07 October 2012

St. Clement - Post 12 - Opening the Icon



 “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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