The Face of the Crucified, final day: Putting a name to a face

An icon is always completed with a name. It’s a little bit the way small children write (or ask their teacher to write) a little label beside their picture to distinguish one collection of blobs and lines as ‘mummy’. Even a bad icon is an icon when it has a name. The name was also the prerequisite for having the icon blessed by placing it under the altar during the service.

We also added the outlines, the final light on the body, and the extravagantly highlighted hair:

What was a picture is now an icon; Christ’s human body, still somewhat naturalistic until today, is now enclosed in a stylistic framework which distances it from the ordinary. I feel it has lost some of the subtlety of human emotion, but it has gained something of the eternal.

The thing people always say about icons is they look at you – even that ‘their eyes follow you’. It is not a simple subject-object encounter but subject-subject. But the odd thing about this icon, taken of course from a Western model, is that the eyes are closed. In fact it has been said that this is the earliest depiction of Christ dead.

So in a way we have the opposite of an encounter with the presence of Christ; we have an encounter with his absence. During Passiontide, in the West anyway, we veil images or turn them to the wall. This is the iconographic equivalent; it allows us to experience not a moment of closeness but a moment of deprivation, of desolation. Yet in another way Christ has never been closer to us than in this most human of all moments, of vulnerability and death.

I believe I may have inadvertently promised you a poem. So here is one – not made under supervision or based on any masterpiece, but just a personal reflection on the intimacy and distance of the painter’s encounter with the icon.

For an absent friend

I touched your cheek today, my friend
You had already gone.
Your golden skin, once bruised by reeds,
now turned
imperishable as memory
and the conservator’s art.

Today I met you, long companion
for the first time, now
face to face, after a sojourn of seven days,
and I knew you
as a mother knows her unborn child.

Your eyes
where love would keep my miniature
are dark, and gaze on distant galaxies.
Where you have gone, I cannot follow.

And yet today
I smoothed your brow, tender
with sable, and with agate
burnished a pillow for you
to lay your hair
the way you would have liked it.

Here I can be
close as breathing
to the space where you are not
and gaze as though my hungry eyes could eat
the interposed aeons
and bring the lips which smiled before the stars were lit
to mine
which press now on an absence and a gilded board.

The Face of the Crucified, day 4: being human, or, life without “undo”

The lesson of today has been one of letting go what is good in order to reach what is better.

Apparently, if you spend enough time gazing into someone’s eyes, then you can make yourself fall in love with them. (Obviously, this does require the other person to stay still with their eyes open, rather than freaking out and running away. Your best chance is probably to take a job as an optometrist.) I’ve been gazing at the image of Christ for several hours a day, all week.

The problem is, to quote Billy Joel, “I love you just the way you are…” At each stage in the development of this icon I reach a point where I just fall in love with how beautiful it is and I don’t want to change anything. Then I have to do the next bit and straight away it looks like I’ve ruined it. Then gradually as I finalise that step I see in the new appearance that same clarity and completeness I thought I saw in the one before. So I fall in love with it again, and again feel I couldn’t bear to do any more to it for fear of spoiling it.

But for something further to be gained, what is already good must be lost. Our teacher likened it to having children. She was referring to the fear of messing up, but it’s true even if nothing goes wrong. As a child grows into adulthood, the person you loved at each stage is lost irredeemably – and yet at the same time, you hope, they are becoming more visibly themselves. It must take a very special sort of un-possessiveness to help a person change and move on from the person you first loved.

There is also something terrible about being able to do something irreversible. I remember as a kid spending a long time on the computer – we were the first family I knew to have one at home – and there was always a “save” function and an “undo”. Nothing could ever finally be lost. I remember how horrifying it was to realise that real life does not have an undo button. I had cut all the hair off a toy I had – I can’t now remember why, it must’ve been part of a story I was playing – and it took a moment for the full horror to strike me: it wasn’t going to grow back.

How terrifying is human freedom! Our power is more terrifying than our weakness. More perhaps even than our mortality. Who are we to commit an act which is irreversible, which marks history for ever? Yet we do it with every single act of every day. It is a wonder any of us dare to leave the house of a morning, so paralysing is the awesome responsibility of being human.

Tomorrow, we commemorate possibly the biggest error of judgement humanity has ever made. But, somehow, we have to hope it will all turn out okay.

