Most children love to draw, but when 5-year-old Elaine Tillison picked up her crayon, she knew art was something different for her — it was her life’s calling.
The self-taught artist began painting at age 19 and painted her first baptistry mural at age 23 at New Liberty Baptist Church, Jacksonville, where she was a member at the time.
“It’s a God-given talent, because it’s always been a part of me,” Tillison said.
When she started on her first mural, Tillison worried that she wouldn’t be able to keep her sense of perspective in such a large painting, but to her surprise, she actually found the large size a better format for her work.
In the decades since that first mural, Tillison has painted murals in 24 other baptistries around the Southeast. She also does portraits, wildlife scenes and paintings of birds and flowers.
Tillison’s latest work is a 15-by-8-foot mural depicting Jesus feeding the 5,000 in the fellowship hall of her church, Webster’s Chapel Baptist, Wellington, in Etowah Baptist Association.
Pastor Michael Yates acknowledges that it’s rare for a small church like 120-member Webster’s Chapel to have such special artwork.
“We’re just so blessed to have her. She’s just such an asset to the church,” Yates said of Tillison, whose art he was familiar with long before he began serving his current church. Not only did Yates go to school with Tillison’s husband and church at New Liberty Baptist with the couple but also she painted a baptistry mural for one of his former churches.
The themes of Tillison’s murals vary depending on their location. For baptistries, she said common themes include the Jordan River, a dove or rising rays of light. At Webster’s Chapel, her baptistry mural depicts Christ standing in a river with His arms raised to heaven. It is titled “Rejoice” and was inspired by Luke 15:10: “In the same way, I tell you, there is rejoicing in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”
One aspect of her artwork that Tillison is careful to point out is the fact that she never paints the face of Christ. She did paint His face earlier in her career but was convicted about the practice.
“I’ve struggled with this for a long time, and through much prayer, I feel it would be wrong to put a face on Him when we will never know what He really looked like. I feel I would be making an idol in the eyes of God,” Tillison said.
She is willing to paint a figure representing Christ but always obscures His face with an arm, rays of light or some other technique appropriate to the painting. In her latest mural of Jesus feeding the 5,000, Tillison painted Him with His back to the viewer.
In addition to literally portraying a scene, she seeks to symbolically represent Christ in her paintings.
In the Webster’s Chapel fellowship hall mural, Tillison included seven symbols of Christ: the branch, the living water, the dove, the lamb, the bread, the solid rock and the true vine.
She said she selected the number seven because it represents God.
“When you really stop to look at it, you want to scan every detail,” Yates said of the mural.
And that’s just the effect Tillison desires to provoke with her painting. “I think you can spread the Word using all of your five senses,” she said.
For more information on church murals, contact Tillison at 256-492-7479 or wwartstudio@aol.com.
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