From Cubism To The Romanesque (To The Orthodox Icon?)

In a comment on my article ‘The Seventh Ecumenical Council, the Council of Frankfurt & the Practice of Painting’, Baker Galloway asks if ‘to develop towards a contemporary indigenous iconography in western cultures’ we need to revisit ‘these medieval (I use the term loosely) periods in our western history, or do we start from where…

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Symeon van Donkelaar: Local Color in Icons

(Editor’s comment:  Symeon van Donkelaar is a Canadian iconographer.  I find his work fascinating as it is an exploration of the flatter and more stylized threads of iconography, Coptic art, early Medieval Spanish art as well as what was developed in Central and Northern Europe before the Gothic period. Lines are bold and highly calligraphic. Color…

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Carving the Virgin Hodegetria

(Editor’s note: this article was written by Martin Earle, Aidan Hart’s studio assistant who worked to create a commission they received for a statue of the Hodogetria. Martin can be contacted at mart_earle@yahoo.co.uk. ) I always brace myself for a bit of anti-Catholic sentiment when meeting an Orthodox Christian for the first time. A convert myself, I…

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Fr. Philippe Péneaud: Romanesque Iconography Today

Fr. Philippe Péneaud is a priest for the Antiochian Orthodox Church and a prolific woodcarver living in the South of France. Having studied in the great tradition of European woodcarving with Raymond Labeyrie, he converted to Orthodoxy in the 1980s under the influence of Leonid Ouspensky’s “Theology of The Icon” as well as through the works of others…

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Our Lady of Lincoln Sculpture

I had often wondered if a three dimensional sculpture could be made to act like an icon, leading the viewer to the holy person depicted rather than acting as a self-contained art object. And so I was pleased when I was commissioned to design and carve a two metre (6′-6″) high stone sculpture of the…

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