Theory
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 »New Liturgical Handbook Illuminates the Heart of Orthodox Worship
A groundbreaking new resource for Eastern Orthodox Christians has been published, offering clergy, laity, and inquirers an in-depth yet accessible guide to the Orthodox Church’s divine services. Titled The Divine Services of the Orthodox Church with Commentary, this comprehensive handbook combines original translations of liturgical texts with rich theological explanations, patristic insights, and practical pastoral…
Continue reading »Image and Awe
It is and it is not. An image is like its subject but also unlike it. Through its likeness, a sacred image helps us to establish relationship with its subject, while through its unlikeness it suggests the subject’s otherness. This journal of liturgical art, as with my own work as a liturgical artist, is concerned…
Continue reading »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.…
Continue reading »Beauty First: Envisioning a Civilization Worth Restoring (ARC Roundtable)
In February of this year, over four-thousand people gathered at the ARC Conference in London. Among them were a group of phenomenal Orthodox artists invited by Jonathan Pageau. I gathered many of these artists in our hotel lobby one evening and hosted a roundtable discussion. It was an unprecedented conversation, considering the extraordinary talents present.…
Continue reading »Humility
If only we could speak to ourselves from the future! How many valuable insights and skills could we have shared with our past selves! On the other hand, how would we have learned these things if not through the mistakes we make today? Is there a way to learn without mistakes? We have books, videos,…
Continue reading »American Aristocrats: Art, Patronage, and Beauty with Andrew Gould and Dr. Timothy Patitsas
This video features a discussion I had with Dr. Timothy Patitsas. We discuss liturgical arts, patronage, culture, and the experience of the artist. We delve deep into the practical difficulties of realizing good art in the modern age. If you enjoyed this article, please use the PayPal button below to donate to support the work…
Continue reading »Teaching Iconography in the Twenty-First Century
Sharing our teaching method, I invite fellow iconographers to share their views on teaching, as only by approaching this subject from several sides can we foster a new generation of iconographers who will be better than us. The teaching method my wife Olga Shalamova and I now use took its shape gradually. In Italy in…
Continue reading »What is an Icon – A Response for Philip Davydov
Editor’s Note: This open letter was written in response to Philip Davydov’s call for master iconographers to address some fundamental questions about their art and its relationship to the Church. Dear Philip, thank you for the interesting article. It seems to me that the questions you have presented to us are not that difficult to…
Continue reading »Questions for Iconographers
Writing this text, I can’t help but feel that it opens up (or continues) a very extensive subject, which will require a lot of effort just to be introduced, and even more effort to be explained, but I will try… On February 12th, 2024 I was invited to the Andrey Rublev Museum in Moscow as…
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