As Mary Melikian sits at her computer each day she’s more apt to work with colors than with words. She is an artist, and the computer is her newest medium. But each day, before she starts her work, she spends some quiet time with God. That’s a habit that started over 50 years ago, when she connected with InterVarsity at the Rhode Island School of Design.
The daily Quiet Time of Bible study and prayer was an InterVarsity habit she acquired as a member, and then leader, of the campus Christian Fellowship. After graduation she spent the summer of 1955 working at InterVarsity’s Bear Trap Ranch in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains. She met students from many colleges and universities and spent a lot of time thinking about her future. “This was a liberating experience and gave me time to see what God’s plan was for my life,” she recalls.
For the next 23 years she lived and worked as a painter, designer and teacher in New York City. She gave many one-person shows. Some of her paintings went to the permanent collections of Worcester Art Museum, Mint Museum, and Vassar College Art Museum, as well as museums in Italy and Armenia. Just last month she was awarded The Art Spirit Foundation Silver Medal for Pastel for “Requiem for Armenia” during The National Arts Club 107th Annual Exhibiting Artist Member’s Exhibition. This unique oil pastel was done on papyrus. She usually works in watercolor and oil.
Opportunities to combine her art with her faith continued to grow after she married the Very Reverend Warren E. Haynes, Dean of the Cathedral in Houston, Texas. She attended conferences on human rights and donated a painting entitled “Exodus” for exhibition at the Centre for Human Rights at UN headquarters in New York. The painting was given in memory of her paternal grandmother and other relatives who perished in the Armenian Genocide of 1915.
When she and Warren returned to the New York area to live, she renewed acquaintances with InterVarsity friends of long ago, including Jane and Peter Haile, who had been her staff workers at the Rhode Island School of Design. She recently celebrated the 50th anniversary of her graduation.
“Pondering my 50th celebration, I realized how those Quiet Times, Bible studies, prayers and fellowship impacted my life in those early years and have continued to be a blessing,” she says. “They kept me grounded in the faith and have given me courage to move into many experiences of grace.”