Excursus

On Thursday morning we took a break from the frustrations of the many-layered and obscurely spirit-guided process, and made a St Augustine-and-Pugin pilgrimage to Ramsgate. This is where St Augustine of Canterbury landed, and the Shrine of St Augustine (a former Benedictine monastery) is also the home church and burial place of Pugin, who built it next door to his house.

So I was able to support Archbishop Justin on the day of his enthronement by venerating the relics of St Augustine and asking his prayers for his successor – not that ++Justin would necessarily approve!

I must also make an apology / spelling correction. “Roskrusch” is “Roskrish” and (more embarrassingly) “egg tempura” is “egg tempera”, i.e. tempered with egg rather than made into a light and delicious oriental batter. Sorry.

The Face of the Crucified, day 3: Watching paint dry

After the rapid transformation yesterday, today was a touch of wilderness.

Spot the difference…

The Greek technique of icon painting, with which I’d been familiar previously, is unapologetically non-naturalistic, using clearly defined and almost geometric areas of colour. The Russian technique involves almost imperceptible thin layers, washes and ‘floats’. Each time you paint a layer which gives more definition, you then ‘veil’ it by painting (very very thinly) over the whole thing. The first float was ‘intense haematite red’ – which, I was pleased to find, didn’t give Jesus a bad case of sunburn but just a sort of classy patina. The colour didn’t seem to have changed, but what I’d just painted had slipped back in time by a hundred years.

I remember how frustrating I found it previously trying to copy a Russian icon and analyse the layers. The face is clear and recognisable, but how? the more you try to unpick it, the more it evades your grasp. It could be a metaphor for Orthodox mystical prayer. You can gaze on the face of Christ, but not penetrate it with the analytical intellect.

Trying to paint in this technique is equally infuriating. I spent the entire day adding something which looks a little bit like the Turin Shroud without the x-rays and digital enhancement. In the end I drew a border just to have something to show for my time!

Intriguingly, even though each of us in the class was following the same model and the same instructions, even by this stage we could see that our Christs were going to be very different. The first layer, as I mentioned yesterday, was called roskrusch (I still haven’t been able to find out a proper spelling for it). But I kept thinking it was called “Rorschach”, and that’s oddly appropriate. The oldest member of the class seemed to be bringing out decay and mortality; the youngest, the smooth physique of the God-man.

And me, the Anglican? Something rather patchy and hard to define.

But it was a chance to reflect on the complementarity of our different perspectives. A learned priest paid us a visit, and one of the things he talked about was the hemispheres of the brain – the way there doesn’t appear to be an efficient division of labour between the two, but rather, two slightly different approaches to the whole. In the same way, Christ is one, but we have four Gospels. It is as if we can’t perceive truth in its wholeness except through the tensions between different perspectives – a sort of spiritual binocular vision. On this day, I gave thanks for being an Anglican – unable to fully grasp the invisible God, but refusing to limit ourselves to the shallowness of a single perspective.

The Face of the Crucified, Day 2: Chaos

It’s the second day in the Priory of St Mildred, Minster in Thanet.

The spiritual significance of icon painting is not limited to the theological commentary attached to each stage. The act of creating an icon is itself a spiritual discipline. I find it particularly helpful because it goes against the grain of my natural tendencies. I spend most of my time thinking, reading and writing – inward, abstract activities, caught up in the past and the future. The nearest I get to physical effort is a hard day’s typing.

But painting is first and foremost a bodily activity. It is about interacting with what’s in front of you, here and now. We are breaking eggs, grinding coloured earths, manipulating paint on the board; it’s a discipline which forces me to concentrate on what my senses of sight and touch are telling me in the present moment. It’s only when I’m painting that I realise how often the rest of the time my attention is focussed somewhere on the inside of my forehead. By the end of the day, we were all exhausted. Don’t let the pretty shiny things fool you; this is a boot camp.

Painting is also something that can’t be hurried. Drawing a line, for instance, is not just a case of getting the brush from A to B by the most efficient possible route. As anyone who has met me will know, this is a more agonising discipline for me than any fasting or mortification of the flesh.

