While the Church is marking Advent and preparing for Christmas, artist Steven Knight is finding himself immersed in work more evocative of Holy Week and Easter, and struggling with the realization that one of his works needed to be completely remade.

The iconographer made the painful discovery while working on Simon Helping Jesus Carry the Cross, the fifth Station of the Cross destined for Sts. Joachim and Ann Church in Aldergrove, B.C. 

Few works of sacred art are as demanding on time as the Stations of the Cross. Where most artwork is complete after just one canvas, the Stations require 14 separate yet visually similar works of art.  

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Knight’s original fifth station  looked fine until he placed it next to some of the other completed stations. The figures were too small, and they wouldn’t have fit in with the rest of the set. The entire piece needed to be redone.  

Knight has now finished “Station 5: 2.0,” as he refers to it, but it required a complete rework of the design and layout of the piece. With the fifth station complete, Knight is approaching the project’s halfway point, having finished six stations.  

“I keep saying to God — because I’m 75 — don’t pick me yet,” he told The B.C. Catholic at his home studio, “I need to finish just a few more.” 

Knight has been an artist for most of his life, starting as a child with “crayons and coloured pencils.” Before retiring, he was the intermediate art teacher at St. Anthony’s Elementary in West Vancouver, where he taught for 35 years. He’s been an iconographer for the last 25 years.  

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“You can’t paint icons without them affecting your faith,” he said. “In some ways it restored my faith because I was a bit shaky before, just going to church sometimes.  

“Once I got into this (iconography and sacred art), all of a sudden everything came back again, and I started going to church regularly.” 

The stations for Sts. Joachim and Ann will be his second set. The first is hanging in Holy Cross Church in Burnaby.  

Those were much smaller, only taking 19 months to complete. With the current set of stations, each panel takes a couple of months to complete, with the most complicated taking up to four months. 

Knight is realistic in his estimates: he still has a few years to go before the whole project is done.  

Contrary to popular ideas about art as personal expression, Knight said, iconography isn’t about the artist. The choice of an iconographic form by Sts. Joachim and Ann pastor Fr. Lawrence Donnelly was intended to be inspired by the strict traditions of traditional iconography. 

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“It’s not about my creativity,” he said. “It’s about doing these images so that people who see them can pray with them. They bring beauty to the Church as well.”

Yet, iconography’s traditional elements often mix with the artist’s interpretation of the scene. For example, in the first station, where Pilate condemns Christ to death, “Pilate’s actually looking out at me,” says Knight about his work. “It’s like, who are you choosing, Christ or Barabbas?”