Icon Workshop. Boise Idaho. June 9-13, 2009

I am pleased to announce that I will be teaching an icon workshop sponsored by Holy Transfiguration Antiochian Orthodox Church (Fr. Mark Fenn) in Boise Idaho. The class has been approved by and received the blessing of His Grace, Bishop JOSEPH. The class is open to all Orthodox Christians, Catechumens, and serious inquirers. We will be painting an 8" x 12" icon of the Pimen Mother of God:




If you might be interested in attending, please check out the brochure. (PDF format)

Or you can go straight to the registration form. (also PDF)

You can also pay the class fee online using google checkout here.

The class will paint this icon from start to finish, with all of the supplies included, and demonstrations of all of the steps necessary for completion of the icon. In conjunction with the class, we will be supporting the work of this mission parish, and reaching out to the community. Before the class begins, I will be installing two (maybe three) icons in the iconostasis of Holy Transfiguration Church. We will try to get press attention for this so that we can have the opportunity to speak to a larger audience, not just about iconography, but about the Orthodox Church. We will invite the public to attend a lecture at the completion of the class so that they can learn about how this sacred art reflects the theology of the Church. It is my hope that this class will be a blessing to the parish of Holy Transfiguration, and a blessing to the area as it will no doubt be a blessing for me and my fiancee.

If you are interested, please let us know. Or if you know of someone who would be interested, please forward this information, or send them here, or to my website.

A Labor of Love, Part 1

I have come to the realization that I am not the most prolific blogger. For someone with as much time as I have to sit around and think, it should be much easier for me to spend a few moments of the day writing down something that I spent hours thinking about. But the truth is that most of the time I prefer to think my thoughts and then let them go rather than saving them for posterity. After all, some of my thoughts are best left forgotten. But it seems to me a shame to have this blog and not really use it.

So this will hopefully be the beginning of a series of posts which should go on over the next few weeks and months. Lisa attends Holy Transfiguration Antiochian Orthodox Church, a small mission parish in Boise, Idaho, and while she would very much like to be married in that Church because of her close friendships with everyone there, when she visited me in Pennsylvania she remarked that she would rather get married in my church because it is so much more beautiful with all of the icons that we have. I told her that I had a solution to her dilemma which was that I could make her Church more beautiful.

In all the years that I have been working as an iconographer, I have done a lot of work in Churches, but it seems like every commission has to match the other icons in the church. I have yet to paint an entire iconostasis because I keep getting work at established parishes. I am certainly not complaining about the work that I have been given, but part of me wants to do something from start to finish. So I have an opportunity to fulfill a little bit of a dream for myself, give a wedding gift to my future bride, and give a small Mission something that they could never afford (and I get a tax deduction out of it to boot...)

So a few nights ago I began the first icon for the iconostasis. It is an icon of the Pimen Mother of God, and in the next few days I hope to draw up the icon of Christ to match it. I have decided to document the work, and use it as fuel for my blog. The added benefit of that is that the people of the Church can check in and see what is happening. In addition, there are plans underway for me to teach a class on iconography (more details in the next couple weeks hopefully) from June 9-13 in Boise, and we will be painting the same icon in the class, so this will give me images to use in advertising for the class, and hopefully I can use this blog to get better coverage and fill up that class since part of the profits from the class will be used to support this parish that will be my spiritual home in a few months time.

Last night was the first meeting of the Executive Board of my church's Parish Council. As the new chairman of the council, it was the first of these meetings that I have attended. At the conclusion of the business portion of the meeting, I started to tell them about some things that are going on in my personal life lately. It was so nice to spend just a few minutes of time talking about who I am as a person, what is going on in my life, what my hopes and dreams and aspirations are. Since then, I have given a lot of thought to what it means to share these things with people at Church. And the conclusion that I have reached is that not sharing is a monstrous distortion of what it means to be a Christian.

We are created in the image and likeness of God. And specifically, in the image and the likeness of the Holy Trinity. Just as Father, Son and Holy Spirit are distinct Persons, they are in perfect union with each other. To be truly human is to be in union with other humans and with our Creator. Furthermore, we believe in a God who became a man, sharing in our humanity so that we could share in His Divinity. We also believe that the Church is the Body of Christ, that our salvation lies in our being one with each other with Christ as the head of the Church. To choose to exist as isolated individuals is truly to deny all of these things in practice regardless of whether we agree to them in theory. This isolation, it seems to me, is the very essence of sin. If we truly practiced unity with one another, we could not lie about our neighbor, steal from them, murder them, use them for our own gain, or abuse them.

