The Creative Resource Residency of Patricia Peace Pipkin

Known to all as Trish, she was out and about the village before most of us had done a single early morning rollover wondering if it was time for the alarm clock to jangle us into a new day. She was here at Holden for a month on a Creative Resource Residency, and it was her intention to complete 4 paintings (oil) during her stay. She brought the canvasses with her with the barest outlines of what the painting would become already sketched out, the concept of the work it would be already in mind.

Trish set a schedule for herself. She was determined that she would complete one painting a week. And from her Hotel room facing south, she would use as much of the waning sunlight as was available and faithfully work during the brightest parts of the day. The door to her room was always open, and she was ever gracious to welcome the curious who were there to check on the progress of her work.

She came to her residency with an interesting concept. She would take 4 well-known stories from the Bible and put them in present-day settings. For all but one of the paintings, she used the environs...and the faces...from the part of Minnesota referred to as the Iron Range. The fourth painting would have the rock pile at the tailings of the Holden Mine as its background.

She would call it "Jesus in the Wilderness."

Trish was forever attending to the details of her painting. At the very end of her stay, Pat Schondren, who lived here as a child when the mine was still in production, took Trish and I up through the various levels of Winston, as the community of miners' homes was called, in a walk of both exploration and remembrance. Somehow, amid all the other remaining bits and pieces of the miners' lives, and in the place where at the time their daily comings and goings went unnoticed, and underneath the snow, Trish found the upper rim of a crock, a piece with the handle still attached. She brought it back to her room and used it as a model for the handles on the crocks in "The Wedding Feast of Cana." She would later return the broken piece to the spot where she had found it.

At the end of her residency when she had finished her paintings, she put them out in the library for all to see. She was gracious to explain her intentions and her methods to all who came by during the hour after dinner and before vespers.

Never one to shy away from using her wry sense of humor, Trish incorporates small details into her paintings that bring forth a smile. Here, in "Jesus and the Fishermen," Jesus stands on a rock pointing the way to an even more bountiful harvest. On the front of his tee shirt is a fish, the universal symbol for Christianity. On the front of the red tee shirt of the fisherman in the boat are the words "A & O (for Alpha & Omega) Charter Service." And in like manner, the baseball cap worn by the Jesus figure in the wilderness painting reads "No. 1 SON."

In "Raising Lazarus from the Dead", the tombstone heaved aside reads "Lazarus Zimmerman," and the front of the yellow tee shirt on the Christ-figure helping Lazarus out of the grave says "GJK Construction & Remodeling."

Attracted by both the subject matter and the unusual presentation of familiar stories as well as the bright colors, both the young and the old stopped by the library to view Trish's work.

As fascinated at the time as we all were with the work Trish was pursuing as part of her Creative Resource Residency, we were even more fascinated with Trish herself...her stories, her gentle and happy ways with people, her willingness to serve others, and her oftentimes audacious sense of adventure...and all of that was a vital part of the Residency as well.

[And a foot-note: Trish wanted to take with her a picture of each of her paintings, and so it came to pass that one mid-day, just in that brief span of time in which the full sun appears above the ridge and traverses across the lovely dip between Buckskin and Copper, we found a nail on the outside of the building called Agape, and there she had me take pictures of her paintings in the full sunlight of a late fall day. These are the individual pictures of the paintings that you see here.