Olga Christine – Inner Space

This Annunciation icon is perhaps the most difficult experience I have encountered making icons. It was confronting in many different ways which I continue to unravel. I began this icon in late 2008 and did not finish until 2011, after many difficulties, debates and changes. Every icon for me is a unique and personal experience. It was simply hard to love this icon and happily that is no longer true.

From a theological perspective, the icon illustrates the story of the divine announcement of the virgin birth of Jesus. There are other ancient versions of the myth of the virgin birth and most biblical scholars recognise the story found in the gospels of Matthew and Luke as canonical redaction. The virgin birth story is not found in Paul’s writings which were written before the gospels.

Why then is this particular biblical myth so captivating? I would like to think that it is an important and beautiful story because Mary gives her life in service to humanity after receiving a divine vision. That is the most profound undertaking in any tradition.

From Luke 1:26-38 (NIV) we find the story that is the Annunciation depicted in this icon.

In the sixth month of Elizabeth’s pregnancy, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee, to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David. The virgin’s name was Mary. The angel went to her and said, “Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you.”

Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be. But the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary; you have found favor with God. You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over Jacob’s descendants forever; his kingdom will never end.”

“How will this be,” Mary asked the angel, “since I am a virgin?”

The angel answered, “The Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God. Even Elizabeth your relative is going to have a child in her old age, and she who was said to be unable to conceive is in her sixth month. For no word from God will ever fail.”

“I am the Lord’s servant,” Mary answered. “May your word to me be fulfilled.” Then the angel left her.

This icon shows the joy of the announcement of the coming of Christ. Archangel Gabriel, traditionally the messenger angel, has descended from heaven to inspire Mary who is chosen to be the Mother of God. It is not difficult to see the beauty of this myth for all mothers as all children are from God. The icon brings divine status to motherhood.

Unique symbolism here is:

• the angel moving quickly with feet not quite touching the pedestal underneath him.
• The angel reaches out to deliver the message as a blessing bestowed upon her by God.
• In Mary’s left hand is a spindle of crimson yarn depicting the task that she had of making the veil of the Temple in Jerusalem.
• Mary’s right hand is raised in acceptance of Gabriel’s message.
• Mary receives this message as she sits in heavenly spheres as shown by the throne which comes from a bright light and the message is acknowledged to her through the spirit that reaches beyond everything.

Here is my version of the Mandylion Icon, also known as the ‘The Icon Made Without Hands’ and the Image of Edessa.

This is an icon that I was compelled to work with. Icons arrive for me in various ways. Sometimes its just a good idea, or feeling drawn to the prototype, or I think I can handle it technically, or as often happens, the prototype is suggested by my icon teacher (master iconographer Michael Galovic) as one that both challenges and satisfies my level of skill. This prototype showed itself at a meditation retreat late 2010 and was completed May 2011. Until then I had often looked at the prototype and been put off by the disembodied image. More than a few times I had said “not doing that one”. As with many things that I discover in life, when I say I won’t do something, I find myself doing it sometime later. Not because I am required to, but because I change my position completely and voluntarily. The arrival of this icon is for me another of those ‘turn arounds’ that seem to come my way regularly. My hope is that such ‘turn arounds’ bring with them some measure of humility, reminding me that I don’t know very much about anything important.

The prototype of this particular icon can be found at the Tretyakov State Gallery, Moscow, Russia. (1) It was made around 12th century. The Eastern Orthodox Church feast day of this icon is August 16 which commemorates its translation from Edessa to Constantinople.

