"I do not make an icon of the invisible Godhead, but I make an icon of the visible flesh of God." –St. John of Damascus

I consider it to be no small miracle that I am here, brush in hand, making life-long pilgrimage as a defender and creator of Holy Images.
I know from seeing, from loving, from entering into icons, in all that I know and in what little I do know, it is indeed possible to enter in through prayer—yielding a transformation touched upon by the Holy Spirit through SEEING and witnessing that which IS through a still point, a breaking choir-sung silence where conversation initiates once that threshold has been passed through. Diving through time, connecting with Eternity through those who have walked before us, there is a means to intimacy and a sweet fullness and vulnerability of laying out our spiritual selves through the icon. It is there, here, now, always--through the slow, steady and meditative process of being with an icon, of being in that two-fold prayer with God’s Cloud of Witnesses (Hebrews 12:1), that the reality of God’s plan on earth can speak into our lives, through us, and point us toward Eternity.
This is a true spiritual gift of line, light, form and matter. In the Orthodox understanding, we iconographers “write” icons, for the icon itself is liturgy, the word made flesh through captured line and color on wood, and transforms even the matter to become something other. And the incarnation for Christians is the high point of our visible understanding of God. Man himself was originally intended to be the icon of God (Genesis 1:27), but when God deemed it necessary to become incarnate, He became fully manifest in human terms as His Perfect Icon, the Incarnate Christ, the New Adam.
O for the long journey that takes one to the road we are happy to travel. I think I have been graced with mercy in my search and recent arrival at a means in which to use my creative talents through my spiritual yearnings. Interesting to look back over the years since childhood and find signposts that led me here. In my early years, nature played an enormous part of my artistic curiosity as with many children—gathering clay from the mudbank, finding plant specimens to press and collage into visual forms, making my own paint from berries and glue, carving images into the trees that grew around my home, building small stick homes and villages—these experiences were my favorite and as an only child, I strangely never felt alone, although I grew up without a formal introduction to God. The notion of Church, perhaps being denied access, became something beautifully mysterious and grew into a quiet hunger in my further years to find out. Although I can markedly say that I did feel I always knew the Other…
Our trip to France as a young adult brought on an appreciation with beauty told through the ancient architecture of medieval Europe—especially in the small forgotten churches in the southern countryside around Sarlat in La Dordogne, where we lived. The Black Madonna of Rocamodour being a marked passage to greater internal desire and hunger to know more. And so I fell in love with early Christian art—raw and sometimes brute (certainly not the Renaissance approach) but it moved me, it was authentic story, added with knowing that the incense and candles burning were a continuum of a human gesture to some kind of Love played out since its inception. I returned in College (going to Art school in Paris), feeling God was pursuing me. Chartres Cathedral, and hours, amounting to days spent at the Louvre museum looking for signs of that Other pointing the way. It was on this road that that mysterious thing of salvation was found. And I am eternally grateful. Truth speaks out of the rubble of our lives and pushes its way to the surface so that we can be born anew in Love. First a Protestant, now a Catholic who has an Orthodox heart (with labels melting in an ecumenical shout for Oneness), I desperately want to see Christians and those questing for God to seek to use the tools that God has given and find our way to the foot of the Cross. To look upon the Holy Face, and the holy faces given to us through time-- to stop, hold, even kiss a tangible image passed down from iconographer to iconographer, since St. Luke initiated this journey through time in the play of Eternity.

Speechless be the lips of impious ones,
Those who do not reverence
Your great icon, the sacred one
Which is called Directress,
And was depicted for us
By one of the apostles,
Luke the Evangelist.

Through the icon I have found a home. I have been told it takes fifteen years to truly become an iconographer, but I am on my way (with five babes afoot). I have spent several years working with master Russian iconographer Ksenia Pokrovsky outside of Boston, and as I write this, I am making myself ready to shift to working with Father Andrew Tregubov of Holy Ressurrection Russian Orthodox Church in Claremont, New Hampshire. I am very much looking forward to my next mentorship—Father Andrew studied in-depth the icons of Gregory Kroug (who in turn pulled his inspiration from Andrei Rublev) in France and stresses the importance of Light in the work of the iconographer. Light is held suspended through the lives of the person depicted, but also literally through the pigments or colors used on the icon board. Marianna Fortunato, a French iconographer said, "...each icon is the name of God pronounced in line and color." Thus the line rendered must be full of love, alive, and reverberating of God’s inspiration. It is in aspiring to this that I hope to fill a full cup of beauty, and be found worthy of my effort.
May you be graced with the ability to enter in through my humble and sincere efforts, witnessing by sight the fullness of God’s Word.


Our faith is stronger than death, our philosophy is firmer than flesh, and the spread of the Kingdom of God upon the earth is more sublime and more compelling. –Dorothy Day