Continuingl on a cheery note, I managed to get my icon of the Confession of Thomas finished before disappearing on holiday for my own micro-Brexit. Slightly under A3 this, so quite large for me, but all those little figures - the festival icons always leave me wondering whether it was strictly necessary to have so many apostles. I suppose I should be glad it wasn't the 70 Martyrs of Sebastopol. No inscription yet - we are still mulling it over. Confession? Declaration? Convincing? Testing? I talked it over in my previous blog entry here. Feel free to express preferences or make suggestions.
This week I was excited to have finished my first sizeable illumination on vellum, and will be sending it off to the US next week. 'Sizeable' in this context is comparative, since the whole piece measures only 8" x 10", but that is pretty large in miniature terms - a lot of eyebending detail and many hours' work. The client wanted the Lord's Prayer, illuminated in the style of a canon table from the exquisite Gladzor Gospel (pictured above). The Gospel book was made around 1300 in one of the monasteries of the vanished medieval university of Gladzor in Armenia, and is now in the Getty Museum in the US. Canon tables were a handy little cross-referencing aid, so that one could compare similar passages across the four synoptic gospels. They were usually decorated to look like a miniature jewelled temple, and the Armenian artists included birds drinking from urns, horns of plenty, fruits and flowers and many symbolic references to the abundance of paradise embodied in the holy Word. I have combined elements from the Gladzor canon table, and others from various works by my much-admired T'oros Roslin who was working a good fifty years before the Gladzor artist. I guessed at the original pigments he used - only four or five, despite the multi-coloured appearance, and tried to match them. I used the beautiful and precious mineral pigments I bought with some of my prize money from Attila at Master Pigments. His lapis lazuli and volkonskoite are intensely coloured and very finely ground: other such pigments I have tried have been much too coarse for illumination work. Vellum is a marvellous thing to work on, and rightfully costly, so much more rewarding than a lifeless bit of paper. As the paint goes on, the moisture causes the collagen in the vellum to swell, making each motif stand very slightly proud like a little jewel on the surface. I'd love some more commissions in a similar vein, so please share with your friends!
A new commission has recently given me reason to revisit the iconography known in English as the Doubt, or Incredulity, of Thomas. The apostle is shown reaching out his finger to the wounded side of the newly risen Christ; Thomas declares his belief and Christ pronounces the 'eleventh beatitude': "Blessed are they who have not seen and yet believe." Picture above is a 15th century wallpainting of this scene from Hertfordshire's very own St Alban's Cathedral, and a slightly earlier Byzantine fresco of the same scene from Greece.
The title of the image expresses the unjustified reputation of poor Thomas in the Western church. I have seen some modern icons inscribed the 'Confession' of Thomas, which is better. After all, Thomas recognises Jesus as "My Lord and my God", one of the pivotal moments of the post-resurrection story. By tradition, Thomas was a very young man, even a teenager, among the apostles, brave, loyal and impetuous. Tradition says that he took the gospel to India, where he was martyred and the community of St Thomas, or Syriac, Christians in Kerala still bear witness to his proselytising. Not the work of a timorous recidivist. So my client and I are considering a different name for the piece, which is destined as a wedding gift. The Greek title translates as the 'Touching' of Thomas, and I'm told that the Russians call it the 'Assurance'. At the moment I am weighing up entitling my icon 'The Convincing of Thomas', or maybe even 'the Conviction' I have painted this icon before, but have become dissatisfied with my treatment of it. My present client wants the full Byzantine party - groups of amazed apostles, doors, scenery and so forth, but the scene lends itself to a focus on only the two central figures. I once thought that this was a modernising approach: focusing on the minimalist essentials of the scene as a counterpoint to the distracting sensory abundance of modern life. But in fact I find that this is not true at all, and in my researches I have turned up a number of beautiful and early two figure 'Incredulity' icons. My favourite has always been the Ottonian ivory, around a thousand years old, pictured first below. I love the way Christ tenderly bends down from his high dais and Thomas is stretching up eagerly as if he is actually going to climb into his wounds. I have had a photofraph of it pinned to my inspiration board for years, and one day I shall paint a version for myself. The second image is a tiny Byzantine carved sapphire (reverse side, hence Christ on the left), dating perhaps as far back as the sixth century. Astonishingly it was found among the treasures of the famous Cheapside Hoard, remodelled as an Elizabethan earring. I hope it is on display - I shall be looking out for it next time I visit the Museum of London. You can read a most interesting in-depth article about this jewel here: http://farlang.com/byzantine-gem-cheapside-hoard There are only two female doctors of the (Catholic) church, St Teresa of Avila and St Catherine of Siena. Why so few are honoured is another of the eternal mysteries, but in fact these two ladies gave me quite enough trouble by themselves and the work took far longer than I budgeted for. Sometimes things just don't go smoothly. No more niche icons and fancy gilding for a while, it's time to simplify. I mounted the pair on my sale page today (see them here). I am planning icons of Jesuit saints now and think to do without gilding entirely, in the style of the Romanesque retables I saw at the Museo Catalunya in Barcelona.
