St. Hyacinth Academy has held a Fine Arts Night for the past three years during Catholic Schools Week, exhibiting the talent and knowledge gained through its Arts Program. During the first trimester of school, the students in kindergarten through 8th grade spent several art lessons working on posters for the Diocesan poster contest. In teaching the children about this year’s poster theme “The Family of God Responds with Mercy,” the art teacher, Mrs. Jennifer Klinzing, was blessed with the opportunity to educate the students about the meaning of mercy, about a Jubilee year, and Pope Francis’ desire for an increase in mercy. In deciding the theme for this year’s Fine Arts Night, Mrs. Klinzing felt guided by the Holy Spirit to continue with the theme of mercy in teaching the art lesson that would be displayed for the show.
The students in grades 3-8 were asked to choose a picture from a variety of images depicting mercy, reinforcing the message of mercy that Pope Francis has called us to focus on this year. The students were taught how to use the technique of gridlines to keep proportion and develop the skill of shading in their work. For hundreds of years artists have used grids to keep the proportion of the image they are drawing. Each of the pictures chosen by the students had gridlines already drawn on it measuring 3x4 inches in size with a total of 12, one-inch squares.
The students were given a 9x12 inch piece of drawing paper on which they learned to draw a grid of 12, three-inch squares. They were instructed to fold the picture they had chosen so they only looked at one square to draw at a time. By focusing on one square instead of the entire picture, it enables the artist to concentrate on the lines, the light and the dark, the shadows and shading of the image. Gridlines are a tool to open up the “artist’s eye.”
Through their art lessons, the students were taught that mercy means to be kind and forgiving. They were taught that the family of God is us. They were taught that the greatest act of mercy ever was God giving us His son to die for us so that we could have eternal life. They learned about the Corporal and Spiritual Works of Mercy. They learned that Pope Francis declared this year in the Church a Year of Mercy, and not just a year of mercy, but an Extraordinary Jubilee Year. They learned that a Jubilee year is a year with special blessings and forgiveness from God and that an Extraordinary Jubilee Year is a year that a pope may choose to declare as a jubilee year for an important reason.
Pope Francis desires as many people as possible to experience the forgiveness, love, and compassion of our Heavenly Father. Pope Francis stated that “No one can be excluded from God’s mercy.” He said that at times we need to be more aware of mercy so we can be more effective signs of God’s action in our lives. He proclaims this Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy as a special time for the Church, a time when more people will come to believe and those who believe in God may grow stronger and make a bigger difference in the world.
Parents viewing the work at the show commented that it was neat to see not only the development of the children’s artistic abilities, but their mental growth in knowledge of the meaning of mercy and how it can apply to their own individual lives. The students learned that they themselves can show mercy in their everyday lives. One parent commented on the powerfulness of the images themselves. It was an opportunity not only for the children to learn and create and grow in both art and faith, but for the viewers of the show to grow and learn as well.