The history of the icon is substantial. There are many myths surrounding it and stories similar to those about the Shroud of Turin. (2) In essence, the Mandylion is considered an icon of miraculous powers. As the Image of Edessa it was said to be a square or rectangle of cloth upon which a miraculous image of the face of Jesus was imprinted. As such it was the first icon image. Eastern Orthodoxy refers to the image as the Holy Mandylion. Legend says that the King of Edessa wrote to Jesus asking to be cured of his leprosy. In response, Jesus sent a disciple to bring to the King a cloth that he had used to wipe his face with and the king was miraculously cured. The image of Christ became the protector of the city of Edessa and was believed to aid Edessa against attacks from the Persians in 544. The image was moved to Constantinople in the 10th century. The cloth disappeared from Constantinople during the sacking of Constantinople that was the Fourth Crusade. It reappeared as a relic in King Louis IX of France’s Sainte Chappelle in Paris, only to disappear again in the French Revolution.

Back to the making of this icon. I was extremely nervous about this one. I am always especially nervous when I work on an icon of Christ or Mother of God. It just is that way. This time the anxiety was off the scale. I could work on it only a few hours at a time. It is not a complex icon but its simplicity means that any and every error stands out.

This is the icon with the base colours and pencil outline of the facial features. At this very early stage I was aware of what seemed to be a fierce space that came with the image and I tried hard to soften that as I went but regardless it is an image that brings with it a fierce space. I think of it as a space of will or unwavering determination.

The application of the first highlight for the face is an unusual approach and brings the face to the image in a ghostly way.

The application of facial features is next. More definition, still ghostly.

The fierceness emerges when the facial features are fully defined and the beard applied.

Colour to the facial features brings a measure of softness.

The gold highlights for the hair are relatively unique. Gold is not simple to apply to icon painting and in this case every wobble and glitch becomes obvious. Countless reworks are essential.

Here the 2nd facial highlights add more softness to the image.

By now I am completely immersed in this image. For me working on this icon was something like falling into an abyss of beauty and will. At times the beauty brings joy and at times the icon is on fire.

The final highlights to the face and beard are both softening and fierce. I simply stared for long periods at this icon. Not wanting to finish it.

Here is the final image after varnish with shellac bringing out the depth of the colours. They become rich and final.

(1) Link for the Mandylion Icon at the Tretyakov State Gallery Moscow http://www.icon-art.info/masterpiece.php?lng=en&mst_id=141

(2) Link for mythology of the Mandylion Icon – The Icon Made without Hands http://full-of-grace-and-truth.blogspot.com.au/2010/08/holy-mandylion-napkin-of-christ-not.html

Here is a very special icon of the Saint Catherine of Alexandria. I completed this work May 2011.

Back in January this year, I wrote about my return to writing* the icon of St Catherine of Alexandria. This was the 2nd icon of this saint that I have worked on.

See the previous posting for background information about the icon and who I think the persona of this non existent saint was based on: Hypatia of Alexandria. http://www.olgachristineinnerspace.com/?p=390

See another icon of Saint Catherine of Alexandria prepared by my hand on my icon website. http://olgachristine.com/icon_stcatherine.html

Friends have asked to see how icons are made. In response, it seemed a good idea to record the process of making icons. Here is my first attempt beginning with an icon that was already 70% complete when I started recording the process.

I began work on this icon sometime during 2007/2008. I always found it particularly difficult. It is a complex icon, much more so than I expected. But more important than complexity, I simply could not find the right space for the icon itself. Something of a space arrived when I found literature on Hypatia of Alexandria and then much later, after I saw the movie Agora, the space of the icon to work from became much clearer to me.

Then came a realization regarding the spaces of icons. From this and other icons I am working on right now, I have begun to understand, and maybe begun to see, that for a creative work to take on its own presence, there must be a seed. This makes perfect sense to me now. I see the seed in the esoteric sense, as the progeny of a greater archetype.

I watched the seed for this one land as I reworked some areas of the icon, especially the face. The presence become more apparent with each session of work until at one point I realized that this icon had her own presence. Not a reflection, not a connection to somewhere else, but the unique presence of this individual icon.

Returning to the process of this icon writing, I re-started by removing the work I had previously done on the face. It had not been good work and there was no sense of presence. Here she is without face and then followed by another view with the new color for the face. Maybe you will notice an absence of presence.

