Saturday, July 12, 2008

Happy Saturday

It's been a good day - a trip to the Farmer's Market for luscious fruits and vegetables, a successful Fare Ministry family event at Saint Diverse, where a group of nine of us prepared six large casseroles and six smaller ones to be frozen and available for those who need a meal delivered, then icon-writing class, where I finished up my Saint Gabriel icon and will start Saint Paul next week, and now I'm resting a bit before getting ready to go to an evening wedding celebration for two dear friends.

Oh, and the sermon is done for tomorrow, so I really will be able to enjoy the party.

PS: I'll post a picture of the Saint Gabriel when it gets back from being varnished next week.

2 comments:

Josephine- said...

Mibi I've been wanting to ask... Does writing icons require skill in painting the way well other types of painting does? I've always been fascinated by them, but I couldn't paint a person to save my life.

mibi52/ The Rev. Dr. Mary Brennan Thorpe said...

Tandaina, I sometimes tell folks it's paint-by-numbers for the spiritual. You trace over a picture of an existing icon (we usually use ones from the 14th-16th centuries) and transfer the tracing to a prepared board. The idea is not to be creative, but to faithfully copy the original. In our class, our teacher guides us through the process, as we add each layer of color onto the board. We start with dark, fairly dense colors, and each layer adds light and translucency. It takes something of a steady hand and a good idea for the forms or shapes in the image, but not the sort of artistic skill that "regular" artwork does. If I can do it, any one can. And we've had several folks in class who really had no artistic skill at all and wrote beautiful icons, with the help of our teacher. I suspect the right teacher is key...but I'd encourage you to explore it if you can. It's a wonderful spiritual discipline.