Rosemarie Adcock: An Artist Finds Her Mission Field
The polar bear was too eye-catching. It drew attention away from the painting’s intended focal point. But Rosemarie Adcock, thanks to years of training and experience as a fine artist, knew what to do. With her eye for color, depth, and composition, she deftly added hints of lavender and apricot to soften the polar bear’s fur and direct the viewer’s attention back to the painting’s focal point, Adam.
Rosemarie has made thousands of artistic decisions like this in her decades as a painter. The work in question, Adam Naming Animals & The Appearance of Eve, is part of a series of biblically inspired monumental paintings. What does monumental mean? Her most recent work, The Revelation of St John Triptych, measures 48 by 144 inches—that’s forty-eight square feet!
Rosemarie’s style in this series is vibrant and dynamic, full of color, movement, and oftentimes humor (and a lot of animals). For all the action happening on the canvas, however, each element is carefully planned and positioned. In the earliest stages of creation, Rosemarie uses a superimposed grid to guide the composition as it takes shape. This steady framework is how she achieves balance in the painting from beginning to end.
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It’s similar to another framework that has guided Rosemarie throughout her career: Holy Scripture. Seeing the world through a biblical grid keeps her grounded and focused on godly living. Throughout her many years in ministry, she has been a:
- Creator of sacred art
- Founder and president of an arts-focused mission organization
- Champion of art-centered outreach for churches
She has carefully and intentionally crafted her life—like a work of art—around the scriptural call to bring Christ’s love to a hurting world.
Painting Pictures, Sowing Seeds
Rosemarie was bound to be a missionary; she was sure of it. But the Lord closed the door on Bible school and opened it to art school instead. And not just any art school. Rosemarie initially attended the American Academy of Art, where she studied under Eugene Hall, in direct artistic lineage from the Russian impressionist master, Ilya Repin. She went on to earn her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She then received a grant from the Minister of Culture of Baden-Württemberg to continue her studies at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Künste Karlsruhe, Germany.
After graduating, Rosemarie embarked on her first exhibit. In the autumn of 1988, she began with 26 impressionistic paintings that depicted life in Eastern Europe and Russia, especially among refugees. Over the next seven years, she grew her series to 120 paintings and toured throughout the United States and Western Europe. In that time, she noticed something amazing: viewers were moved to tears by her work, and often asked her what they could do to help the subjects of her paintings. The Lord was using Rosemarie’s art to communicate his heart. And to plant seeds—literally.
That first exhibit led to gift-in-kind donations valued over $1.25 million, much in the form of vegetable seeds and vitamins. These went to communities in need across the recently dissolved Soviet Union, and Rosemarie realized that the Lord had called her to the mission field after all, through her vocation as an artist.
Arts for Relief & Mission
At the conclusion of her international tour, Rosemarie founded Arts for Relief & Mission, a nonprofit charity dedicated to deepening this connection between art and missions. For over three decades, she has led ARM alongside her husband, Ed. ARM remains dedicated to global missions and currently supports widows in Uganda. But ARM also finds ways to partner with churches and ministries with as much eye-popping variety and creativity as Rosemarie’s paintings. Just a few examples include:
- Guiding young artists through their first opening reception and exhibit
- Arranging for a community mural to engage artists outside the church
- Helping set up and run a children’s art camp
- Coordinating live music and real-time painting within liturgical services
- Providing professional musicians to lead worship in many forms of sacred music
The goal of these and many other projects is to mentor and equip local parishes to sustain such endeavors on their own.
Church Planting through Chapel Galleries
Of course, in all this time, Rosemarie has continued her work as a painter. She is adding to her series of biblical paintings all the time, planning to tackle the wedding at Cana next. By showing her artwork in public galleries, she has witnessed firsthand how eager her viewers are to learn more about the scenes she has painted—and sometimes how little they know to begin with. One couple, looking at a painting of Adam and Eve, asked who it depicted. When Rosemarie answered them, she was stunned by their follow-up question: Who’s that?
The decline in biblical literacy among the general population has created a whole new mission field right here, in our own communities. Rosemarie, a vocational deacon in the Anglican Church, and her husband, Ed, a priest and musician, both love spending time answering questions and building relationships with people who come into their art gallery. Many of them do not attend church. This sparked the idea for their latest project, Chapel Galleries.
Spaces for Connection
Chapel Galleries is a ministry-in-the-marketplace that aims to duplicate this gallery experience. It partners with local parishes to either set up a gallery inside their existing church building or create one in a public setting. These spaces can foster growth and connection as relationships build, and in some cases, even turn into a church plant.
Rosemarie has tested this model in a number of different locations. Her current vision is to establish a permanent gallery to exhibit her original monumental paintings. This location will serve as a gathering space for her own community, but also as a prototype for Chapel Galleries across the country. Rosemarie and Ed’s well-developed skill set in mentoring parishes, along with high-quality reproductions of Rosemarie’s paintings, will enable the cultivation of a missional presence in any community and support the cause of sacred art.
Join the Harvest
Does your parish have a space that can display paintings? Is there a spot in your town or city where you could set up a presence dedicated to outreach through the arts? What resources or skills do you have that the Lord might use in an unexpected mission field?
While not all of us are called to bring fresh and colorful interpretations of Bible scenes to wall-sized canvases—polar bears and all—we are all called to cultivate what the Lord has given us for the glory of his kingdom. Following Rosemarie’s example, let us order our lives on the unchanging groundwork of God’s word, and answer his call in faith. God, who is the Master Artist, will expertly turn our own lives into dynamic, colorful, and unexpected creations, ordered to draw the viewer’s eye ever to him.
- To learn directly from Rosemarie about her artistic process, projects, and events, visit her website or sign up for her newsletter.
- To find out how to partner with Chapel Galleries or to purchase Rosemarie’s original paintings, prints, puzzles, and gifts, see the Chapel Galleries website. Portions of proceeds from these sales support outreach locations, relief efforts, and other mission projects.
- To learn more about Arts for Relief & Missions, visit their website.
- If you live in Illinois, one of Rosemarie’s paintings, The Feeding of the 5000, is currently on exhibit at the Riverfront Museum in Peoria, Illinois (and featured on a billboard advertising the museum!).
Image: Detail of The Revelation of St. John Triptych by Rosemarie Adcock.
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