Painting an icon

I promised (or for those of you uninterested in art, perhaps I threatened) to make a post on the details of painting a religious icon. So here goes.

If you want to skip the longish intro, there are lots of pictures and short descriptions of the process below.

In the beginning

For those coming in late, I spent the first full week of June at an Eastern Catholic monastery, courtesy of a friend who dared my non-religious self to do it and courtesy of that friend and others who generously funded the expedition. Though I didn’t experience the leap of faith my friend was surely hoping for, I did learn valuable lessons at the iconography workshop held that week.

The ancient art of icon painting is on the upsurge, as more people in this country quietly move toward rigorous and traditional forms of Christianity. The teacher of our class was a Greek Orthodox convert from Protestantism who makes his living as an iconographer. My fellow students were all Roman Catholics, but several had a pretty good acquaintance with the Eastern church, and a couple had a downright passion for icons.

Class began Monday after a delicious brunch with the nuns. Before that, students so inclined attended the long early morning prayer service called Orthros, which (because it was a feast day, the Monday after Pentacost) morphed seamlessly into Liturgy. All this was very foreign to me, but beautiful — featuring incense, candlelight, and chanting. Every element of both services, including bible readings, was either chanted or sung. Only the priest’s homily was spoken.

But the homily was about icons and their meaning, and after it all the student iconographers, including my unbelieving self, came forward to be blessed. At the end of Liturgy, I also shared in the antidoron, the leavened bread given to everyone (as opposed to the communion bread, which only Catholics or Orthodox — everyone present but me — were permitted). I thought that final distribution of bread to all was a very touching, inclusive gesture.

I’m glad I knew about some of this stuff going in, though, ’cause otherwise I was totally confused.

Anyhow, on to the icon class. All of the above is relevant because iconography is specifically a religious activity, with each step having some biblical significance. And of course each class day also began with a series of short prayers, during which we faced east. I never asked why we faced east. Now I wonder.

But to the artwork …

We began with 9×12 plyboards, already coated for us with a traditional form of gesso (plaster), as opposed to the acrylic surface preparations more common these days. Plyboards are for student work. “Proper” icons are done on wood panels, often made by monks, that cost a very pretty penny but are designed for the ages.

We all worked on our individual renditions of the same icon, The Holy Mandylion or the Holy Face of Jesus. While this wouldn’t have been my first choice, it proved an interesting, challenging, and varied project.

First, we transferred an outline from paper onto the gessoed board using carbon sheets. Haven’t seen those since the old typrwriter days! Next, we took a sharp-pointed stylus and scratched the image into the plaster. This gave us permanent lines that remained no matter how many layers of paint we laid over them. The inscribed lines are also a design characteristic of certain schools of iconography.

The very next thing we did was something that seems as if it should be a finishing, rather than a beginning, step.

That’s a fragile coat of 23-karat gold leaf, rubbed on over a layer of red clay and a tacky oil-based bonding agent. I think this was my favorite part of the whole process.

Then we began painting very thin layers of wash to establish our background colors.

You can see by the paint tray that we were working with tiny quantities of paint. This is egg tempera, an ancient medium that went out of fashion in the era of Michelangelo and Leonardo but is making a bit of a comeback, at least in part thanks to the icon revival. It’s a mix-it-yourself medium (in this case mixed by the teacher). Very fragile. It can’t be stored. But once applied and sealed, it lasts for centuries.

The most disturbing part of the process for me was painting Jesus’ face and hair two shades of mud brown.

This step signifies something like, “God created all men, including Jesus, out of clay.” It’s also, of course, to establish a ground for shadows and skin tones. But laying down blobs of darkness scares the bejabbers out of me. How could a face emerge out of that? Where would we go from that beginning?

As it turned out, we proceeded to ignore the face while moving onto what turned out to be the hardest step, lettering and fine white lines.

It wasn’t hard because it was in (modified) Greek, but just because it required a tiny brush and a steady hand. The writings say (or in some cases are shorthand for): “Jesus Christ,” “The conqueror,” “The One” (which could also be translated as “I am that I am”), and finally at the bottom “The Holy Mandylion.”

Mandylion just means napkin or facecloth, which is probably why the word never actually gets translated. It’s based on a legend about Jesus wiping his face and transferring a miraculous image onto the cloth.

Anyhow, eventually we got back to the face, and something began to emerge.

I mentioned before that, while complicated, this was almost “paint by the numbers.” We applied exactly three ever-lighter shades of yellow ochre to define the face, and applied them as specified by diagrams in a booklet each of us had at our work stations.

After those three layers, which gave me a lot of trouble, we moved into a series of dramatically transformative steps, like rouging.

Yes, we painted red (actually bright magenta) highlights on the face, where they would remain un-softened by any more natural hues. After that, we painted the hair (again, three layers; always seems to be three, which no doubt also has religious significance).

After that we added black or dark brown outlines and highlights, which further defined the face and further contributed to the unreal look characteristic of icons.

Finally — or almost finally — we painted in the deliberately unnatural white lines representing divine light.

After that, it was just a matter of sealing the image with an egg mixture, which the teacher did for us one evening after class. After that had cured overnight, we returned to rub on a varnish made mostly of beeswax and lavender oil. It was the classic Karate Kid “wax on, wax off” gesture with our bare fingertips. It somehow felt very good to perform the last step in such a literally hands-on, ancient manner.

The teacher then used a very unauthentic heat gun to dry the varnish well enough for us to safely transport our images home.

And that, dear blog readers, was that. A truly fascinating and worthwhile experience. I’m looking forward to trying icons on my own. But the specialized materials they demand are going to take time and patience to acquire.