East Tennessee artist’s paintings of Georgia Martyrs to be displayed at beatification
By Bill Brewer
As a gifted artist who resides in the Diocese of Knoxville, Clorinda Galdós Bell finds herself with an abiding connection to Catholic parishes in Georgia.
Her works of sacred art are increasingly being hung throughout the Archdiocese of Atlanta, and there is an emerging trend feeding that connection: the five Georgia Martyrs who have been named Blessed and will be beatified on Oct. 31 in Savannah.
Mrs. Bell’s paintings of the martyrs will be exhibited in the Savannah Convention Center, where the beatification will take place. And she has learned that she and her paintings of the martyrs will be featured on EWTN, which plans to cover the beatification.
Since the Vatican declared the martyrs venerable in January 2025, leading to their beatification, Mrs. Bell has seen an uptick in commissions specifically for Georgia Martyrs artwork.
She also is a finalist in an art exhibition and competition commemorating the beatification of the martyrs.
Mrs. Bell recalled that in 2019 a priest commissioned her for a painting of St. Rose of Lima that would be hung in Our Lady of the Mountains Church in Jasper, Ga. The commission was accepted shortly after she appeared in 2018 on an EWTN program with popular Catholic media host and evangelist Pepe Alonso.
The Jasper priest in 2021 then commissioned a painting from her of the five Georgia Martyrs.
“We presented the painting at Our Lady of the Mountains. Everything was so beautiful. After that, probably in 2021, he contacted me again for commissioned artwork for the five Martyrs of Georgia. At that time, I didn’t know anything about who they are. The priest provided me with all the information he had on them, and he talked about what each martyr looked like,” Mrs. Bell said.
Mrs. Bell then set out to learn as much as she could about the five Spanish Franciscans who settled in the 16th century in the Spanish missions in what is now Florida and Georgia. She learned what they looked like, their similarities and differences, and the culture in which they found themselves in the late 1500s.
Her work included several research trips to Georgia. She had delivered three paintings—the Holy Family, the Immaculata, and St. Joseph—to Corpus Christi Church in Pollard, Ga., near Savannah, and absorbed images of the coastal area while she was there.
The five friars—Pedro de Corpa, Blas Rodríguez, Miguel de Añon, Antonio de Badajoz, and Francisco de Veráscola Sáez de Castañiza—evangelized to the local Guale people and began to convert them to Catholicism.
The Guale Native Americans lived along the Georgia coast. When their polygamy culture clashed with Catholic teaching and the friars ministered to them against taking more than one wife, they were killed by the Guale tribe.
Mrs. Bell set out to artistically blend images of the five Friars with their coastal Georgia surroundings, including the Guale tribe. She incorporated what is known about St. Francis of Assisi’s appearance in her images of the five friars.
Her creative work in the Peruvian Cuzco style of painting in which she is renowned has apparently resonated with churches in Georgia. The Cuzco style features gold detail and intricate relief in its images.
A second painting of the martyrs was completed for St. Francis of Assisi Church in Cartersville, Ga., in late 2021. And then a third painting was done for St. Michael Church in Gainesville, Ga., in 2022.
As the sizes of her commissioned paintings grew (one was 4 feet by 6 feet), she began to include more elements, including a primitive Catholic church building.
Her fourth painting of the Georgia Martyrs was for the art contest exhibition.
“I have done four. The last one I did for the art contest exhibition was a challenge for me because I have to put all the other three together and try to do in one. So, with all this experience, what I do is I put all the elements in one. In this last one, I use everything—the trees with the moss that are very, very common in Georgia. I also did a church. I did the palmettos and the ocean and the sand dollar. It had all the things described before, but the crucifix I did better. In the first, it was like just a cross. But this one is more complete. And with the Guale people, the men have a lot of jewelry. And I put the girl with a dress and also a peach from Georgia,” Mrs. Bell said.
The fourth painting, with all its rich detail, resembles a color photograph and took six weeks of painting every day to complete. She submitted it in June.
Mrs. Bell said she is honored to be part of the mission of the Five Georgia Martyrs.
“I am very, very excited to be part of the mission. And I think the message of the Five Martyrs is very important in this time because they were defending the family. They died because they defended the family. They were teaching about God and the Catholic faith. But when one of the Guale leaders wanted to get married with another woman, and one of the Franciscans showed him the Bible and said, ‘Hey, you shouldn’t do that. You have to stay with your family,’ that was the start of the disagreement, and they were killed for their faith,” she said.
Mrs. Bell will be attending the Oct. 31 beatification with her husband, Aaron. Their son, Ben, is a senior in high school. They are members of St. Mary Parish in Oak Ridge and also attend St. John Neumann Church in Farragut.
And if the martyrs are one day canonized, Mrs. Bell said it would be a dream of hers to attend that Mass and ceremony in St. Peter’s Square. The Vatican and the Holy Land are top destinations that she longs to visit.
But she dares not think about her paintings of the five Georgia Martyrs hanging from the balconies of St. Peter’s Basilica during a canonization.
She is faithfully content to help bring the martyrs’ story to life through the inspiration of God and His Son.
“I pray a lot to God to guide me because in creating most of my paintings, I really don’t have a copy or image I can use. I don’t have models like some people use with a man to paint a representation of Jesus. Many artists do. My case is different. It’s all in my head. It’s all what I have seen in different pictures or from the Internet. I put all the information in my imagination. And the most important thing of this is to ask God to guide me in what He wants for this specific subject. I put all my prayers in there,” she shared.
Mrs. Bell noted that she has assembled quite a collection of artistic inventory through her years of painting, and she would like to share it with parishes in the Diocese of Knoxville. Her sacred artwork can be seen at St. Mary School in Oak Ridge, at the Cathedral of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, at the Diocese of Knoxville Chancery as well as St. Rose of Lima Church, and the Motherhouse of the Dominican Sisters of St. Cecilia Congregation in Nashville.
She is available for exhibits at churches and diocesan events. For more information, go to clorysgallery.com.