“But the earth was unsightly and unfurnished, and darkness was over
the deep, and the Spirit of God moved over the water” (Gen 1:2, Brenton LXX
version)
And with that as the guiding principle, I opened the Icon today.
It took me as long to set up as to apply the pigments.
In my own way, I am a purist.
Gregorian chants were set up to play.
Roman sandalwood incense was lit. Italian wine – from Rome (Fontana
Candida Frascati, if you are interested) – was mixed with egg yolk to form the
tempera. Palm ashes and clamshell ashes were prepared (more on that
below). And I finally sat down to cover
the icon in pigments.
The initial coat in an icon is not perfect – in fact, it is a bit
messy and uneven – on purpose. Creation
of an icon mimics the creation story itself, and that means that the initial
phase is one of chaos and darkness, as the Spirit of God hovers over the
waters. In replication of that process,
the paints applied are the darkest ones to be used – darker than any of the
items are envisioned. The pigments are ‘floated’
on water above the icon, more than painted on the icon.
I mixed dried pigments – struggling to get the desired color
combinations – and watered them down with the egg-yolk and wine mixture, and
began applying them to the appropriate areas. Of course, the part I thought
would be the most difficult – the olive-green ‘sankir’ color applied to the face
and skin features of all icons – came the easiest, while the background color
proved the most difficult. Then, using a
larger brush, I watered them down significantly, and pushed and prodded the
pigments around as they ‘floated’ on the surface of the water being applied to
the icon. My fears that I would ‘lose’
the underlying picture proved unfounded, as the evaporating waters left a
chaotic application of paints in a very thin, translucent layer over the lines.
In my first Icon of St. Columba, I was blessed to be able to use
water from St. Columba’s well in Kells, Ireland, to add to the base coat. With St. Clement, I also wanted to
incorporate physical elements into the icon, and I chose two:
The base coat on St. Clement’s clothing is mixed with ashes made
from palms that were used by the celebrant at a Palm Sunday mass at St. Clement’s
Church in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (Thank you to the Rev’d Canon W. Gordon
Reid, Rector of that parish, who sent me those palms).
The pigments forming the base coat of the ocean were mixed with
powder grinded off of the Quahog shell (thanks to my partner, an aspiring jeweler)
that I had used to burnish the halo (see my previous post). It just seemed ‘right’ that the very piece of
shell that represented the ‘burnishing’ (which I see as a sort of ‘testing’) of
the human, earthly, red-clay halo to prepare it for the gold leaf, be
incorporated into the ocean waters of the Icon.
It is there as a symbol of how the ‘trial by persecution and drowning’
experienced by Clement prepared him for an eternal Gold Crown. It is even more significant to me because the
shell came from the south shore of Long Island, and the St. Clement’s Church of
my youth (“The Fisherman’s Church” in Baldwin Harbor) was located directly on
these waters.
So now, we wait…wait for the base coat to dry completely, so I can
begin the painstaking process of forming more perfect images out of the chaos.
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