“Artists Joe Hester, left, and Richard Caemmerer are painting a creation mural on the walls of the Sun Walk passageway connecting Trinity Lutheran Church to its new expansion.Laura Canby photoIn the Biblical account of creation, God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh. Inside a walkway in Freeland’s Trinity Lutheran Church, visiting artists Richard Caemmerer and Joe Hester have completed a giant mural depicting the creation story in just three-and-a-half days, with no time to rest after their labors. The walkway, dubbed the Sun Walk, is a wide passageway connecting the main church to a nearly completed 16,000-square-foot facility expansion containing a combination fellowship hall and gymnasium, eight classrooms and two nurseries. The Sun Walk and adjacent garden courtyard will be used for small group meetings, coffee socials, and quiet individual reflection. Bordered by glass walls and doors on one side, the 120-foot-long by 12-foot-high bare walls on the other side of the walkway just begged for some art, said Larkin Van Horn, a local textile artist and member of Trinity. Van Horn had just the artist in mind for the job: Richard Caemmerer. Caemmerer is the founder of Grunewald Guild, a nondenominational Christian artist community and teaching center located in Plain, 14 miles north of Leavenworth, Wash. Van Horn both attended and taught at the guild. Grunewald, a German word meaning green woods, is also the name of one of Caemmerer’s favorite artists, a 15th century religious painter. The goal of the guild is to help people connect their faith to the visual arts, Caemmerer said. Eight artists and faculty reside at the guild year-round, including Caemmerer’s assistant artist on the mural, Joe Hester, whose artistic specialty is stained glass. In summer the guild community swells to 40 students and faculty. In addition to being executive director of the guild, Caemmerer produces more than 80 works of art for churches around the world each year. His media include banners, stained glass windows, murals, furniture, and even the design of church structures. He is also a liturgical artist often invited to paint during religious services as a visual enhancement of the service’s theme. I remember watching him paint a mural on a wall in back of an altar during a worship service at Holden Village (a Lutheran retreat center) several years ago, said church member Bill Koll. It was one of the most remarkable services I ever attended. Over his career, Caemmerer has created original art pieces for 650 churches. I work with churches, rather than working for them in creating art, he said. To emphasize this distinction he gestured toward a luminescent blue whale on the green fifth sphere of creation. The previous day Pastor Lindus had brought his 11-year-old daughter, Kelsi, to watch the artists work. Art is not a spectator sport, Caemmerer told Kelsi, putting a brush in her hand and helping her translate a rough pencil sketch into a finished creation of her own. If we are created in the image of God, then we ought to be creative ourselves, maintained Caemmerer. Though he has painted interpretations of the Genesis account many times, Caemmerer paints only one creation story a year. The mural at Trinity Lutheran Church includes a progression of brightly colored spheres with abstract images drawn from the Book of Genesis, science, and First Nations folklore. To me, the creation story is a way of understanding what surrounds us, and a way of putting God at the center of life, Caemmerer says. Pastor Lindus agrees and said he hopes the mural will foster a sense of awe, wonder and perspective in people, whether they take the Genesis account figuratively, as does his denomination of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, or whether they view it in a literal sense as do fundamentalist denominations. The Sun Walk creation mural will be one of several focal points at the new building’s dedication ceremony June 17. The public is invited to the dedication as well as to a more extensive community celebration being planned for July 29. “