Surgery scene and mystical floating pieces, by Denise Klitsie

Denise Klitsie started her career as a layout artist for Disney Feature Animation, then turned to painting, and then to magazine illustration. She credits Fuller Theological Seminary’s magazine with giving her “a place to be an artist serving the church.” Her illustrations use narrative, symbols, and collage to develop a theme, as in this one on the subject of healing, in which the scene in the operating room includes a pisanki Easter egg, an image laden with Christian meaning. “We wanted the tools tray in the foreground to have objects that suggested something beyond physical healing was going on under the surgeon’s knife,” she comments. She was also inspired by the work of Giotto, Masaccio, and Fra Angelico. “I find these pre-Renaissance painters’ works to be more human than most of the gothic art of their time, yet, to my eye, retaining a bit of otherworldliness.”