Our Lady of Guadalupe and a gift ~

I need to establish something.  Something that perhaps is already a given, but none-the-less something that I want to stress--I am not imagining myself to be an iconographer yet. I am walking to that point, but will clarify aspiring as the key term. It is a slow climb, amidst the other parts of my life as wife and mother of five. 

I have fully embraced the notion of the journey and slow daily process of learning to become. I think this runs in a synonymous fashion with the daily dying to self and sin and hopeful learning to love more and more each day.  To break old habit, to not fall asleep, to be in constant awareness of tending to the door--allowing the worthy to enter and break bread. To be open to that which the Creator intends.
This is what gets me up each day.  The notion of possibility.  To be a mouthpiece to the Spirit, through hands and eyes and voice.  And often I fail, or seem to make only the slightest of marks to fulfill.  But God can be like the smallest voice deep within the wind, and I am learning that acceptance of the small is liberation, as long as I am faithful in obedience.  I do not want there to be much of "what I have failed to do" if prompted. 
And I have been prompted.  So much of it has to do with Beauty, and the gesture of the reveal to the world. And again, who am I?  I am nothing.  I am dust that longs for the rain to be poured forth or to be spit upon so that I may become clay, and be shaped and somehow anointed on the eyes of the blind. To take part in the return to wholeness.  For whomever that may be...


"Above all, trust in the slow work of God..." Teilhard de Chardin


I have slowly been working on the fulfillment of a small, still echo that I have lived with for several years.  One that I was unprepared to even attempt earlier as I did not have the training to carry it through. You can read more in length about this project on my website under "Life Icon Project" http://www.iconeyestudio.com.   But I was just recently granted funding to go ahead, and I feel confident that I have the ability to do it now, after several years of training and pushing myself to learn.  Words fall short.  This is an enormous gift to be able to bring Our Lady of Guadalupe to more people and one I am most passionate about.  I am certainly no expert on her apparition that occurred back in 1531, but the miracle of image that was given has to be contemplated.  It was the apparition of Our Lady of Fatima that opened my heart back when I was nineteen, and this one, being that it is a miraculous painting, strikes a very personal place as an artist.
(Very good photographs of the  image and understanding of symbols used within can be found http://www.secretsoftheimage.org/en/index.html ~ one can get very close to areas of interest). 
So I am currently undertaking a large true-to-size commission of the image, using my skills as an (aspiring) iconographer, but adhering closely to the true prototype of the image from the original.  I am researching indiginous pigments to Mexico, and currently a board is being made roughly 3 1/2 by 5 feet in size by a master carpenter.  There is no way to express my excitement.  Affirmations of this specific undertaking are being given daily, even though I do not have a permanent future home for the icon as of yet.  I know it will be made known in due time.  Even my carpenter friend, upon giving him the master pattern for the board, shared with me his recent enthusiasm about grinding stones and gems to mix into layers of beautiful wooden boxes that he makes, which paralleled my own need to grind Azurite and other gems from Mexico to incorporate into the painting process with the organic and luminescent inherent nature of egg tempera.
I only briefly share my enthusiasm here, but I will be documenting the full journey on another blog for the record: http://www.ourladyofguadalupeproject.blogspot.com ~ join me if you wish. The unfolding has already been most beautiful...
So in utmost gratitude for having a patron who joins me in anticipation of Beauty, I pray for the unfolding of gifts for all, that we can support one another through the slow and wonderous work of God...

The prayer of the still point: brush, breath, and illumined dust.

A detail of Hildegaard Von Bingen's self portrait from one of her illuminated manuscripts

Slowing pulse.  Silence.  Here within the room the air is thick with the promise of all that can come in the slow and steady approach.  The moon is rising out my window off my left shoulder with its light hitting the white barn down the road. The stillness of it all settles.  

Here and now the echo chamber of sound removes itself, with all its overlapping burden, that had run into the wire of my still point.

Now it is time to journey into this advance of process, of action, of defining love.  This too is the clarity of the moon grown full wound around my hand, grasping a slowly moving brush.  Slower still I move, sculpting this movement into this other land--juncture of the land of the living and of the Everlasting-not-yet that hovers on the pool of shifting light between shadow and form, here and now.  

But I want to pull closer into this sacred space, this place that illumines my heart and drives my hunger for more.

This is all a reassurance, a promise of things to come.  This smell, this taste in the air, the subtle weight of the pigments and their smooth density on my brush, and the means to achieve an end.  Can I discard the other weight of the invisible stones tied on my back? The things of this world that meet my own sin and prevent fullness of beauty?  And so they prepare to fall.  They must.

Breathe deeper still.

How to pool color like clouds of Genesis on the uncreated Light of Being...round and round with French yellow ochre and white floating with the bare yolk of this emulsion and pure holy water caught from the font at Lourdes while I was pregnant.

What is liberation?  I am nothing.  

The burdens, the rocks, the shadows: the fears, the cacophany of intrusion, sin, death.  

"Be still and know that I am God."

The weight slides like one wandering in a desert stripped bare, no bodily provision but faith.  No why. Attentive to the wind, the light, the dust of Eden upon the feet. Not even survival, but being. The promise of the moment and the timeless that ensues like a victor of death.

Prepare the space for the Holy One.

The stars and sky wait outside the panes of this Northern window, pale moon cast blue on the surface of the illumined snow. 

Slowly and with purpose, the brush exposes flesh and space and absorbs time in the determined layer after layer, transparent and pure.

This is but one movement:

Breathing in Lord Jesus Christ, Son of The Living God, have mercy on me a sinner.

Distilling the mud from gifted hue, original in their incarnate unfolding, there the Beauty of The Savior's face opens through image on simple plank. Pigmented shadows, yet I see the imprint of the foundation: the yolked clay in place, ready to become the light of the Resurrection in its next movement, while exhaling have mercy on me and on the whole world. 

This shall dry and saturate, fuse and mark passage.  

Is this why it is called "opening" an icon?

Every tone in its place, harmonizing the next movement, transitioning to the victory of Life over death. Still the moon travels, slower in the latent hours, rising higher to pass peak and prepare for its descent, the coming of dawn, the light of life to come.

And at this juncture, closure.

Have mercy on me and on the whole world.

Have mercy on me and on the whole world.

Have mercy on me and on the whole world.   

Echoing into my rise to now make haste to the breath of sleep.   

Full of thanks.

Ready.