Posts Tagged ‘Jonathan Pageau’
Theophany and What Sacred Art Does
You enter a silent museum. Standing at an appropriate distance, you gaze at a piece of art set against a clinically white wall. The art is lit as to leave no glare or shine and you as the viewer leave no shadow on it. Enough space is allotted all around the art so to be admired without…
Continue reading »The Ass and The Ox in The Nativity Icon
There is no ass or ox in the Biblical narratives of the birth of Christ. Yet, besides the Christ Child himself, the ass and the ox are the most ancient and stable elements in the iconography of the nativity. In fact the earliest example of a nativity known to us contains only the swaddled Christ in the manger flanked by the ox…
Continue reading »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…
Continue reading »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…
Continue reading »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…
Continue reading »St-John Chrysostom on Liturgical Art
As a liturgical artist, as someone who makes expensive objects to furnish the Church or to be worn by its clergy, there is a homily of St-John Chrysostom I like to keep in the back of my mind. It is a homily on the Gospel of St-Mathew in which he warns us: “Do you want…
Continue reading »Wooden Vessels
Recently I had the chance of making a wooden chalice and diskos set for a priest. It was quite an interesting undertaking as it required a woodturner, a silversmith and myself to bring the whole thing together. Interestingly enough, the order for this set came as I was working on another wooden chalice, making stone roundels…
Continue reading »The Recovery of The Arts (pt.3): Memory of the Heart
This is post 3 of 3 in the series “The Recovery of The Arts” Jonathan Pageau Examines the duality in the traditional vision of art, and how it is transformed by Christ, moving from the garments of skin to liturgical art and how this vision contrasts to contemporary notions art. The Recovery of the Arts…
Continue reading »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…
Continue reading »The Mystery of Ethiopian Iconography
Ethiopian Christianity presents many mysteries to us, their unique use of Old Testament typology, their concentric churches, their claim of having the Ark of the Covenent and its use in liturgy – these all create an obscure but fascinating question. I went to Ethiopia in 2009 to discover more about their liturgical arts. I would…
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