The Territory of Creativity

Holy Martyr Elizabeth Feodorovna, 2017. Wood, gesso, relief gesso, egg tempera.

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.…

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A Vision for Orthodoxy in Puerto Rico

In 2023, I was asked to consult on the design for the first Russian-Orthodox church in Puerto Rico. In the three years since, this has turned into one of the most interesting projects of my career. I believe it may also prove to be one of the most important. It will set the style for…

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Organicity and Sham

Author’s Note: This article was written for a Moscow magazine on church aesthetics, and speaks to the situation with church art in parishes of the Russian Orthodox Church. In American churches, the situation is somewhat different. For example, icons and church utensils in America are not manufactured on the massive scale that occurs in Russia.…

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A New Icon – Saint Katherine Teaching the Philosophers of the Alexandrian Court

I would like to share an interesting project in which I collaborated with iconographer Natalia Aglitskaya to develop a new icon composition. The project was a commission from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, to commemorate their fiftieth anniversary of coeducation, which occurred in 2019. The college wanted a memorial to the admission of women to…

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“And the Glory of The Lord Filled the Tabernacle” – Some Reflections on the World Premiere of Benedict Sheehan’s Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom

In the past thirty years, I have attended almost 7000 liturgies in the United States, Canada, Russia, and Greece. Some of these have been in small candlelit chapels in the desert of Mount Athos; others have been in magnificent imperial monasteries with a thousand years of history. I have beheld liturgies celebrated by patriarchs and…

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