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Documenting history and a renowned work of art
BY LEIGH ANNE WILLIAMS
The pandemic brought grief and hardship, but there were a few gifts and good things that came in the midst of it. The Rev. Canon David Clunie (recently retired) made a beautiful art history documentary in a creative collaboration with many contributors. If not for the pandemic, it might never have been made.
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“I was always crazy about photography and cameras when I was in high school,” Clunie told Crosstalk. “For my Latin project in grade 10, I did a video with 8mm film…. But this was in the 1960s, and there weren’t places like Algonquin or community colleges that taught that stuff, so, I just didn’t think that it was a possibility and went on to do other things.”
Cut to 2020 and the beginning of the pandemic at St. Bartholomew’s Church in Ottawa. “We did a prerecorded service in our church,” Clunie explains. We would record it on Wednesday, and it would then go live on Sunday….Tim Piper, our organist, would do music and hymns … and I would spend a lot of time with images —art, photography— that would be on while the hymns were playing, and of course, the words would be out in front as well. So, after a year and a half doing it, I started getting pretty handy at it…, We were putting out a video a week, 35 or 40 minutes, with a lot of artistic content instead of just livestream liturgy.” These well-honed skills enabled Clunie to embark on a new project. to
Mourners bear witness to the terrible price of war.
St. Bart’s is home to a stainedglass window created as a World War I memorial by the renowned Irish artist Wilhelmina Geddes. It is officially titled ‘The Welcoming of a Slain Warrior by Soldier Saints, Champions and Angels’ but in stained-glass circles, it is simply known as the Ottawa Window.
The church is directly across from Rideau Hall and has been attended by many of Canada’s governors-general, including the (L to R) Irish Ambassador Dr Eaamon McKee, who supported efforts to restore the window; narrator Charlotte Gray, art historian Dr Shirley Ann Brown and the Rev. Canon David Clunie.