You’ll have noticed that we used no paint at all the first day. 24 hours in, we still have basically a white board, but with a little patch of gold, which at the moment is just a shiny liability, constantly daring me to wreck it with a careless brush stroke or a splash of water.

The Russian technique we’re using involves building up colour in multiple very thin layers. Now, after the refinement and restraint of the gilding, we’re slopping on the “roskrusch” (background – a word which apparently means ‘chaos’) and “proplasmos” (first flesh). Each individual layer is extremely uneven and patchy, a technique which is designed to give light and movement to the whole, but it’s hard to see how this blotchy mess will ever resemble the glossy perfection of a finished icon.

Our teacher kept reminding us to “trust in the process”, a phrase which brought back horrible memories of my years in ‘discernment’. We should not be forcing the Holy Spirit to give us what we want, but allowing the figure to reveal itself in what might be an unexpected and unplanned way. She encouraged us to think of it like life – you can’t go back, you can only go forward, working with what you’ve got. Like the new creation being brought out of the old, and the resurrection body growing like a plant from a seed, “nothing is irredeemable”. But, unlike life, you can always wash paint off and start again. There are great advantages of icon painting for the beginner, one of which is that it’s extremely forgiving. Most things can be undone; those which can’t, can usually be worked with.

The other great encouragement is how quickly you get to something that looks nearly finished, or at least recognisable:

That’s probably a lesson too. But what lesson? That we can spend too much time worrying about how far we still are from the “full stature of Christ” and fail to see how clear his image already is in us? Or that when we look like we’re nearly there, we’re still only at the beginning?

Perhaps that’s a question for another day.

The Face of the Crucified Part 1: the First Day of Creation

Creation starts with a void. With the formless deep and with the Word of God waiting to be impressed onto it. Or in our case with a blank white-gesso’d board, and an outline drawing based on a crucifix by Cimabue. There is no creation ex nihilo for the icon painter, but always a cooperation with the creative work of God; the first task is to humble oneself to the apparently childish task of tracing and copying. Even an experienced icon painter (or writer – everyone seems to know that ‘writing’ is the correct word but I’ve been given various different accounts of why) will base their original drawing on a long tradition. Our teacher, as a Western Christian, combines Russian technique with early Western models.

The outline of Christ will be drawn in all four times, and three of those times are on the first day. The image is traced, transferred, and finally inscribed into the white gesso. By repeatedly tracing the same lines with our hands we are also letting them sink into us, symbolically inscribing the image of Christ on our souls.

You are going to get very familiar with this face.

As will become obvious, everything in the way an icon is made comes with a symbolic commentary. Some of it can be slightly irritating, a ritualised way of remembering the process turned into a spiritual justification for never deviating from it – or, worse, ascribing the superiority of the Eastern church and the ills of the decadent and straying West to accidental features of late Roman art. But I’d like to share with you one which really sums up the whole spiritual significance of iconography, the sanctification and deification of the human.

The first thing to go on is the gold – not, in this case, the whole background, but the halo. But before the gold can go on, we need the red clay or ‘bole’. The man, Adam, is made of earth, adamah, and the word for red is also cognate. So the red earth is human nature. And sure enough, it turns out to be a bugger to work with. It needs a lot of time sanding and polishing and re-applying and sanding again and even burnishing with semi precious stones before it can be glorified by the gold of the divine nature.

And how is gold united to human clay? Through the spirit of course – or at least, our condensed breath, huffed onto the cold surface.

Traditionally, this requires a cold, damp, dewy kind of day – another rather romantic illustration of patient co-operation with God’s creation. But if the weather doesn’t happen to oblige, you can always use the fridge or freezer, which isn’t romantic or symbolic but is very effective.

Here’s one I made earlier: a blog for Passiontide

This year I’m hoping to spend more of Holy Week praying (or, let’s face it, catching up on work) and less on blogging. But I will be posting a reflection every day from my retreat last week. So this year’s Holy Week blog will be The Face of the Crucified, a meditation on the process of creating an icon of Christ crucified.

The retreat was courtesy of Minster Abbey (the Priory of St Mildred, Minster in Thanet – not to be confused with Minster Abbey which is a parish church on the Isle of Sheppey) and Catholic iconographer Amanda de Pulford. For more details, see:

http://www.minsterabbeynuns.org/
http://amandadepulford.tumblr.com/

So to set the scene, as promised some photos:

Minster Abbey is apparently the oldest monastic site still to have a resident community – although of course with quite a long gap. The Abbey was even raided by Vikings!

