A Month Away on Retreat (Without Leaving the City Limits)

I'm taking annual leave for four weeks to work in the studio with a student, Julie Perigo, who has come to Juneau for an intensive tutorial on icon painting.  We've already completed almost a week together and she has begun work on the Holy Face ('The Icon of Christ-Made-Without-Hands)

This icon is best starting point to introduce the theology of the icon and the spirituality of the iconographer and a good place to begin painting as well, as the composition is very simple.

She is also getting hands-on experience (no pun intended) in the craft work of making wooden icon panels and preparing the levkas (the gesso ground for the board) as well as water gilding and egg tempera painting.

I'm grateful to have the leave time to devote to working with her and being in the studio.  It is as much a spiritual retreat as work time, as I tend to pray best with a brush (or a piece of sandpaper) in my hand.

The Egg and I

Had a few minutes last evening to paint in the studio, where I'm working on two little icons - one is of the Mother of God of Kazan, the other is of Christ.  They are both on egg tempera, a painting medium of great antiquity by which earth or mineral pigments are bound together with egg yolk and applied to a wooden panel that has been surfaced with plaster.

Which got me to thinking about my first encounter with egg tempera back when I was in high school.  The DeYoung Museum in San Francisco in 1972 had an exhibition of the paintings of the 20th century American painter Andrew Wyeth.  His subject matter didn't particularly appeal to me, but his painting medium, which was egg tempera, certainly did.

At the exhibit, it was possible to get up very close to each of the paintings and to look carefully at how he handled the paint.  (So much is lost in a photographic  reproduction of a painting!)  The transparency of the colors, yet their saturation and vibrancy immediately appealed to me.  Unlike in an oil painting, in an egg tempera painting, gradations of color are not made by blending colors on the palette  but with hatching lines, applied in overlapping strokes of pure color onto the panel.  Wyeth's palette was largely earth colors - yellow and red ochers, green earths and various umbers and siennas, (which, unbeknownst to me at the time, is the foundational palette of iconpainting).

Fortunately for me, my dad taught theatre and stagecraft, and had bins of dry pigrment, which, mixed with hot glue, were at that time, used for stage painting.  And our refrigerator had a carton of eggs, so I set out to paint an egg tempera painting on a sheet of masonite primed with acrylic gesso (knowing nothing about supports and grounds!)   It turned out OK, but my life and my life as an artist took a different direction until a decade later I found myself learning how to paint icons -- in egg tempera!

Ora et Labora (continued)

Today and yesterday were all about gilding and prayer. Yesterday I applied gold leaf to the haloes of the icon of the Mother of God and Jesus which I am working on.

The red bole on the halo is a mixture of clay and glue. First, I breathe on the bole. The warmth and moisture of my breath makes the bole become sticky for just a few moments (perhaps 10-15 seconds).


Then I quickly press the gold leaf onto the bole and gently rub on the back of the paper that the gold is attached to.

It's a time consuming process, because in order to be able to burnish (or polish) the gold leaf, I have to gild the halo not once but twice.

It took me most of yesterday to gild the haloes and then to begin burnishing them.

Burnishing the gold also takes time - there is no rushing the process. If everything goes right, burnishing is simplicity itself. Using an agate burnisher (a completely smooth agate set in a wooden handle), you rub the gilded surface with the agate until it begins to shine. Piece of cake! Unless something goes wrong. Which always seems to happen. There may be tiny holes in the gilding or the burnisher lifts up some of the gold or there is one spot that just doesn't want to shine, no matter how much you burnish it. Which usually means making corrections (faulting) to the gilding. but in the end it is worth it.

These last few days have also been a time of prayer. I'm grateful that my studio is also my oratory.

My urgent prayer of supplication has been for Egyptian Muslims and Christians in the aftermath of the coup that toppled the government of Muhammed Morsi, the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood who was elected President of the country a year ago. This has led to demonstrations against the new government by Morsi supporters, demonstrations that that army and security forces have fired upon, killing hundreds of protesters in at least four separate incidents that can only be charactorized as massacres.

In addition to violence between pro and anti-Morsi rioters in various Egyptian cities and towns, extremist elements in the Muslim community appear to be scape-goating the Christian minority around the country and mobs have looted and burned over 60 churches and church related buildings in the past week.

Praying evening prayer tonight was for the feast of St.Bernard of Clairvaux, the great eleventh century reformer and Doctor of the Church (called the Doctor mellifluus, the Honey-sweet Doctor for his love of the word of God and devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary) yet preached the catastrophic Second Crusade.
The reading, from the Letter of St. James, gives me much to ponder.
"Wisdom from above is first of all innocent. It is also peaceable, lenient, docile, rich in sympathy and the kindly deeds that are its fruits, impartial and sincere. The harvest of justice is sown in peace for those who cultivate peace."
May it be so, in our hearts and in the hearts of our brothers and sisters in Egypt.

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