Piercing. Visceral. Striking.
All three words describe the excruciating pain of a sword. All three are words that cut to the heart of the thoughts and emotions evoked by the “Seven Sorrows of Mary” paintings by Falls Church native Katie Parker.
Parker, 20, finished the seven paintings in July after more than two years of work. They are now housed in the parish center of St. Mary of Sorrows Church in Fairfax, her grandparents’ parish. The paintings portray Our Lady with large swords in her chest and back; each subsequent painting depicts a sorrow with an additional sword than the one before it, making Mary’s sorrow more tangible to the viewer.
“I tried to show with the swords just the amount of pain she went through in each crisis,” said Parker.
Parker also paid careful attention to the setting and time period. “Before I even started sketching, I did a lot of background research on time and place, basically the environment that Mary and Jesus were in in the Bible so that I could get everything as historically accurate as I possibly could,” she said.
Parker shared her intentionality about Mary’s veil.
“I found some interesting facts about how if you are a virgin, your hair can be exposed but if you are married, it should be covered,” she said. “I had her hair partially covered because I still wanted her to be seen as the Virgin Mary throughout the whole thing.”
The project came with many challenges for Parker, a junior at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond majoring in communication arts with a minor in creative writing. Oil painting, the medium of the project, came with a learning curve. She often reworked sketches to better communicate her ideas. But she said the most arduous part was simply finishing.
“Mentally the hardest part was just having the determination to finish this because seven paintings is actually a lot and I was doing them between school. And it was a new kind of medium for me.”
She explained that a prayer her grandmother taught her helped her persevere to the end. “Mother, my confidence, be with me.”
“I found myself saying that a lot when I was painting just to have the willpower to continue,” she said.
Her grandmother, Mary Parker, is one of her strongest supporters. She has helped nurture the artist’s talent since she was 5 years old when she sent Parker to a summer art class.
“She came home with a self-portrait and I thought to myself, ‘Now how would a 5-year-old know about a self-portrait,’ ” Mary recalled. “I thought, ‘This child has potential.’ ”
When Father James S. Barkett, pastor of St. Mary of Sorrows, began looking for a painter to undertake the project, Mary naturally connected him with her then-17-year-old granddaughter.
What began as seven 5-by-7-inch paintings for a parish confessional became seven 16-by-24-inch paintings now on display in one of the most active buildings of the parish, Ferrell Hall. “It gets a lot of traffic over there now,” Father Barkett said, explaining that the parish preschool, religious education, youth ministry programs and some parish offices are located there.
For those who would like to pray with the images while away from Ferrell Hall, her grandfather Fred Parker created prayer cards with the seven images and part of a novena to Our Lady of Sorrows. “He wanted people to take them and meditate with those prayer cards on the seven sorrows,” said Mary.
The hope is that people can use the paintings to pray and reflect on Mary and Jesus. “I hope anyone who sees them is drawn into them like we are to the role of our Blessed Mother, which was so much greater than we realize,” said Father Barkett.
“There’s this reality that she lived her life never in relationship to what it would cost her,” said Father Barkett. “It was always in relationship to what God was asking. There was never a moment where she said, ‘This is too much’ or ‘I don’t want to do this.’ It was always whatever God wanted was what she wanted. It’s highlighted in her sorrows.”
Pariseau is a freelancer in McLean.