There was much reworking that went on with the gold paint, as well as the wheel, the books, and the robes. That work is not obvious from the photos here.

The next phase is the work on the face. I was very surprised to see that the face that landed here was not very different from the face that I had previously worked on and removed. However the technique for this work was much improved and a much more gentle face emerged, than before.

The next phase that can be seen is the crown and the hair. St Catherine of Alexandria icons are relatively unique for having gold through the hair and jeweled crown.

Also the double headed eagle of the Byzantine Empire, on her cloak, is relatively unique. The astrolabe indicates her work (or Hypatia’s) as a mathematician/astronomer. The books indicate her knowledge and work as a philosopher. The crucifix indicates her devotion to Christ. The palm held in her left hand indicates peace.

Here her crown is almost finished, waiting for pearls to be applied, in paint of course.

The Greek inscriptions are finished here. These tell us that she is St Catherine of Alexandria.

The halo is also finished. The halo and inscriptions are arguably among the most difficult parts of an icon to paint. They are painted directly onto gold leaf (guilding) and every waver shows.

Then comes the pearls. This was an intense phase that took a whole day. For me, it requires a level of care that can be very challenging but is a wonderful experience when complete.

I love each one of those pearls. Here they are most of them on the brocade for the robe. Pearls are also on the crown and around the collar.

At this point I thought I was done and worked the final retouches. For me, just about everything is reworked or retouched many times.

As I retouched the main robe, I discovered that the original color in my paint tray had changed which made a mess of the retouching. Not surprising that the paint aged over 4-5 years. Also this red, or perhaps any mix of red color, is difficult to apply. Red covers very poorly. The application needs to be as good as I can make it.

You can see here some splotches on the red. Every time I retouched it got worse. I left it for a week or wondering what next. I could not bear the idea of removing the red robe color, which by the way I had already removed once back in 2008. ‘Not again’ was all I could think of.

Eventually the remedy became obvious. It turned out that I could remix the color and paint over the whole lower robe, around the highlights. This type of correction is not always possible, but thankfully it worked.

In this final image below, the icon is ready for shellack, to be followed by varnish. You may notice that the first image of this icon (at the top of this post) has more intense colors than the one you see completed below. That is because the shellack and varnish had been applied to the image at the top of the post.

For reasons I do not understand, I find that the image here, without the shellack and varnish, takes me back to the spaces I felt in the writing of the icon and in that sense is different to the image of the finished icon at the top. This image below makes my heart sing -  perhaps because it holds the journey of the making of the icon.

* the traditional description of the work involved in an icon is to write an icon, not paint an icon. From http://orthodoxwiki.org/Icon

The most literal translation of the Greek word εικονογραφία (eikonographia) is “image writing,” leading many English-speaking Orthodox Christians to insist that icons are not “painted” but rather “written.” From there, further explanations are given that icons are to be understood in a manner similar to Holy Scripture—that is, they are not simply artistic compositions but rather are witnesses to the truth the way Scripture is. Far from being imaginative creations of the iconographer, they are more like scribal copies of the Bible.

While the explanation of the purpose and nature of icons is certainly true and consistent with the Church’s Holy Tradition, there is a linguistic problem with the insistence on the word written rather than painted. In Greek, a painted portrait of anyone is also a γραφή (graphi), and the art of painting itself is called ζωγραφική (zographiki) while any drawing or painting can be referred to as ζωγραφιά (zographia). Ancient Greek literally uses the same root word to refer to the making of portraits and the making of icons, but distinguishes whether it is “painting from life” (ζωγραφιά) or “painting icons” (εικονογραφία). Thus, from a linguistic point of view, either all paintings—whether icons or simple portraits—are “written” or (more likely) “painted” is a perfectly usable English translation, simply making a distinction between the painting appropriate for icons and that appropriate for other kinds of painting, just as Greek does.