She brainstormed with
Martin about how to get permission to clean them.

Martin suggested that Shrine Mont offer adult art
workshops to help raise funds to restore the Woodward
paintings and to meet the demand from campers’ parents.
As a result, James Madison University began offering art
workshops there, and Martin volunteered to be an instructor.

Rainey became the chairman of the art committee
and raised more funds for the restoration project
through grants and contributions. Nearly all of the
collection has now been cleaned.

When the JMU art workshop was discontinued a
few years ago after the instructor retired, watercolorist
Gwen Bragg took over the program. Bragg said the 10day workshops give participants a chance to learn new
techniques that would take too much time to learn in a
normal classroom setting.

“Day-to-day distractions are eliminated so they
can paint day and night – a luxury many don’t have,”
she said. “There’s a sense of being withdrawn from the
usual hubbub. You can connect with your art and explore
different themes,” she said.

Elaine Nunnally
Watercolor artist Elaine Nunnally has created literally hundreds
of paintings and drawings during her time at Shrine Mont. Her
painting of Shrine Mont’s famous “butt buns” – served alongside
roast beef, mashed potatoes, gravy and apple butter – are the
star of this painting, which Nunnally painted when her family was
at Shrine Mont in 1992. “This night, I pushed back from the table
[and] asked the waiters to leave the buns on the table so I could
paint [them] … and I painted the ‘still life’ in front of me. When I
see this, it just makes me think of all the wonderful meals in the
dining hall, but especially those wonderful homemade rolls that we
and the campers called ‘butt buns.’”

Another painting features a bit less well known subject: the
unfinished attic rooms in the top floor of the Virginia House, which
Nunnally found as a source of inspiration during an art workshop
at Shrine Mont in 2000. “In those days, the rooms were being
used for storage of the many articles and furniture that were used
in the centuries before, when the hotel was a busy and bustling
place,” she explained. “Many of the rooms just had junk cluttered
or thrown in, all piled high, and they had been there for ... well,
decades! The heat of the summer sun radiated through the dusty
windows, and the dust was piled high! As I sat in the hot attic
and painted the interesting scattered arrangements of stuff, it all
seemed to speak to me of the times gone by.” One of her paintings
from this series was her first accepted into the Virginia Watercolor
Society’s annual show.

Arts continued on page 18

Prayer Cards from Virginia to the People of
St. George’s Anglican Cathedral in Baghdad, Iraq
These prayer cards (opposite page) were created by people of
all ages from St. James’, Leesburg; St. Gabriel’s, Leesburg; and
St. David’s, Ashburn, for the people of St. George’s Anglican
Cathedral, Baghdad, Iraq. The cards were made in two venues.

The first venue was a confirmation workshop, attended by
students from all three congregations. The idea was to create
“picture prayers” for their brothers and sisters in Iraq.

The second venue was Shrine Mont, during the St. James’
Parish Retreat in 2007. The prayers were then sent forth from that
peaceful, Virginia mountain to war-weary parishioners in Iraq.

On the day after the Shrine Mont retreat, the prayer cards
were hand-carried by a St. James’ parishioner to Cyprus. The
Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in Nicosia, Cyprus, then handcarried the physical prayers to a meeting with Canon Andrew
White, the vicar of St. George’s, Baghdad, Iraq. Unfortunately,
in the chaos of war, the cards were lost before ever reaching the
people of St. George’s. Nevertheless, the prayers still rose to
God in the creating, the carrying and the sending forth.

– Submitted by Debbie Gegenheimer

Summer 2013 / Virginia Episcopalian

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