St. Clement - Post 11 - Red Clay and Gold Leaf

Yes, It's been over a year since my last post.  St. Clement has waited patiently in a drawer as my personal life took some tortuous turns, including packing up and moving, not once, but twice.  Our current apartment is perfect for us in many ways:  It is a big old house, subdivided into several units, and all of the neighbors are down-to-earth, friendly free-spirits.  I am now 15 minutes from work (rather than an hour), in a small New England Village, and the house overlooks the Deerfield River. I have an office that is now set up with room for painting, and a second-floor screened-in porch that runs the length of much of the apartment.

Something about the autumn wind, the warm days and cool nights, the changing leaf colors, the reflection of leaves in the river has gotten into the artsy element of our souls.  Our upstairs neighbor has decided to begin major painting projects (He likes BIG artwork: furniture stenciling, boats etc.) and his tools are sprawled across what little back yard we have before it falls down the bluff into the river.  My partner Danny has just been über-productive mode, turning our porch into a jewelry studio and producing a series of necklaces from pieces of wave-scoured quahog shells we collected from our recent trip to Fire Island (a much-needed escape from a year of brutal changes in our lives).  And St. Clement is now out of the draw from which he has been patiently waiting to emerge.

When we moved to Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts in July of this year, I began investigating new church homes.   It only took one visit to St. John's Episcopal Church in the neighboring village of Ashfield to know that I was "home:" though it is a small country parish, they have icons on the wall.  They chant. They respect the liturgical elements of worship.  And so, this weekend found me renewing my work on this icon.

I spent a few hours refamiliarizing myself with the steps taken thus far, and re-reading, once again, Clement's letter to Corinth. And yesterday morning, I decided to take the next step: Clement's halo.

When I painted my icon of St. Columba, I simply painted the halo; with Clement, I decided to actually use Gold Leaf, which needs to be applied before any other painting. The symbolism, as in all aspects of iconography, is compelling.  The first step was to melt rabbit skin glue and mix it with a drop of honey and red clay to make a 'red clay bole' paste.  The red clay is the first layer in preparing the icon for gold leaf.  In the original Hebrew, the word 'adam has at least three meanings: the color red; the masculine form of the female 'adamah (ground, earth, soil); and Man.  Hence, the first Man, created from Earth in the creation story, is named Adam.

So do all holy men and women begin, like us, created, rising from the primordial womb of earth: red clay. Everything I read cautioned me about using exact proportions of glue and water and honey and clay sediment....and I still decided to use my intuition and let my feelings guide me.  

They served me well: the clay went on easily, and dried within an hour.

To remove the small bumps and smooth out the imperfections, I needed to 'burnish' the clay, using a 'burnishing tool' or perfectly smooth 'burnishing stone,' neither of which I had access to.

But Icons should be created using natural materials to the greatest extent possible...and we had precisely such perfect, natural, smooth materials to use for burnishing: a collection of perfectly smooth, ocean-pounded hardshell clams.  I smiled at the beauty of this possibility: St. Clement, martyred by being cast overboard into the sea and weighed down by an anchor, having his 'earthness' burnished and polished and readied for gilding by a product from the sea itself.  Yes, this was right.  And so, I burnished the surface with a shell, and it was good. :-)

Since Gold Leaf requires specific 'climate' conditions to adhere well, St. Clement took a brief sojourn into the refrigerator. Had I been more patient, I could have left him on the porch over night, which would have cooled the icon in the chilly evening autumn air.  That would have been better.  Oh well.

The Gold Leaf sheets were amazingly fragile and light.  Using wax paper, I 'stuck' the sheets of gold leaf to the wax paper, cut it into strips, and proceeded to apply the leaf to the Icon.

"And God formed the man of dust of the earth, and breathed upon his face the breath of life, and the man became a living soul"  (Gen 2:7, Brenton LXX)

I breathed on the cool clay, and the combination of moist breath and cool clay created the condition necessary for gilding. I places the wax paper-backed gold leaf strip on the clay halo, pressed down gently, and peeled off the wax paper.

The Gold Leaf remained.  I continued.  In time, the red, earthy clay was transformed into something golden and perfected.  As a symbol of the transformation of the base to the holy, it was a fascinating process.  

 Unhappy with a 'simple' halo, I finished by imprinting a slight double row of indentations around the exterior of the halo, some of which slightly revealed the underlying red clay, an effect I actually appreciated and embraced, as it spoke to the dual nature of man: physical and spiritual.

I am very happy to be back at this work.