Iconography Class

The past weekend I took an iconography workshop with Colette Kalvesmaki, a family friend who is an iconographer. You may be asking, what are icons?

Well, an icon is a sacred image, usually two dimensional, which may depict a person (or persons), as well as special events in the Bible and saints' lives. If you've seen programs about Russia on tv where they talk about churches, you may have seen paintings of Jesus Christ, Theotokos (Virgin Mary), saints. We Orthodox Christians do not worship icons; rather, these help us to contemplate the divine and spiritual.

If you look closely at an icon, you'll see that there is a certain style that may look odd, such as big eyes, long, pointed fingers, etc. There's a reason for that - to show the otherworldy nature of the divine. You don't have to be a talented artist to create an icon, but you do have to understand the theology since that is a big part of iconography.

There are many steps that go into creating an icon. Usually, one starts with a wood panel that has been overlaid with gesso, a glue on linen mixture that has been applied to one side and dried, and then polished. However, for the class, we used a poster board with a white side. n the board, you start off with an outline of the image that you're going to be using. You can lay down some sort of transfer paper and on top of it a copy of the image, and use a pencil to trace the lines.

Here we took the ruler and drew lines on all side of the poster board, then we painted the first color layer (which can be applied as many as 3 times). With iconography, you lay down one color at a time, building up from the darkest color to the lightest. The paint used is egg tempura (egg yolk with water) blended with colors, usually obtained from natural material like ground stones. A little goes a long way, but you have to work quickly as the paint dries quickly.

Here's the icon after applying the brownish shade to the face, along with dark green around the neck and reddish-orange to the cape.

And further on in the process. It was my first time, so I kept making bloopers, such as laying on the paint too thick and not drawing as fine a line as I could. Something to keep in mind - if you're applying a light hand, you need to go even lighter. And, it's hard to fix a mistake the more paint you've put down, because the paint does dry fast and since water is part of the mixture, if you dab at it, the paint below the layer you've painted may come off too.

And here's the final icon. Not bad for my first attempt at painting an icon. Maybe this fall if I have time, I'll start taking private lessons from Colette.