Woman gives art to church, Celina Record

Celina woman gives back to church through artwork Lisa Ferguson, lferguson@starlocalmedia.com Jun 10, 2016 0 It is possible that no one was more surprised than Becca Jackson to discover that she possesses artistic abilities. “I just thought art was fun,” she recalled. In 2012, during her junior year at Celina High School, Jackson enrolled in an art class. “I actually started trying … and it just kind of came naturally. It was weird.” Even more surprising, she said, was being asked earlier this year to commission a painting for First Baptist Church of Weston, where her family has been congregation members for a decade. The untitled work, which depicts a cross surrounded by stars, was unveiled during a church service May 29 in its baptistery area where the painting will be permanently displayed. For the 4 1/2-foot-tall-by-5-foot-wide piece, Jackson, who works as an orthodontist’s assistant, said she turned to the Internet for inspiration and found photos of religious artwork she liked. She created the piece on Plexiglas using a special type of paint that, when dry, gives the impression of stained-glass artwork particularly when it is backlit as it is at the church. “I would paint it and really didn’t know what it was going to look like,” Jackson said, because it was the first time she had used the special paint. The painting was commissioned as part of a remodeling project at the church, which was constructed in 1924. According to Pastor Allan Strickland, the church was last renovated in the early 1970s. Strickland said he became aware of Jackson’s talent four years ago when she presented him a drawing she’d made of Jesus on the cross, which the pastor promptly hung at the church. When it came time to remodel the building, he said, congregation leaders were looking to get away from “the old-timey church look … so I just thought about Becca because I had seen some of her work and knew she would do a good job.” Strickland said Jackson “went and did a lot of research and gave us options before she did it. She brought some color sketches. We picked one, and she just kind of went from there and blew it out of the water. It’s amazing.” He called 21-year-old Jackson’s artwork “the crowning piece of the renovation.” Recently, on the dining room table at her family’s Celina home, Jackson displayed a handful of the pieces she has created in recent years including a painting of herself as a toddler, a mountain landscape that she made as a gift for her father and a portrait of her dog Daisy. She calls art her hobby and said she prefers to keep it that way rather than pursue it as a career. Although she was paid an undisclosed sum for creating the painting for the church, Jackson said she would have done the work for free. “I’ve been going there so long, that church really means a lot to me,” she said. “So I really wanted to give back to it for everything they’ve done for my family and all of the other families.”