CRC Artist Creates Anniversary Painting

Sy Ellens, an artist in Kalamazoo, Mich., has created a painting commemorating next month’s 125th anniversary of Christian Reformed World Missions (CRWM).

The 50-by-40-inch painting highlights images from CRWM’s ministry with Native peoples in North America and work in Africa, Asia, and Latin America over the years.

While the ministry regions are depicted in separate quadrants, they’re tied together with a cross. CRWM will display the painting at celebration events over the next year and make prints available.

Sy Ellens has been interested in art since he was a young boy on a farm in McBain, Mich.

“I’m glad I was brought up on a farm,” he says. “It taught me how to work and enjoy God’s creation and the farm is still in me. That’s why I like to do landscapes – I know the land very well after picking lots of rocks and harvesting crops.”

After high school, Sy worked at a boat-making factory in Cadillac, Mich. for several months before realizing he didn’t want to do that.

He quit and began doing decorative painting for a house and church painter, eventually starting his own business. A few years later, he completed design school and worked commercially for a year before deciding to get his teaching degree.

Sy was still studying for his teaching degree when he received a part-time job offer from Kalamazoo Christian High in Kalamazoo, Mich. He ended up teaching at Kalamazoo Christian for nine years. He had so many students interested in his classes that, by the time he left and went to Africa, he was teaching seven classes daily.

He was drawn to Africa by the stories he had heard when as a child he had gone to church with his family to listen to listen to missionary Johanna Veenstra, says Sy.

Her accounts of her work in Nigeria drew him to that country. In 1976, Sy, his wife, Jan, and their children left to serve in Nigeria with Christian Reformed World Missions.

In Nigeria, Sy taught art at a Vandeikya Government Teachers College. He had classes of over 60 students and few materials.

Every month or so, when he and his wife went to visit their sons at boarding school in Jos, Sy would receive money from the principal to buy art materials. But, unable to find what he wanted, Sy improvised.

Once, he had his students carve from logs that had been cut down near the school. The school hired someone to make hatchet-like tools for his students. Another time, he contacted some women who knew where clay was embedded in the riverbank.

Sy’s male students initially resisted working with that clay, seeing it as “women’s work.” But their interest grew as Sy showed them that they could create more than ordinary bowls.

After three years, the Ellens returned to Michigan and Sy began illustrating buildings designed by architects. Although he has since retired from making commercial renderings, he continues to paint aerial landscapes and commissions for people and organizations such as CRWM.

“I paint because I have to,” Sy says. “I would go crazy if I couldn’t. It’s what I feel God put me on this earth to do . . . I like to think that my work is stimulating to the people who see it and that they come away uplifted and blessed by it.”