The Light Shines in the Darkness and the Darkness Has Not Overcome It

 

Today is the feast of St.John the Evangelist (aka the Theologian or the Divine). It is also the anniversary of the martyrdom of Blessed Sara Salkahazi.  Encouraged and supported by her superior in religious life, Sr.Margit Slatcha, founder of the Sisters of Social Work, she arranged  to hide hundreds of Jewish woman in their convents and institutes when the Nazi occupiers and their fascist Arrow Cross allies began to deport Jews to Auschwitz in 1944. * 

On December 27th, 1944 four Jewish women she was sheltering in Budapest were denounced and arrested.  She refused to be separated from them and along with an unidentified Christian co-worker, all six were murdered on the embankment of the Danube and their bodies thrown into the river.  

In the darkness of the genocidal fury of the Nazi perpetrators and their allies, the majority of  Europe's Catholics and Protestants abandoned their Jewish neighbors to their fate due to fear, prejudice or indifference.  

May the courageous actions and self-sacrifice of men and women such as Pere Jacques de Jesus OCD, Blessed Sára, Raoul Wallenberg ,Chiune Sugihara, ordinary families like the soon-to -be beatified Polish martyrs Józef and Wiktoria Ulma and their seven children, and others inspire us to live our lives in the light of compassion, hope and solidarity .

*Yad Vashem estimates that the Sisters of Social Work rescued 2000 Jewish women and that Blessed Sara personally rescued 1000 of them.

 

O Glorious Lady, Throned In Rest

 'O glorious Lady, throned in rest, amid the starry host above, who offered nurture from your breast to God, with pure maternal love.'

This the first stanza of a hymn text by the 19th century English divine, John Mason Neale, an Anglican scholar and hymnographer and contemporary of Saint John Henry Newman.  Like Newman, Neale was part of the Oxford movement and had a particular devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary.  Unlike Newman, in the end, Neale never undertook the ultimate step of becoming a Roman Catholic.  

In Morning Prayer this morning for the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception - a Marian dogma confirmed by another contemporary of Neale's, Pope Pius IX in 1854 - I came across this beautiful hymn to the Blessed Mother, entitled: "O Glorious Lady Throned in Rest" sung by Kathleen Lindquist in an album entitled : "Hymns and Chants of the Divine Office, Vol.1"

All of which coincides nicely with the Virgo Lactans or Nursing Mother of God icon* I've started working on as a way of meditating on the mystery of the Incarnation during Advent and Christmas.  How Mary could give birth to God, much less nourish and nurture her Creator from her own body is a lot to reflect on, which I do better with a brush in my hand. 

*In the Christian East icons of this type had the title of Galaktotrophousa in Greek and Mlekopitatelnitza in Slavonic. 

Across the Finish Line

I completed the "Burning Bush Triptych" yesterday afternoon.   The photo is a bit skewampus but the colors are pretty accurate.  

I wish I could say that the last-minute decision to gild the fruit on the thorn bush was primarily motivated by theology, but actually, I realized that there needed to be something more in the background to balance the dominance of the gilding of the figures of the Mother of God and Jesus.  

In other words, the gilding of the figures made the burning bush recede so much that it almost disappeared.  

That said, I also realized that if I didn't balance out the figures in the foreground and the background, it would be distracting during prayer.  (This icon is for the prayer corner in my studio, which means I'll be praying with it a lot). 

 

Saint Luke, Pray for Us!

Today is the feast of St. Luke the Evangelist, the patron saint of artists and iconographers).  I love this particular icon of him painting the icon of Mary, the Mother of God and Jesus, who are posing for him. The the composition of this icon is based on a drawing by my master teacher, Pere Igor.  Unfortunately, I never had a chance to ask him why the pose of the two figures in the icon are so different from the actual figures who are standing in front of him.  

So on his feast I was able to make a bit more progress on highlighting the figure of the Mary and Jesus in the center of the triptych.  Her garment is highlighted in paint; the figure of the Christ Child is highlighted with gold leaf (sometimes called 'gold assist').  

His little overgarment is highlighted in much the same way as with paint, only using finer, sharper brush strokes.  Instead of paint, gold size (a crushable compound called a mordant that dries tacky) is applied to all of the areas where a gold line is desired.  It has to be thick enough so the brushstrokes will hold their shape and fluid enough to paint with.  

When the size has set (depending on the size it will remain open for at least an hour or two), gold leaf is then pressed onto the areas painted with size.  And voila! The gold lines appear as if by magic on the icon (usually) when the excess gold is gently brushed away with a soft brush.

Then follows the painstaking faulting of the gilded areas, because inevitably, their will be lines here and there that the gold did not adhere to or a line or two the one wielding the brush failed to paint in, and so the process is repeated once or twice (or again and again if you are having a particularly bad day) until all the gold lines are complete.

A couple of coats of shellac to fix the gold leaf (which is surprisingly fragile), followed by redrawing the lines as necessary to pull it all together.

   

Practice, Practice, Practice!

 

A beautiful way to highlight garments is the technique called "double reflection" in the translation of Pere Igor's book "The Icon: Image of the Invisible".  Not having the original French available (or any proficiency in French, that term may actually have a quite different and more precise meaning.  

But in essence, this type of highlighting of the garment utilizes one color (usually, but not always a kind of bluish-gray to highlight a garment in a completely different color.  In these panels, the garments are a kind of reddish brown (R) and a brownish/greenish ochre (L).  

If (and its a big if in my case), the color is applied with just the right amount of transparency that builds up to the brightest highlight being barely but sufficiently opaque, and if the underlying color is transparent, well, it can be, as Pere Igor would say, terrific.

The key is restraint, combined with decisive and expressive brushstrokes.  Getting it right takes a lot of practice - I still feel like a beginner every time, so I'm still practicing!

In Praise of Pure Pigments

One of the first assignments in art classes is to do a painting using only hues mixed from the three primary colors of red, blue and yellow.   I suppose its a useful exercise but unless you are as naturally gifted a colorist as a Cezanne or Matisse the resulting painting is predictably a disappointing collation of muddy and/or garish oranges, greens and purples.  

Fortunately,  for most of art history, beginning with the cave paintings of Lascaux and Altamira,  artists worked using pure pigments (their palette was limited to red and yellow ochres and black).  20,000 years later the various shades of ochre and other mineral colors remain the workhorse colors of icon painting.

Today was spent in the company of malachite green, used as a highlighting color on the landscape and architectual elements of the triptych that I'm working on.  Natural malachite is too expensive for my budget, but the colorists at Kremer Pigments manufacture an imitation of that warm greenish pigment that is both affordable and beautiful.  

Mixed with a little bright yellow ochre and white, I think it is a superlative highlighting color, which, once you start looking for it, you notice in many Muscovite  icons of the 14th and 15 century.  

  

 

Ugly Duckling

 Opening up the icon is the "ugly duckling" stage of the work of icon painting, as one begins laying in the base colors.  Greenish-red faces, garish color contrasts, undefined forms etc... have to be put-up with at this point in the painting.  A stage which must not be rushed through, even though the temptation is do exactly that.

Eventually (if all goes well), once the shadows, outlines,  highlights, gold assist are added the ungainly gray cygnet will be transformed into a swan.  But in the meantime....