An icon is a portal into the eternal and the divine, a place through which it is possible to glimpse energies which are beyond our comprehension. An icon is an aid to prayer, to enable veneration of and reflection on spiritual qualities and the possibility of eternal life. It must celebrate the created world, which is incarnation, but also link to the life beyond. It is a place between worlds, and this must be reflected in the way it is created. It can be neither purely representational nor can it be too abstract or it loses the human connection.
“The icon must depict that which we see with our eyes….yet at the same time it must point towards the inner spiritual essence”*
For me there must be humanity too. There is a quality of interaction, connection, even intimacy in the gaze I exchange, particularly with the most resonant female icons. This is what I want to achieve for the people for whom I paint. So my faces are, I think, strong and individual, and I conceptualise and paint the face before the rest of the icon. I must have the face first.
All this cannot be rushed. There is much that is mysterious in the creation of an icon, which is partly why there is a price premium on individually created work. Over and above the complexity of producing a temporal work of art, the icon must capture something sublime, numinous, eternal.
*Justiniano, Fr J.,The Pictorial Metaphysics of the Icon: Abstraction V Naturalism, Part one The Orthodox arts Journal, 2015 p.2
“The icon must depict that which we see with our eyes….yet at the same time it must point towards the inner spiritual essence”*
For me there must be humanity too. There is a quality of interaction, connection, even intimacy in the gaze I exchange, particularly with the most resonant female icons. This is what I want to achieve for the people for whom I paint. So my faces are, I think, strong and individual, and I conceptualise and paint the face before the rest of the icon. I must have the face first.
All this cannot be rushed. There is much that is mysterious in the creation of an icon, which is partly why there is a price premium on individually created work. Over and above the complexity of producing a temporal work of art, the icon must capture something sublime, numinous, eternal.
*Justiniano, Fr J.,The Pictorial Metaphysics of the Icon: Abstraction V Naturalism, Part one The Orthodox arts Journal, 2015 p.2