Icons

Rublev's Triotsa

Many of you with an interest in sacred art probably already know about the Contemporary Icon show at the Art Center of the Capital Region. I was able to view it the other evening during Troy Night Out. Upstairs at the Art Center, you'll find the work of Christine Simoneau Hales and her students. Each image is meticulously rendered in luminous egg tempera and gold leaf.

Icons, while made with painting materials are very different from other forms of painting. In fact, nobody "paints" and icon: icons are written. Giotto is often credited with beginning western art's preoccupation with a painting as a window into the world, but the iconographers of the east were creating a window of another sort for five to six hundred years before Giotto. Rather than a window into the world, icons are a window into heaven. To borrow Heraclitu's phrase, an icon is a finger pointing at the moon. They are purposefully abstracted and stylized, so as not to distract from their meditative purpose. Even the means employed to painter them has been carefully developed over the centuries to harmonize with their liturgical use. Egg tempera is employed as the oil medium has been known to be too sensual.

If any readers would like to know more about the art of iconography--and create an icon yourself--Christine will be teaching a class on the subject at the art center. You'll learn to make your own paint, and do a little gilding with 23k leaf. The class will run from March 20th to May 29th. Details can be found via this link