But just to show that the Catholics don’t have the monopoly on beautiful architecture in Minster, here’s the Norman parish church, where one can experience Sarum-style Lenten Array and Kingsway Music worship songs in the same place.

I hope you’ll join me for the journey over the next week.

Coming Soon

I said the other day that there would be pictures. Unfortunately I’m not getting a good enough connection here, and an icon blog without pictures is a bit pointless. So instead I’ll wait til I get home and my Holy Week blog this year will be “one I did earlier” – a meditation on creating an icon of the crucifixion.

Nuns in Lent

Our choir master has a favourite insult for us when we are singing feebly and timidly: “you sound like nuns in Lent”. Well, I have now experienced the singing of nuns in Lent, and I do have to admit the comparison is just.

However, there is a great deal to be said for the nuns of Minster Abbey, and indeed for their singing, even if I do have to keep a tight rein on my Mirfield-trained voice. By comparison with Minster, the singing at Mirfield sounds like a very well-tuned and well-mannered football chant: boisterously authoritative, public and male. Maybe it’s the size of the church which makes it feel more public, less relaxed. Or perhaps it’s the presence of the students, which gives the offices something of the status of a masterclass for future clergy. My favourite service there, on the rare occasions I go to it, is weekday Matins – the one service which is rarely attended by students or the public. It is hushed, gentle on the just-out-of-bed, familial.

The nuns of Minster (who are proper nunly-looking Benedictines in habit and wimple) have a homely but beautiful barn-like chapel and a homely but beautiful manner. Everything in church is done steadily and calmly, but straightforwardly. A white-veiled novice snuffs out a taper with a brisk pinch. A warm-smiling sister asks me to drop a note through an old lady’s door. People do what they need to do and speak when they need to speak.

The Benedictine wisdom is that work is prayer, and prayer is work. Here, from the little I saw, the sisters get down to the work of prayer unfussily. God is their work and their rest, their everyday and their Sunday best. I’m here to spend a week in the particular prayer-work of icon painting, and I’m hoping I might pick up a little of whatever it is that’s making that sister smile.

I will post photos hopefully tomorrow.

Hell and high water (aka Katy’s first world problems)

(written yesterday, 11 pm)

My experience has been that a retreat starts with hell and ends with a poem. At least with this one I’ve got the first part of that equation out of the way in advance.

I suppose it was always asking for trouble to sign up for a retreat which required getting an easel from Yorkshire to the Isle of Thanet (well located for staging an invasion from the continent but not much else). .

I hadn’t prepared very well in the first place, having forgotten to declare my young person’s railcard (delightfully, being a student makes me officially under 26 as far as the rail companies are concerned. Keeping one’s mind active really is the key to youth), a mistake which could be rectified by paying a charge almost exactly equivalent to the discount. Still, with my easel protruding from the top of my suitcase and secured with jaunty and seasonally-appropriate purple ribbon, I felt bohemian and ready for adventure. Well, as much adventure as one can conveniently have with a wheely suitcase.

I was prepared for anything. So well prepared, indeed, that I checked before I left to be sure my train was running. It wasn’t.

Every other train for the next four hours was replaced by a bus. The enquiry line was unable to confirm that my ticket was valid on those “trains”. The rail company had closed its helpline for the weekend. It is often noted that priests love trains, a phenomenon I can attest to across the theological spectrum. So far I am showing little sign of developing it myself.

Still, I got to Kings Cross a mere four hours late, with only a slight additional delay caused by flooding near London, fortified myself with a coffee from a Frenchman who seemed only mildly inconvenienced by my custom, and boarded my onward train with plenty of time to share the amusement of the two blokes who were blowing raspberries out the window at each passerby on the platform. I think it was when they said “We’ve got another twelve minutes of this!” that I really cracked. But discretion is the better part of valour. It would have been a shame after getting my easel all this way, to break it over the heads of two idiots on the 20:12 to Ashford International.

But I am here now, in a bungalow belonging to Minster Abbey, the oldest abbey to be occupied by a religious community today. And there’s a whole nine and a half hours to Lauds 🙂