Compelling Faces in Art - Gari Melchers, Sunday Mass.

Gari Melchers was an American artist (1860-1932). His painting, Sunday Mass (c.1886), depicts the interior of a church with parishioners in traditional Dutch clothes. The faces, as well as the poses, demonstrates Melchers’ qualities as a storyteller. I can imagine the preacher teaching these women to pay attention to the good gifts of God that surround them, and developing habits of gratitude. And, I also see in their faces what Norman Maclean describes in A River Runs Through It and Other Stories: “We can love completely what we cannot completely understand.”