Posts Tagged ‘art’
The Territory of Creativity
This article was originally published in the magazine “Slovo i Kamen” (“Word and Stone”). Icon Painter and Artist From book to book, from trip to trip, from one person to the next, encounters keep happening – and each time something important comes into view. For me, one of the most meaningful was meeting Todor Mitrovic.…
Continue reading »Lord, it is Good to be Here: Building Orthodox Culture in America
A video of my keynote address, given at the Paideia Conference in June 2025, is now available. My talk is titled “Lord, it is Good to be Here: Building Orthodox Culture in America”. In it, I discuss the full history of Orthodox church building in America: the beautiful and well-acculturated churches of the early 20th-century:…
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 »Painting as Prayer, The Art of A. Sophrony Sakharov
Editorial note: This is the third part of a series on the artistic path and iconographic legacy of Saint Sophrony the Athonite (1896-1993) as seen through a collection of monographs written by Sister Gabriela, a member of his monastic community in Essex, England. The previous articles, Seeking Perfection in the World of Art can be…
Continue reading »Narthex Murals at St John of the Ladder
Introduction This article is the second in a series documenting the mural project at St John of the Ladder Orthodox Church in Greenville, South Carolina. This beautiful temple was designed by Andrew Gould. The previous article presented the murals in the two smaller rooms adjacent to the church’s sanctuary. Here, I will present the recently…
Continue reading »‘Being’, The Art and Life of Father Sophrony
Archimandrite Sophrony, painting Christ at the Last Supper, early 1980s, the Monastery of St John the Baptist, Refectory.[1] Image: ©The Stavropegic Monastery of Saint John the Baptist, Essex. Editorial note: This is the second part of a series on the artistic path and iconographic legacy of Saint Sophrony (Sakharov) as seen through a collection…
Continue reading »The Nature of Divine Beauty
A Tough Love Many are drawn to the beauty of icons. But clearly this beauty is of a different order than, say, that of a Greek statue, or of a Renaissance painting. Icons are liturgical objects, created for prayer, a means of communion with the Lord. So what are some of the characteristics of divine…
Continue reading »Sacred Art in Secular Terms
Last year I was invited to speak at the Northwest Catholic Family Education Conference. The event was going to be quite open to the public and was dealing with the notion of Truth, the truth seen in different walks of life. I was asked to speak about the truth in art and discuss my own…
Continue reading »Making Art with an Axe
As we have just passed through the season of Theophany, I have been brought to ponder what Theophany means for art, especially liturgical art. The icon of Theophany offers much to reflect upon as we gaze at the elements it brings together. Just as in our lives and in the world, in the making of Christian…
Continue reading »The Robot, the Mutant and The Artist
[1]One of the weaknesses in our vision of the world is that we tend to look at what surrounds us from one side of an opposition. This is inevitable as humanity’s existence unfolds like a wheel, waxing and waning, pulled by opposite forces from extreme to extreme. These extremes feed each other, call each other…
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