The Silliman University Divinity School Deans 1921-2021

  Several images of Channon have been published in books about Silliman University -- now these are available on various platforms on-line. The photo that was the basis for this drawing appeared in the Portal, Silliman's official yearbook, of 1922.

Dr. Paul T. Lauby served as dean of the S.U. Divinity School from 1961-1965, and was a member of the faculty before then. He was Silliman's vice president for academic affairs in the late 60s, and then general secretary of the United Board of Christian Higher Education in Asia  from 1970 to 1989.   He was the minister who married my parents, and in March or April 1979, he and his wife Edna hosted us at their home in Montclair, New Jersey. My memories of that visit are of course a child's -- a quiet feeling of joy and contentment as we walked through the spring woods, sleeping under the sloping eaves of a house more than a hundred years old, a wardrobe filled with intriguing, fur-collared coats from decades past, a beagle called Nugget. They were extremely nice people, I remember that. A happy weekend, and for many years after that those short moments on that walk in which I wandered off alone, (yet always keeping the adults in sight) over the wet leaves, peering at the pa...

Irving Monroe Channon was born in 1862 in Durant, Iowa. He received his education at Griswold College (B.A., 1887) and at Oberlin College (M.A.). He was conferred a B.D. degree by Oberlin Theological Seminary in 1890. He was ordained as a minister of the Congregational Church in 1888. Channon and his wife Mary started their work under the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in 1893 and served as missionaries of the Congregational Christian Churches for 40 years. This article by Ligaya Magbanua Simpkins outlines how the Channons laid the groundwork for what is now the Silliman University Divinity School.  I used the tiny photo in the Magbanua-Simpkins article as reference. The Divinity School had sent me a larger version of the same photo, but it had been distorted by the angle of the camera. I relied on a soft pastel pencil (Caran d'Ache) in sanguine for the most part, then added shadows with Cretacolor dark sepia and light sepia pencils, and highlights with...

I never knew of Dean Higdon until I started this project. He served only a couple of years; growing up I never heard his name mentioned. In the reference photograph he looks to be in his late 60s, his hair mostly white, his eyes half-concealed by the shadows cast by his horn-rimmed glasses. I decided to work on Dean Higdon next, simply because of the familiarity of his features. Living in Denmark, I encounter people who look like him on a daily basis. Yet I would not be encumbered by the baggage of memory and personal experience, of debating whether it was a fine stroke here or a soft shadow there that had completely changed the nature of the man. As I was searching the web for reference photos, indeed any information at all, I found his obituary . He had just finished his term when he passed away.   

Dr. Proceso U. Udarbe was the first Filipino dean of the DS, serving from 1965-1970. He was a family friend, and one of my father's oldest colleagues. The photograph provided me must have been taken in the late 1960s, before I was born. In the photo he looks quite different from the Dr. Udarbe I was acquainted with in the 1980s. 

 I won't start the oil paintings until March or April, when it's warm enough to open a window and air out my workspace. I look forward to June, when I can actually work outdoors without freezing. At present, the snow is coming down in curtains and we're looking at minus 5 degree nights this week, or worse. It's a time for drawing, getting to know my subjects thoroughly before I apply the first stroke of paint. Probably my favorite among my drawing tools is the Creativo set from Cretacolor, with its selection of hard (carre) pastels in traditional colors (sanguine, sepia, white, black). It's incredibly useful for limited-palette or monochromatic drawing. I decided to use the carre pastels to make a series of 30x40 cm studies of the deans, occasionally picking up one of the white pencils in the set for gentler, more subtle strokes.  I pulled out five more pastel pencils from my collection: a Caran d'ache Sanguine, a Faber Castell Pitt Caput Mortuum, and a green a...