Life in pictures.

Santa Barbara landscape artist Eric Parfit feels a calling to use his art `to interpret for people the amazing wonders of God's creation'.

Although he discovered at school that he had a talent for painting, it was only later in life that the California artist returned to his first love.

As a boy growing up in Britain, he was much in the shadow of his two athletic brothers, both members of the Oxford University water polo team. Determined to be independent, he fixed his sights on Cambridge rather than Oxford, but he was nervous, shy of appearing in public and had developed a hampering stutter.

One day he noticed a marked change in the more combative of his two brothers, who was often in open conflict with their father. Not long after, this brother asked Parfit if he could borrow his motorbike in order to go to an Oxford Group (later MRA) conference in the English Peak District. Somewhat to his own surprise Parfit found himself replying that his brother could have the bike on the condition he went with him.

One of the people at the conference helped him to make the experiment of setting time aside to listen to God in quiet. This led Parfit to have an honest talk with his father on his return home. `Following that talk, the stutter just vanished,' he recalls. When he went up to Cambridge, he decided to see what happened if he continued the experiment. Although not much of an athelete, he put his name down for a two-mile race for first year students. In his time of quiet that morning, he had a clear thought: `Whatever happens, finish the race.' The field soon divided into a fast and a slow set, with Parfit firmly in the slow group. By the penultimate lap all the rest of the slow group had dropped out, and the fast set had flashed past him to the finish.

Parfit finished the last lap on his own--and received even more applause than the winner did. One of the best runners came up afterwards to ask why he had kept going. Parfit explained about his decision to listen to God each day--and the athlete became the first of several in the college to make a similar decision.

Experiences like this made Parfit want to give his whole time to winning people to God, by working with the Oxford Group. He used his gift for photography, and branched out into making documentary films about the spiritual revival which resulted from the Oxford Group's campaigns in Europe and North America. His first film, Bridgebuilders, was shown in all of pre-war London's news theatres; his second, Youth marches on, was screened through J Arthur Rank's British cinema chain.

Most rewarding, Parfit now feels, was the feature film he made with dockers from Rio de Janeiro about the revolution of honesty and democracy which swept through their port in the late 1950s. Men of Brazil was one of Brazil's official entries for the Tenth Berlin Film Festival and has been shown in many languages around the world.

In 1970, Parfit took up painting again, and in 1975 he was elected President of the Santa Barbara Art Association. His watercolors can be found in private collections throughout the US and in Europe and Saudi Arabia. Artline magazine comments on his `combination of intellectual understanding and a rare talent to capture and portray the majestic essence of nature without a single overstatement'.