Da Vinci’s work inspires dentist

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: What do you suppose a modern-day dentist has in common with a 15th century Renaissance painter? Perhaps it’s the virtue of patience and great attention to detail. Leonardo da Vinci spent at least two years, 1495-1497, with tempera paints and brushes in hand, carefully depicting Christ’s Last Supper with his 12 apostles. It was a large project on a dining room wall inside a Dominican cloister in Milan, Italy. When finished, the scene measured 15 feet by 29 feet.

Dentist Don Locke reproduced this masterpiece in patchwork over 2 1/2 years, essentially the same length of time Da Vinci took to paint the original. Locke enlarged a computer-generated copy of a photograph of The Last Supper until the pixels appeared. From those, he made templates and cut fabrics into one-inch squares. It was a huge project sewn together — 51, 816 pieces — by Locke on a Singer Featherweight machine in his Waxahachie, Texas, home. When finished, each square measured a tinier one-half inch and the cloth tableau measured 67 inches by 183 inches.

Coincidentally, Locke’s quilt was completed in 1999, the same year that da Vinci’s painting reopened for public viewing after a 21-year restoration process. During Lock’s patchwork project, he still worked full time at dentistry. Now in retirement, he travels with his wife, Marilyn, around the US and to other countries, showing his ‘Supper’ quilt. It was on display this spring in Chicago at the International Quilt Festival. Locke and his wife were on hand to answer questions from visitors who marveled at his mind-boggling accomplishment. The idea to make the quilt came to Locke in an instant “as something I had to do,” he says. “My quilting wife said I was crazy. I had done a small wall hanging (using a similar technique), and this was my second project, so you can say that I was naive.”

After several years observing people’s reaction to the image , “I can say easily that it was a God-inspired project.” Backing fabric for the quilt was hand-dyed by Jy Press of Godley, Texas. All-cotton batting and thread were used, and professional quilter Linda Taylor of Melissa, Texas, stitched the quilt on a longarm machine.