The aspiration to make light radiant and luminous, which is best done in egg tempera, is much more involved and elusive than I would have ever imagined. There is always so much that is beyond our grasp and capabilities. Very few of us ever fully master iconography. I estimate that it took me about ten years to get to a point at which I really began to master the art of writing icons, moving beyond merely copying prototypes. Always the pragmatist, I thought this would be easy. This is a unique and completely different idea of light – uncreated light. In Eastern Byzantine art, you start out dark and work, transparent layer by transparent layer, towards the light, because the light radiates from within. Gabriel by Janet JaimeIn the West or, I should say, post-Renaissance art, you start out with the light and work toward the dark or the shadows, always concentrating on atmospheric light. I soon realized that East is exactly the opposite of West in technique and approach. I was challenged by the idea of making light come from the figure, in the same way I had spent years perfecting and studying the way light fell or was subtly reflected onto a figure. What a perfect fit for me, a lover of anything tedious, I thought. Icons, I observed, were classically rendered subjects that obviously required a detailed, exacting, time-consuming process. I rather naively didn’t see such a great leap between being slavishly accurate in representing detail recorded by a camera, on the one hand, and being slavishly obedient to the rules of iconography, and following prototypes, on the other hand. At that time I was an illustrator who worked in a photo-realistic style. I began to observe icons closely and soon realized that they appealed to my particular temperament, which is naturally drawn to doing tight, detailed work. He said this in a very matterof- fact way, and through his encouragement gave me an open door into a wonderful world. ICONOGRAPHER HOW TOConstantine Nasr, suggested that I should learn how to write icons. Sometime after I became Orthodox, my priest, Fr. In iconography, our materials are also taken from the earth – pigments, precious minerals, animal hide glue, whiting, wood, gold and eggs – to create, with our hands, an image to be venerated, an icon created as an act of devotion and prayer to God. When making Holy Bread, for example, we use the gifts from the earth – wheat, yeast and water, with a pinch of salt – and return it back to God as an offering which we made with our hands. God provides us, out of His creation, the materials needed to create. When we offer our gifts to God, we are really only returning what was given to us, that which we do not own nor can take credit for. Some of us have many gifts and others, only one. We are each uniquely blessed with gifts from God.
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