First Baptist Church

Life Around the Church (1/17)

Betsy Andersonby Betsy Anderson, Office Manager/Building Supervisor

The Christmas decorations in the Sanctuary have come down. The tree has returned to storage, and most of the greenery is put
away. But there is a new thing of beauty at the church: Rebecca Ellis’ sand-and-watercolor paintings of the women of the Bible.

Rebecca Ellis is an artist who lives in Half Moon Bay. She likes to use texture in her paintings, and for this series, she takes handfuls of sand from the beach and
combines them with watercolor paint on 90-pound paper to make patterns and shapes. When everything has dried, she taps off the sand, rubs out some paint, and adds more layers of paint until the faces she has visualized are clear.

Rebecca says “When I was a girl, I didn’t get to learn about these women. I want my daughter to know them. Girls need to know that there are women in the Bible who survived hardships, who saved and led their people”.

Each painting has an accompanying narrative, written in the first person by Ellis, as though the woman in the painting is telling us about her life and who she is. Stroll through our hallway and enjoy the visual and written stories of Rebekah, Leah, Shiphrah and Puah, Deborah, Ruth and Naomi, Esther, Elizabeth, Mary Magdalene, and the woman at the well. It’s a peaceful journey to ease into the new year.

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fbcpaloalto

We are a progressive Baptist Church affiliated with the American Baptist Churches, USA. We have been in Palo Alto since 1893. We celebrate our Baptist heritage. We affirm the historic Baptist tenets of: Bible Freedom, Soul Freedom, Church Freedom, Religious Freedom

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