St Pamphilus

At tomorrow's Belmar Art Walk I'll be demonstrating woodblock cutting as a way to try to build interest in my upcoming BAC woodcut class.  That means I need to have a block to cut.  A few days ago I decided to start a new saint with a feast day matching the date of the demo, April 28th.  The book had 10 saints for this particular day.  Most were not particularly exciting.  One possibility was St Cronan of Roscrea, an early Irish saint for which there was no contemporary information, but a later story mentioned something about producing a very large quantity of beer through some miraculous means.  However, I already have a beer themed saint from the original set (St Lioba  September 28th) so I looked further.  I settled on St Pamphilus, an 8th century bishop.  Typical story with a common enough theme- a very zealous religious leader whose intense devotion and practices annoyed those around him until he was accused of heresy to Rome before he proved himself innocent of those charges.  The biography mentions that on Sundays he woke up around midnight, said his order's traditional night prayers, then jumped into a mass, hours earlier than anyone else ever did.  Then at daybreak he'd prepare a meal for the poor and share it with them.

The meal thing had possibilities.  In the weeks following Hurricane Sandy there was a lot of food giveaways.  Restaurants in the shore towns around here set up outdoor grills and cooked and gave away their inventory, since there was no way to preserve the perishables for very long.  Of course churches took up the slack after that- in my former town of Manasquan you could visit a different church for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day for weeks.  People don't usually associate these beach towns with poverty, but post-hurricane a lot of people were (at least temporarily) homeless, out of work, and lacking access to things we had come to think of as basic needs.  One of my Manasquan neighbors was in the habit of making the daily rounds for free meals, and I got word from him that breakfast was a sit down deal- place your order and they brought the plate to your table.  However, much more common (as in photos I found online) was a line of steam trays and the guests getting their plates filled cafeteria (or perhaps soup kitchen) style, and I thought that would be a better visual.  Earlier versions of the pencil sketch showed a wide view of such a table, and a cropped view of a server and someone having a plate filled, but in the end I went with a more close up view of a pancake held by tongs, no more than bits of the hands of the server and diner, with small bits of steam table and other diners in the background.  Some things in the above sketch are not quite worked out, but enough is that I'll have stuff to keep me busy for the two hours.