Designing Icons (pt.2): Icon Prototypes

This is post 2 of 9 in the series “Designing Icons” Aidan Hart gives us a full chapter on designing icons from his book “Techniques of Icon and Wall Painting.” Designing Icons (pt.1) Designing Icons (pt.2): Icon Prototypes Designing Icons (pt.3): New Icons Designing Icons (pt.4): Researching Festal Icons Designing Icons (pt.5): Conventions of Traditional…

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Designing Icons (pt.1)

This is post 1 of 9 in the series “Designing Icons” Aidan Hart gives us a full chapter on designing icons from his book “Techniques of Icon and Wall Painting.” Designing Icons (pt.1) Designing Icons (pt.2): Icon Prototypes Designing Icons (pt.3): New Icons Designing Icons (pt.4): Researching Festal Icons Designing Icons (pt.5): Conventions of Traditional…

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The Recovery of Symbolism

“Symbolism” is a term that has become quite diluted in the past 500 years. Since the middle ages, the notion of the symbol has undergone a deep mutation due to the immeasurable changes in our experience of knowledge and meaning.  Symbolism has been progressively reduced from underlying our very cosmological world view, to now being a…

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Rescuing the Art of Ecclesial Embroidery

Editor’s Note: Our readers may remember the piece we published previewing the Hexaemeron Inc. workshop on ecclesial embroidery. This piece is a follow-up, now that the course has been completed.   “And all the women that were wise-hearted did spin with their hands, and brought that which they had spun, both of blue, and of…

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Teaching Art in a Catholic School

Some of you might be interested in reading a short article I wrote for the New Liturgical Movement.  I teach art once a week in a small Traditionalist Catholic school.  It has been a great joy to teach in a context so friendly to liturgical art.  On my first day, as I was explaining what…

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The Carved Miniatures of George Bilak

George Bilak is a Serbian carver who now lives in the United States.  He carves miniature icons, pectoral crosses, blessing crosses and eggs that will take your breath away.  I can say without hesitating that he has been one of the biggest influences in how I carve miniatures.  My very first miniature commission, of which…

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New Wall Painting

In August I completed a wall painting on the east wall of my medieval parish church, The Greek Orthodox Church of the Holy Fathers, Shrewsbury, England. On some of the other walls there already exist simple medieval wall paintings, dating from around 1380 A.D., but the east wall was newly plastered during recent restoration work…

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Opus Sectile Icons

There is a relatively famous image of St. Eudocia from the 10th or 11th century from Constantinople that has recently caught my attention.  It is done in a technique called Opus Sectile.  Unlike Mosaic which is the assembly of similarly shaped squares forming a pattern, Opus Sectile is when stone is cut in different shapes…

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Painting an Icon; the Hexaemeron Workshop

I am not an icon writer nor am I an icon painter, if it makes a difference. I am the founder and administrator of the non-profit organization Hexaemeron which sponsors courses in iconography. As such, I once attempted to make a St. Paul icon to familiarize myself with the process so that I could write…

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