Losana and Llewellyn

(Written by Losana Boyd)

Our copy of Claudio Coello’s “The Triumph of St. Augustine” has been presented to the Canonry of St. Leopold, a community of Augustinian Canons Regular in Long Island, New York. The original, painted in 1664 for the Augustinian monastery in Acalá de Henares, is now on display in Madrid’s Museo del Prado. 

In developing our painting, we utilized as much as possible the methods and pigments that Coello would have used, beginning with a wash drawing in umber on a gessoed linen canvas prepared with a mid-range campitura, and building up successive layers of paint and glazes to encourage richness of depth and luminosity. 

As co-collaborators on this painting for the Canonry, part of our motivation was to restore, to some degree, the former tradition of artists working together on larger scale projects. As Catholic artists, we also want to make available images from our great Catholic treasury of sacred art to parishoners who might not otherwise have the opportunity to see examples of these works.

Martinho's mural of an Italian festival

AA alumnus and instructor Martinho Correia was commissioned by the Business Revitalization Zone of International Avenue in Calgary, Canada, to paint a mural of an Italian festival. Pulling from his experience of life in Italy, Martinho chose to paint a subject he knew well: The Flag Wavers of the Uffizi. The mural measures 8 x 16 feet and was painted with outdoor latex paint on plastic dibond panel. It will join seven other murals on the Avenue in celebration of the diversity of Calgary's cultural makeup.

He writes that the fun thing for him was that he had four assistants on this mural. Martinho painted the heads and hands, and each of the other artists worked on a particular part—flag specialist, background, statue specialist. "A really fun project," he writes.

We'll show an image of the completed mural after the unveiling on April 30.

Behind the scenes

A section of the long-pose colour-class in the drawing stage

(Photo by Jered Woznicki)