Ann Schneider stood back as she hung her painting of a Jerusalem street, making sure that an overhead light was at the best angle to display her rendering of the first of 14 places where Jesus is said to have stood, walked, fallen or died on the day he was crucified.

	Alyssa Cwanger, Post-Gazette Ann Schneider -- "With these paintings, I hope the viewer will consider not only what Christ's Passion means, but also the realization that Jesus existed just as truly as we do today. Click photo for larger image.

The 23-year-old artist from Morningside spent six weeks in Jerusalem last year, painting the traditional sites of the stations of the cross as they appear today. The 14 paintings were displayed in several Catholic churches during Lent and will be in the Ryan Catholic Newman Center in Oakland until tomorrow.

"In my art I try to find ways to explore the relationship between religion and contemporary life," she said. "By painting the stations in this manner, it takes the traditional image and shows the contemporary reality of it."

She wanted to show that the events of Good Friday are rooted in a real time and place.

"With these paintings, I hope the viewer will consider not only what Christ's Passion means, but also the realization that Jesus existed just as truly as we do today," she wrote in a brochure.

Parishioners at St. Sebastian in Ross, where the paintings hung for a week, were so moved that one parishioner wanted to buy them, said the Rev. Joe Mele, the pastor there.

"She really captured something special in each of them," he said. "There is a warmth to them. I think she conveyed some of the peace that you feel looking into those beautiful scenes. ... She must have put prayer into it as she was painting."

Ms. Schneider was raised Catholic by her devout mother, Margaret, but her lackadaisically Protestant father is her enthusiastic backer. Martin Schneider, a retired construction worker, says he "discovered" his daughter when she was a kindergartner and the family watched the first episode of "The Simpsons." She was doodling throughout, producing her own Simpsons scenes.

"I told my wife later, 'Look how she made them all look the same in each picture,' " he said.

She majored in art history and studio arts at the University of Pittsburgh, graduating last spring. It was at Pitt that she found her calling in sacred art.

As an act of repentance at a time when she felt she had not been faithful, she painted a pieta, an image of Mary holding the crucified Jesus. She painted it in oil to look like a sunlit stained glass window. She included it in her portfolio, which she showed to a graduate student.

Instead of critiquing the pieta, the older student brushed it aside, saying, "That's nice, but I'm not religious."

She began to ask herself why someone of artistic sensibility would fail to respond to one of the greatest subjects of art.

"It challenged me to create religious work so that people who aren't really religious can appreciate what it shows," she said.

She lives with her parents and lifeguards at Club One in Shadyside for spending money. She borrowed money to go to Jerusalem late last fall as a "visual scholar" at the Tantur Ecumenical Institute for Theological Studies.

At first she wanted to paint the major Jewish, Christian and Muslim holy sites, but realized it would take too much time. She wandered the Old City, trying to follow the stations through the narrow, twisting streets and alleys of the Via Dolorosa. She got lost two days in a row before returning on a Friday to follow the Franciscan friars who lead weekly processions

As the traditional path of Jesus wound through Muslim and Jewish neighborhoods and past Christian churches, she realized she could embody all three faiths in contemporary depictions of the traditional stations.

Working in the Impressionist style, she set up her oils and canvas at two sites each day. Earlier stations were painted in morning light, later ones in the afternoon. The last four, from the cross to the tomb, were done in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.

Although no people or vehicles are depicted, the streets were packed. She dodged tourists, school children and garbage trucks.

The first station looks down a street where Pontius Pilate's headquarters once stood. Today a school for Muslim children is to the left, but the arch where Pilate is said to have presented Jesus to the crowd is in the background. The sky is bright, and flowers bloom atop stone walls.

It was the first of many sites where she discovered scholarly debate about whether it was the true location of the events.

"Whether this is 100 percent historically accurate is a question. But it is according to tradition and it's establishing that it happened in a real place. It's as real as the rocks on the ground," she said.

Sometimes she didn't understand what she had captured until the painting was complete. One of her favorites became station three, where television antennas now rise above the spot where Jesus is said to have fallen for the first of three times. After she finished it she learned that the stones in the street had been used for construction in the time of King Herod, and were reused to build that street.

"So they could be stones that Jesus had walked on," she said.

The fourth station, where Jesus is said to have met Mary, is today the site of a clothing shop for children. She painted little shirts hanging in the open air.

"I thought that was very appropriate for the place where Jesus met his mother," she said.

She was most moved by the site of Jesus' death, inside the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. She painted the altar with a glass case beneath it covering the stone where his cross is said to have been erected. Visitors can reach through a hole to touch the stone.

"It's very humbling. You have to crawl beneath the altar to reach it," she said.

The station is an Orthodox part of the church, and she worked hard to capture the elaborate ornamentation. She had feared that the priests would ask her to leave, but they encouraged her.

"They would look over my shoulder and say it was beautiful," she said.

Her work was far from over when she came home. Her father built frames. Into each one she carved a tiny, traditional image for each station.

"That was something. Her hands got all blistered," Martin Schneider said.

When a priest who had seen the paintings offered to set up a Lenten tour of the churches' exhibitions, she sought a way to hang them without putting holes in church walls. Her father hit on the idea of building stands with a light fixture for a base and a curtain rod for a post.

She hopes to display the paintings in galleries, but for now they remain available to churches. She can be contacted for information at annschneider82 @yahoo.com