September has arrived. This brings me at the happy arrival of re-entering into my Russian-Byzantine Iconography mentorship and long-awaited further study with Ksenia Pokrovsky (www.izograph.com) through a NH State Arts Council grant.
I just found this lovely photograph of this most wonderful woman. This woman who has allowed me into her studio and helped to bridge my desire to become an iconographer with all that means in the slow steady push of entering into the process, the technique, the theology, the beauty. She holds the promise of all that I need yet to learn. I miss her and the joy of sitting at her icon table as her wild birds sing and swoop overhead (the sound of a babbling brook from the third floor eves of an old Victorian house). I am ready to be there with her critical eye, her slow and steady encouragement, her smile and "time to take a break", as we would go to her table in the kitchen, and she would feed me goat cheese and crackers and occasionally a strange and wonderful Russian cookie along with black tea. "But don't iconographers fast while writing icons?" Not with a baby in the mix, I soon found out, incubating or nursing. When I last left Ksenia's studio (outside of a visit this spring) I was eight months pregnant with my son Soren, and ready to embrace a different intensity of transition into this world for my littlest one. Soren, who is rapidly approaching two years next month, is my child number five--to which Ksenia, also a mother of five, says is the perfect number of children for a woman. She is living proof that mothers indeed can become master iconographers, even if that speaks of decades of pursuit.
So time has passed and I have tried to do my best on my own in the few moments of time that I find to enter into the most beautiful gift of prayer and paint through the icon inbetween feeding and loving the children at my feet (and those who are taller than me as well as my sixteen year Justin). But I have missed Ksenia. And I fail miserably to arrive where my desire propels alone in my studio. I miss her "scrape!" with the passing of a blade to erase hours of work because it simply was not right. Honestly, I think she would have me scrape everything I have written (we "write" icons--icons are as Word--liturgy as line and color) in this time away from her eye. This is why iconography is a living tradition, passed down from iconographer to iconographer and very much needing the direct instruction of a master to pass the gift. And to discipline the pursuit of beauty.
Ksenia is a remarkable woman. She began her own pursuit of iconography in the 1960's when iconography was still very much forbidden in Russia. She started out her adult life in science, studying physics, when she met Father Alexander Men who was to become her spiritual father (a tremendous voice in the Orthodox Church, who was martyred in 1990 ~ www.alexandermen.com). He encouraged her to follow the path of iconography, to which he proclaimed to her that within several decades, there would be an enormous resurgence of interest in this art. "You will teach others, " he told her, with a prophetic insight.
Learning iconography primarily on her own through study, practice and restoration work, she did spend time with renowned iconographer Maria Sokolova (or sister Juliana), observing her at work and in lengthy discussion when they had summer cottages next to one another in the 1970's, learning what she could in the difficult time of not being able to openly practice iconography. Ksenia has personally shared with me in our breaks from instruction, the struggles of that desire to learn when she first was getting on her feet with writing icons coupled with raising children. I very much relate to that, and enjoyed hearing of her packing infant in a stroller to wheel down to Maria's cottage so the baby could nap while she could learn--seizing any opportunity to immerse in the art.
By the 1980's, Ksenia had come into her own as an iconographer and as a teacher, and her Izograph Studio was a school where students could receive formal instruction where there had practically been few options outside of monasteries, let alone for women. It was a special time for Ksenia, who loves to reflect on the collective minds and desires of fellow iconographers concerned with the resurrection of the icon. I especially love her common concern for traditional materials, namely the natural pigments, for which she used to be a storehouse for as well--bags of ochres, blues from remote places, vermillions---all of which were not readily available to the public as it was still a criminal act to practice iconography. I wish I had a photo of her pigment jars which sit on a large shelf next to her table and library, hauntingly beautiful (this will come).
For someone who grew up unchurched (but now a Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox at heart) with limited access to icons in the US, it is an enormous priviledge to study under this remarkable woman. She has made it clear that I am her last student outside of the workshops she leads--www.hexaemeron.org and that too is quite humbling. And I have so far to go... Many people don't understand this intense desire to adhere to this tradition that is not about self-expression (I came through art school in my college years), but a direct connective artistic and liturgical thread to Christ himself, to walk through these doors to the Eternal initiated by lines of fellow jouneymen. It is indeed a beautiful journey.
"A Westerner taking an interest in iconography and studying iconography as either a painter or a scholar almost inevitably arrives at an understanding of one of the essential aspects of Eastern Orthodoxy: the confession of Christ as divine beauty."
~ Irina Yazykova, from Hidden & Triumphant www.paracletepress.com
(I strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in the underground struggle to save Russian Iconography)
The confession of Christ as Divine Beauty. And this is so. I am struck by the icon deeply as a beauty that takes us not only closer to our Creator, but also as a unifying tradition to the church undivided, and the mystery of the heavenly Jerusalem to which our souls long to be.
So thank you Ksenia, for allowing me to connect with this tradition through your life's dedication, and for taking to heart what father Men instructed you to do.
