Announcing an Exciting Book Project Featuring the Liturgical Arts of North America
I’m very pleased to announce that I’ve partnered with the Sacred Arts Institute at Saint Vladimir’s Seminary to produce a major book featuring the best of North America’s Orthodox Liturgical Arts. This will be a high-quality art book focused on presenting excellent color images. We will feature historic and contemporary churches, icons, furnishings, metalwork, textiles,…
Continue reading »Iconostases in Balkan Churches – Part 2: Dečani Monastery
The iconostases of Dečani Monastery are of such overwhelming interest that they warrant their own post in my photojournalism series. Dečani was built in 1327-1331. Among the hundreds of monasteries built by the medieval kingdom of Serbia, it was the tallest and grandest. Today, it is also, miraculously, the best preserved, with an extraordinary collection…
Continue reading »Icon, Religion—Abstraction: Joseph Masheck with Joachim Pissarro & Fr. Silouan Justiniano
…I looked at Russian icon painting with new eyes, that is to say, I “acquired eyes” for the abstract element in this kind of painting. –Wassily Kandinsky[i] For better or for worse the traditional icon painting revival is indebted to modernism, in particular its development of abstraction. Although, as a traditional liturgical art,…
Continue reading »Iconostases in Balkan Churches – Part 1: Serbia
Continuing my photojournalism series highlighting Balkan churches, this post features interesting iconostases I photographed in Serbia and in the Kosovo and Metohija region. These iconostases range from medieval to contemporary, and exhibit a remarkable range of styles. I find it fascinating to view them grouped together, and consider that there are such diverse solutions to…
Continue reading »Apsidal Wall Painting for St. Christopher’s Church, Codsell, UK
Definition of Apse: A large semi-circular or polygonal recess in a church, arched or with a domed roof and typically at the church’s eastern end. Via Latin from Greek hapsis ‘arch, vault’, perhaps from haptein ‘fasten, join’. In astronomy, either of two points on the orbit of a planet or satellite that are nearest to…
Continue reading »Interview with Andrew Gould on the New Church at Holy Cross Monastery
I invite you to watch this new interview, in which Abbott Seraphim and I discuss the new church under construction at Holy Cross Monastery. We touch on the future of monasticism in America, the importance of authentic craft to the growth of the Church, and the special role of Orthodoxy in an increasingly artificial world.…
Continue reading »Portraits of Light and Shadow in Balkan Churches – Part 2: Peć, Gračanica, and Dečani
Continuing my photojournalism series highlighting Balkan churches, this post will feature wide-angle interior portraits of the three great monastery churches of the Kosovo and Metohija region. Peć, Gračanica, and Dečani are monuments of unequalled importance, astonishing for their architecture and frescoes, and for their incredible state of preservation in this most embattled region. Because few…
Continue reading »Portraits of Light and Shadow in Balkan Churches – Part 1: Serbia
Having completed the first tour sponsored by the Orthodox Arts Journal, which took place in June of 2023, I’ve been considering how to share some of the four-thousand photographs I captured. The tour was a resounding success, visiting thirty monasteries and many other churches and cathedrals. Because of the volume of splendid things we saw,…
Continue reading »The Epitaphios of Jesus Christ: The Role of an Artist’s Creativity in Christian Art
Foreword In 2021 I attended a conference on “The Art of Embroidery in the Orthodox Church,” at which a speaker presented a thesis that church art is unchangeable, because it is based on church doctrine and therefore the only choice an iconographer or embroiderer is given is to choose between styles. This idea hit a…
Continue reading »On Manners and Mannerisms: Thoughts on Style…Part II
Participation Vs. Mannerism As mentioned earlier, I take stylization as a neutral, unavoidable trait of painting at large and in fact of all made things. Any embodied articulation of meaning possesses a style. Style is a visual rhetoric of sorts. But not all rhetoric has the same power. The goal should be to “…move, in…
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