All Day, All Night, Angels Watching Over Me
OMNI and Jane Lillian Vance are pleased to announce the completion of two joyous new paintings.
They are the Day Angels and the Night Angels, each 2′ x 6′ oil, mica, and gold on linen. The paintings are named after the comforting lyrics of the anonymous old folk hymn.
Vance has worked for four years on her Africa Series paintings, inspired by the work of OMNI. Next summer, she will join the medical mission trip for the third time, working in wound care.
Vance’s upcoming TED talk at Virginia Tech, Catalytic Compassion, will include a tribute to OMNI’s president, Karen Remine.
In July, 2015, in OMNI’s Morgan Dana Harrington Educational Wing in Ndola, Zambia, Vance instructed 200 bright children who are fed and educated by OMNI–to draw an angel. She had brought paper, markers, and colored pencils for the children to use, and she explained that when they finished, she would take their angels to America and put them into large paintings to help OMNI.
The children, ages 6 to 17, set to their task with great earnestness, producing astonishingly original angels, almost 70 of which Vance has included in her work.
In the Day Angels painting, Vance has included a typical Zambian thatched gathering hut, a South African beaded elephant and giraffe, and the angel whose story most captivated her. “What is this angel doing? What is she holding?,” Vance asked the young artist. Headmaster Teddy Kasongo translated the child’s Bemba: “This angel simply could not pass by the lemon tree without plucking the beautiful lemons.”
The charming lemon-plucker angel gave Vance the inspiration for the content of the Night Angels painting. Written in the night sky, in Bemba, is the narration that the Night Angels light fires in their charcoal braziers and watch the lemons turn into stars.
In both the Day and the Night paintings, each angel is paired with a small triangular window, made of mica, through which the angels can always see the people they love, over whom they keep constant watch.
The Day painting is colored both bright and pastel, like a box of candy.
In the Night painting, the angels soften the challenging darkness by crowding out fear. Their cheerful presence is joined by a beaded rhinoceros, lion, and ostrich, and by four cozy charcoal braziers. The Night Angels transform the foreboding darkness into a festive gathering among silver and lemon-slice stars.
Friends asked Vance, “But how did the children know what to draw? How did they know what an angel looks like?” Part of the answer must surely be that children know what kindness looks like.
Most of the angels are women. Some appear with young children. Most wear their hair in dreadlocks.
To the Zambian children, angels look like fortunate Zambians, who have not only multiple wings and golden aureoles, but the luxuries of shoes, beautifully patterned cloth, cups full of milk or tea, and flowers. Sometimes, the children’s angels show an even greater luxury: a smile.
OMNI is hoping that the children’s angels will inspire you to be an angel yourself this Christmas season, to consider becoming the sponsor of a Zambian child.
Your sponsorship provides all school supplies, books, health care, dental care, uniforms, shoes, mosquito nets, funeral expenses for family members, and in some cases, new homes.
And amazingly, your sponsorship costs just $1 a day, $30 per month, $360 per year. Your charitable donation will be tax deductible.
For more information or to become a sponsor now please visit:
http://omnimissions.com/site/sponsor/
Comments are currently closed.