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!

Remember the Marvels the Lord Has Done

Today, March 17th, is Friday of the Second Week of Lent and/or St. Patrick's Day.  It is also the third anniversary of the death of my teacher and friend, Fr.Egon Sendler SJ (aka Pere Igor).  

Reflecting on the daily readings for today, I was struck by the ways in which God's redemptive purpose is able to to be found even in circumstances of  great suffering and injustice.  In the first reading is the familiar story of Joseph, and how his brothers, out of jealousy and hatred, throw him into a cistern to die and then, when the opportunity presents itself, sell him into bondage in Egpt.  In the gospel, Jesus tells the parable of the vineyard, in which the wicked tenants beat and kill the servants of the owner of the vineyard and then in their greed, kill his son.

/But God's redemptive purpose cannot be thwarted, even by the intransigence and violence of sinners.  Joseph forgives his brothers and reconciles with them.  Jesus, from the Cross, forgives those who are putting him to death and even excuses their actions before God, "because they know not what they are doing."

St. Patrick was kidnapped by Irish pirates and enslaved in Ireland.  Yet after his escape from bondage he returned and shared Christ with the people of Ireland.  In a similar way, my friend Pere Igor, conscripted into the war with Russia, was a German prisoner of war in Siberia for three years, where he worked as slave laborer.  He vowed, if he survived his imprisonment, to devote the rest of his life to the service of the Church in Russia and to work for Christian unity.  Which he did, for the rest of his long life.

Like Joseph and like Patrick,  Igor, (the name the Russian inmates gave him in the labor camp) had to chose whether or not to be consumed by hatred and bitterness towards those who mistreated and enslaved him.  It would have been understandable, reasonable even, for each of them to have responded that way to undeserved suffering.  

But grace and a willingness to be open to grace made it possible to chose to live and act in a different way. That they chose to love and not to hate allowed God to use their suffering for his own mysterious but always redemptive purpose.

Memory eternal, Pere Igor!

St. Patrick, Apostle to the Irish, pray for us!     

The Brilliance of Eternal Values

"By using [the perspective of importance], Byzantine painting accentuated the holiness of the persons represented.  Their individual and temporal aspects were thus clothed by the brilliance of eternal values, and the image itself receives a function other than that of a simple drawing.

The way that an icon grasps, understands, and draws its subject cannot be based just on physical vision but must be interpreted by thought.  In the same way, its optical effect undergoes a change; by enlarging the proportions, the main person seems to move out from the interior of the icon toward the spectator.  The focus is thus inversed.

Pere Egon Sendler SJ. 'The Icon: Image of the Invisible

 

For an iconpainter, the representational conventions of Byzantine painting are so familiar  that it is easy (at least for me) to lose sight of how peculiar those conventions are that depict the human form in space.   I've been sketching out the cartoon for an icon of St. Anne, with her daughter, Mary, the Mother of God and Mary's son, Jesus.  I first encountered this image of mother, daughter and son in the work of my teacher, Pere Igor (Egon) Sendler, in the photograph of a fresco he painted in the 1980's.  As in many icons, Mary is depicted both as the Mother of God (that is to say, as an adult woman with her son, Jesus), and as the youthful daughter of St. Anne, symbolized by her diminutive stature in comparison with her mother.  

Which is a reminder for me of two things.  First, that drawing is always a way of seeing and thinking about the visible and invisible realities that we seek to perceive, comprehend and depict.  Second, that when it comes to what Pere Igor speaks of as those realities that are "clothed by the brilliance of eternal values", our ordinary, natural ways of sight and perception are inadequate to fully represent the subtle and elusive mystery of a world tranfigured by divine Grace.  Paradoxically, the more painstaking the attempt to enclose such realities in the garb of naturalistic realism, their luminous brilliance simply fades from sight.