Iconic

My attitude towards icons has changed across the years. It was originally coloured by the circumstances in which I tended to encounter them, which was in what you might describe as liberal-catholic contexts, in which worship was important but not necessarily very grounded in traditional belief. Icons are silent: you can read what you like into them, and they won't answer back. You can light a candle in front of one and sit around it meditatively without having any of the orthodox - still less, Orthodox - understandings which make the icon make sense. I thought they tended to be a way of depicting sacred personages while avoiding the uncomfortably carnal, bodily implications of statues. I preferred the three-dimensional. Statues were more upfront, more confrontationally physical, more aggressively Catholic. 

This began to change, I think, when I was looking after Goremead some years ago and realised there was no representation of its patron saint, Jude, anywhere in the church. I ended up buying a south American painting of Jude as a gift. There's a tradition of depicting holy people in that part of the world which is very different from that of Orthodox icons, but also follows its own strict convictions and, certainly in the case of this image, produced something which had an equivalent sense of 'presence' rather than being merely a picture. I sat and prayed with the painting for a while and the more I looked the more I saw in it.

Nowadays I rather prefer the icon to the statue. We have a very nice statue of the BVM and Christ Child at Swanvale Halt, a sweet and even winsome image which originally came from a convent, but very often indeed religious statues are mawkish and camp, and despite their three-dimensional physicality actually have less presence than an icon. The icon silently watches and invites the onlooker into relationship with the person to whom it is bound, and to Jesus. Statues are a bit dead in comparison.

A retired priest who lived in Swanvale Halt and worshipped with us died last year, and his widow would like to give something to the church in his memory. We decided perhaps a couple of icons would be appropriate, using remaining boards from the old pews which were removed three years ago. I had contacted a well-known icon maker but then I was told that one of the Roman Catholic congregation locally was an icon-painter: it would be easier to deal with her, certainly - and she might even be a bit cheaper, if only on postage costs. However in view of my experiences outlined in the first paragraph here, I was rather nervous about what approach she might be taking.

In fact I need not have worried. Her house and studio are full of peace and light, and she is strictly traditional in her approach, insisting rightly that painting an icon is a matter of working within established conventions and not a creative act in a modern sense. What a relief!