So tonight at the first meeting of the full Parish Council, I shared the abridged version of how God used financial ruin, and a stay in the hospital to bring me back home to the Church, and how I vowed to return to the Church as a servant which is why I agreed to be on Council and why I agreed to run for Chairman despite my fears and trepidation. And once again, I saw how this little bit of sharing is what begins to tie us together as Christians.

For a while now, I have been sharing things through this blog, and on various other sites I am on, but there is something very different about sharing things in person. What I write here may be read by many people, or no one at all. People may be brought to tears by what I write, or they may roll their eyes. This is not a personal medium, even though there are people writing and people reading. There appears to be a connection between writer and reader, but in most cases this is little more than an illusion. I don't know most of the people that will read this, and so while it might make me feel good to write things down, and it might help someone to read it, we still are not united together in a substantive way.

I have been doing much more sharing in person lately. I have shared my joy, my sorrows, my struggles against temptation, my sins and my faults with people, and in return I have received love, forgiveness, acceptance, encouragement, and consolation. The truth is that if we are even a little bit serious about being a Christian, we have this desire within us to share, and to have others share with us. It is imprinted in us as beings in the image and likeness of God. We have just forgotten how because we live in a fallen world that encourages us to stay separate from each other.

We may start by sharing bits of information about ourselves, but over time we begin to actually share our whole self. And I am finding that the more I do this, the more blessings I have to be thankful for, and I spend more time sharing myself with God.

I like your hat

For years I have been aware of St. Spyridon's existence. He has been staring back at me from books for as long as I have been hunting up prototypes to paint. And every time I saw an icon of St. Spyridon, I thought the same thing, "I love that hat." That, unfortunately, was the sum total of my thinking on the matter. I never bothered to find out why he wore such a funny looking hat. I never looked up an account of his life to see when he lived, what he did, or why we remember him at all. St. Spyridon was always just that guy with the odd pointy hat.

A few years back, I took a trip to Greece. During that time, I spent a few days in Corfu. In planning the trip, I had all these grand ideas of visiting tons of Orthodox Churches that I had seen in books, but never seen in person. As it turns out, I only got into one church in Corfu. I walked into St. Spyridon's Cathedral, and found it to be very dark. It was hard to see much. The highlight of the whole experience was that I saw an icon of St. John of Damascus that I had actually used as a prototype several times before. Of course the icon was probably 25 feet in the air, and a little hard to see, but I had seen it, and for that I was happy. We only stayed for a couple minutes before we ran off to catch a bus. It was only after returning home from Greece that I read in an icon book that St. Spyridon is actually at St. Spyridon Cathedral in Corfu. It was only after returning home that I learned that he is in a glass case, and that every year they take him on procession in Corfu. I learned after the fact that they change his shoes every year because they are miraculously worn out as a sign that he is still active in going to help people.

I finally painted an icon of St. Spyridon last year. I know now that he wears that funny little hat because he was a farmer, and that was the kind of hat that farmers wore. I've read about his election as a bishop despite his lack of theological training. I have read about him going to the First Ecumenical Council. And I see now that there is so much more to St. Spyridon than just a guy in a hat. He is a shining example for all of us that it is not earthly wisdom or intellectual pursuits that make us Godly people, but rather a simple love for God and His Church, and a desire to follow where God leads us.


St. James the Persian also has a funny hat. And his sleeves have a hole halfway up the sleeve so that his arm hangs out there while the rest of the sleeve hangs down looking like an elephant's trunk. Needless to say I was similarly captivated by St. James the Persian. I finally painted an icon of St. James around the same time as St. Spyridon. In the process, I read about St. James, and learned about his horrific martyrdom. St. James had abandoned his faith for the worship of idols. When he repented, the King ordered soldiers to cut him into pieces while still alive. Each of his fingers and toes were cut off, then his arms and legs before finally being beheaded. All the while, St. James who had been weak enough to leave his faith before found faith to endure this suffering, and as he was cut apart, there was a sweet smell that came from his wounds.

This is just another example of a Saint with an incredible story, and one that leads us to repentance and to reconciliation to our loving and forgiving God, and to me he was just a guy with a neat outfit.

I realize that this is not just the way I look at the Saints of the Church, it is also how I tend to look at people in general. I am easily caught up in externals. I might remember things about how someone looks, what they are wearing, or what they were doing when I saw them, but I have always been very slow to engage people in a meaningful way. I am usually oblivious to what is going on in the lives of people that I encounter, and I'm sure that a great many times their lives can be edifying as well. Our calling as Christians is to be social beings as a reflection of the persons of the Trinity in unity, and yet my inclination has always been to seek isolation rather than communion with others. But it is only in learning to love my fellow Christians like St. Spyridon, St. James, the person standing next to me in Church, the person I interact with on a forum, a blog, or anywhere else that I will really understand what it means to be created in the image and likeness of God in Trinity.