The dreadful looking mess in the top right photo is the 'proplasmos' layer of sample painted according to the Prosopon School of Iconology technique. Prosopon was founded by a Russian emigre in New York, and I recently attended a little workshop given to members of the British Association of Iconographers by Irina Bradley, Buckinghamshire-based Grand Master: you can visit her website at http://www.irinabradley.com/index.html. Proplasmos is the primal soup (or in the English translation 'chaos') from which God began the work of creation. We were copying a detail of Irina's own icon of the heavenly Jerusalem, pictured left. The technique relies on a textural sub-layer, created with gritty pigments in a very dilute suspension applied wet in small pools - as the pools dry they leave mottles and swirls on the surface of the gesso, exploiting the natural tendency of different weight crystals to separate out. When the proplasmos layer is dry, the large crystals are scraped off with a palette knife. This underlayer is then modified by many successive scumbles and glazes, ending with the characteristic abstract white highlights. Picture 2 shows the colours intensified and some rough delineation of the forms, picture 3 some quick highlights in white to demonstrate the next stage. A finished icon painted by this technique can have twenty or thirty transparent layers which produce a lively, even busy, visual effect. On the whole not a technique for the the control freak.
I spied this hanging at an exhibition of international textile artists in the Lake District a couple of weeks back: Roublev-style angels interpreted in quilting and machine embroidery. Unfortunately I managed to cut the artist's name off in my photograph and now can't remember the surname, which was Russian. There was a lot of text used in the design, but it didn't help me decide what the hanging 'meant' or why icons were the subject of it.
Once upon a time, around eight hundred years ago, a group of English artists took a study trip to the fabulous Byzantine church mosaics newly installed in the Kingdom of Sicily. On their way back to Canterbury they worked their passage round the Mediterranean painting a few chapels and castles as they went. The abbess of a wealthy convent in Aragon (the south of Spain) seized the opportunity to have the refectory done out with the latest in pious interiors: the team executed a complete biblical sequence in double quick time and went back home to work (inter alia) on the Winchester Bible, a priceless treasure of English illumination. The convent gradually fell on hard times but the frescoes endured, unnoticed by anyone but a passing art historian in the 1930s who recognised their quality and importance and took some black and white photos of the images. Shortly afterwards the whole lot was burnt to the ground in the Civil War, leaving the frescoes roofless, leached of colour by the heat and scorched to the underpainting. Some decades after, using a pioneering technique, the surviving remnants were removed and re-installed in a specially built room of the Museum of Calalunyan Art in Barcelona, where they remained ever after, largely ignored by tourists but nevertheless a priceless testament to the lost beauties of medieval Christian art.
That museum has been on my bucket list for a long time and I finally had the opportunity to make a pilgrimage to study them in the flesh last week. The Sigena frescoes are installed high up on arches and barrel vaults, so I still have a crick in the neck from viewing them. Here is a taster: the first photo shows the the frescoes as they are now, bleached to the underpainting; the second shows the only section where the original colour remains; the third photo is a clever digital colour reconstruction which I found on the web; the fourth is a detail from the Winchester Bible, showing the artistic relation of the two. The frescoes are only a tiny part of the fabulous art treasures on display, from the Visigoths to the Modernistas and Picasso. I have just been sent a link to a newspaper article about the discovery of a buried 5th century church in present-day Turkey. It contains the earliest existing complete cycle of frescoes, including some hitherto unknown iconographical images. One to watch - here is the link: http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/turkey-historic-fifth-century-church-discovered-underground-city-cappadocia-1540337
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