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While driving away from her church in Venice, Heather Davis was wondering what might have a visual impact on the flow of people passing by the familiar Spanish-style Lutheran Church on Venice Boulevard.
The idea suddenly hit the former advertising copywriter: "Jesus Roller Skating with Friends at Venice Beach!"
That seemingly incongruous image was not her idea. Davis was remembering a ceramic artwork created in the early 1980s by a Belgian monk at St. Andrew's Abbey in the Antelope Valley foothills. But she envisioned it reproduced much larger and mounted on an outside wall of the First Lutheran Church of Venice.
After two years of effort, with the delighted cooperation of the monastery artist, Father Maur Van Doorslaer, a four-panel mural measuring nearly 5 by 13 feet will be dedicated today by the 250-family congregation and its neighbors.
Van Doorslaer's abstract white-on-shades-of-white paintings hang in European galleries, but when he summers at the...