PROTECTING & PRESERVING THE WOOD MURALS OF
The My Father’s Love Foundation
My Father’s Love Foundation was established for the purpose of housing and protecting Ed Lantzer’s wood mosaic panels as well as for coordinating and displaying the panels for the world to see. A Board of Directors was created to oversee the Foundation and to make sure that Mr. Ed’s wishes for the panels were brought to fruition.
The panels are made up of small wooden diamonds cut either on a 30 or a 60 degree angle. They are cut with four different saws so that their dimensions are identical. The wood is finished with simple varnish – no painting or staining changes the natural hue of the material.
Ed’s father taught him this form of art called Marquetry— in which small pieces of wood are overlaid onto another wood surface to form a picture—and goes back eight generations in Ed Lantzer’s family, but his family tradition dictated wood pieces cut on a 45 or 90 degree angle.
“My dad was a 45-90 man,” he says. “I was able to work with that until I was 15. At that point my dad said, ‘go find your own angle.’ I chose the 30-60.”
These pieces of wood are the building block’s of Ed’s work. Carefully crafting each mural, Ed did not do any design work ahead of time. He didn’t sketch, he simply created.
“My Father’s Love is a testament of divine redemption that unfolds over a series of thirty 4’x8’ marquetry panels … An inspired work of faith, Lantzer has also created a masterpiece of vernacular art.”
– Gregory Waskowsky, Outreach Curator Kalamazoo Institute of Arts
Want to learn more about Ed and his story?
The Mural Writer, written by LaShelle VanHouten, is a moving memoir about a man who believed he couldn’t love, yet was chosen for an amazing purpose to teach us all about love through the art of marquetry.
The Mural Writer is now available on Amazon. Get yours today!
