The personal portfolio of Philip Cheaney
The Reluctant Baby Is Born
Growing up in my hometown, Arcadia, Missouri... where my father was once mayor and where his father was once mayor, where my uncle ran the newspaper and where my cousins and I had mowed half the town’s lawns in the balmy summers...there sat a place that greatly shaped me. It was a red brick mammoth that was built in 1843 and had been a women’s Catholic college until 1971. The photo of Ursuline Academy above shows only maybe a 1/4 of the building complex. It seemed to dwarf the town and its purported 672 inhabitants making me wonder how something so large and beautiful came to land in a town so small and rural.
It piqued my interest in almost every way. The building was as vast and beautiful as the grounds it sat on, and its heavy, locked doors nearly drove me crazy with curiosity. Furthermore, it was rumored to be haunted and the century old graveyard on the grounds did nothing to help this suspicion. Even if it wasn’t actually haunted I knew that it still must have its secrets it wasn’t telling.
It was here that I first began to appreciate high art, architecture and iconography as well as develop a restless curiosity for the secrets that such ornate granduer must surely hold.
So this is how I settled upon “Ursuline Design”. I hope you enjoy the site. It is 5 years over-due.