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…
Continue reading »On Manners and Mannerisms: Thoughts on Style…Part I
Editorial note: The following letter/article, which will be posted in two parts, is a response to a friend’s question concerning the problem of style in icon painting, in particular as it relates to one of my icons of Ss. John the Theologian and Prochoros. **** The style is the man himself. – Compte de…
Continue reading »The Design of the Anointing Screen for the Coronation of King Charles III
(Editor’s Note: The Coronation of King Charles III, this Saturday, will include important contributions from Orthodox artists. Alexander Lingas, Founder and Music Director of Cappella Romana, will lead the Byzantine Chant Ensemble in singing Psalm 71. And Iconographer Aidan Hart has designed the beautiful screen for the sacramental anointing, which he describes in the article…
Continue reading »Sacred Arts East and West: A Conversation with Aidan Hart, Jonathan Pageau, and Andrew Gould
The Institute of Sacred Arts (ISA) at St Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary (SVOTS) will host a panel discussion with artists and scholars Aidan Hart, Jonathan Pageau, and Andrew Gould, on Monday, April 24, 2023, at 7:30 p.m. The event will be moderated by ISA founding director and SVOTS Professor of Systematic Theology Dr Peter Bouteneff and Associate Professor of…
Continue reading »Icon Painting as Participation: Interview with Cornelia Tsakiridou…Part II
In Tradition and Transformation…Gadamer’s “horizon” helped me think in terms of a “communion of icons” (koinonia eikonon) or to think of icons as living these interpenetrating lives across time. Think, for example, of all the variants of the King of Glory/Akra Tapeinosis since the type first appeared in the 12th century. Each one carries…
Continue reading »Icon Painting as Participation: Interview with Cornelia Tsakiridou…Pt. I
Editorial Note: It was in 2014 that I first came across the work of Cornelia A. Tsakiridou, a year after the publication of her major contribution to the current discourse on icon painting, Icons in Time, Persons in Eternity (Ashgate, 2013). It was quite an unexpected treasure to find at the time. Challenging indeed—breaking the…
Continue reading »Lecture: The Neptic Icon and Orthodox Tradition
I am delighted to announce that Professor Cornelia Tsakiridou, author of several exceptional books on the holy icon, will be giving a special lecture on the evening of Tuesday 14th March 2023 at the Hellenic Centre in London, UK. The lecture is organised by The Prince’s Foundation, School of Traditional Arts and generously made possible…
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