Beyond Brushstrokes: The Language of Icons
Emerson: “Iconography is an unfamiliar practice in the West, often ignored or even reviled by many Protestant Christians. We're here today with experienced Orthodox iconographer Seraphim O'Keefe to clear up some of these misconceptions. Thanks so much for being here, Seraphim.”
Seraphim: “My pleasure.”
Emerson: “To begin, could you give our readers some background on iconography and the Orthodox tradition, and what distinguishes icons from other types of Christian art?”
Seraphim: “So iconography is a term that can refer to Christian or non-Christian art. There's iconography in the Buddhist tradition and Hindu tradition for example. It's a word that simply means “image-making.” And it's actually something that's been practiced by all cultures that we know about–it would even include things like the pictures that you have on the wall behind you, or the billboards that you see going down the street. Christians have had iconography in their churches for as far back as we can see. The earliest ones coincide with the earliest times of Christian tradition. Even the Jewish tradition that preceded Christians had iconography, as we see in the Bible—particularly statues and articles for use in the Temple. And in early Jewish synagogues we find Bible stories painted on the walls. So that's really continued to the present day, especially in the Orthodox churches in the East. And in a way, you could say it continues with all Christians.”
Emerson: “So then what makes Orthodox icons different from the other traditions and all the other places you see iconography?”
Seraphim: “So primarily, Orthodox icons express the Orthodox faith on the walls. And it's a tradition that has been practiced all these centuries and all over the world. It's become a very rich language. It has found ways over the centuries to deeply connect with the space, with the life of prayer, the practice of worship that's in a given space, the way that they're arranged on the walls of a church—even the way that a church is designed iconographically, and the way that the homes of the faithful will correspond to the church building. Orthodox people have iconography in their homes and are linked as an outpost of their local church through the iconography.”
Emerson: “On your website, I saw that you've been creating icons and church art since 2002. What initially drew you to iconography? And what does the training for it look like?”
Seraphim: “Well, around that time I was getting a classical education in painting and drawing, mostly from life. And that is when I became a Christian, joined the Orthodox Church, and joined a monastery for about a year, not as a monk, but as a novice. And that's where they began my education in iconography. They said, ‘Well, you're a painter, so you should learn how to paint icons.’ And it didn't exactly stick at that time, but the seeds that had been planted gradually grew.
There was a time in 2008 where I was engaged to my wife and thinking about how to make a living—the economic downturn had kind of excluded the idea of continuing to work as an exhibiting artist. The market for art had plummeted. Around that time, I had some encounters with people who asked me to paint icons, and I got a taste of the difference between the work of an iconographer and that of an exhibiting artist. An exhibiting artist, in our culture, is expected to go off on his own and bring ideas down from on high, from his own creative genius, to present to a passive public. But in the market, it involves trying to court the interest of people with enough wealth to support an artist, who are mostly interested in art as either an investment or a decoration. While I loved painting and going out into nature and painting beautiful landscapes, I did not really have a vision for what it was doing in the world. I didn't like having to peddle my work in that kind of way. I'm not very suited to it. And I found that with iconography, there's a vision and motivation that comes from a community, and the images that I make enter into the lives of people. That's something that participates in their life on a daily basis. It's part of how people connect with reality and with God. I hadn't seen it that way before. Once I got a taste of that, then I didn't really go back to what I had been doing before.”
Emerson: “So as someone who made that transition from a more classical artist to iconographer, have you found the style of iconography to be much more rigid, or more freeing? How much room for personal style do iconographers have?”
Seraphim: “That's one of the most common questions that an iconographer gets. Style is, of course, a hard thing to define, but the general kind of wisdom that I know about with iconographers is that you seek to enter into the tradition. The tradition itself is very diverse. It goes back about 2,000 years and is represented all over the world’s cultures. There are some things that are common across that whole field, and it's an iconographer's job to look across that history and to try to understand the logic of it as a language.
I think a good way to understand this is just like in the English language. You enter a tradition, that's ‘English.’ It's handed down from your ancestors, given to you by your parents, and in a sense, it’s rigid—it comes with rules for grammar and words that you have to use if you want to speak English. But that's not how we think about the language, because it’s rather a set of tools. Without English, we wouldn't be able to speak or even to conceive of ideas to recognize the world around them. And I think that that applies to artists as well: we ask them to speak truth through the structure of language that we have. The fact that iconography is so old and has been practiced for so much longer than English makes it a very rich language.
So for example, there's a lot of meaning in a given image. Like if you have just a simple image of Mary holding Christ, that image has been done in so many ways over time that even small variations can have a lot of significance. Just like: are the two touching? And in what way? Are their cheeks touching? Or is Christ's hand touching Mary's face? Any small thing can have a great deal of significance because, just like in a poem in English situated within the whole history of literature, a few words can evoke a great deal if you are familiar with that history. So I think that's the best way to understand it. The style is not very rigid. And an iconographer who's working, I think, will draw from every source that you can. I draw from everything that I can to feed my work. That's kind of a necessity if you're producing something day after day. It's a lot of output and you need a lot of input.
Besides what I want to ingest as inspiration or source material, I ingest a bunch of other stuff that I don't want to, like everything I see driving down the road, McDonald's signs or whatever it is. And there's no real keeping that out of my style, either—much as I would like to keep it out. And I think that in every given context and age, we have to find ways of making things work, of transforming even what's bad in our diet into something good. Or at least something that can serve the purpose of this kind of relation between God and man.”
Emerson: “That's a beautiful way to explain it. You describe how there are undesirable elements that can seep into your iconography to an extent: parts of contemporary culture, such as the McDonald sign example you gave. Is this something that we also see when we look back at icons from older eras and see how the perhaps less desirable parts of their times affected those iconographers?”
Seraphim: “Yes, for sure. We can't always identify exactly where things are coming from. Take the 1700s and 1800s. A great deal of the tradition was becoming lost. It wasn't lost—we still have the old icons—but there was pressure from political influences like the westernization of Russia under Catherine and Peter the Great where they wanted to make icons look more like what was happening in Italy, just for more political reasons. They wanted Russia to become a modern, more fashionable place. And so you can see a real degradation to the language of iconography during that time. But even there, you can see those kinds of influences come into some of the better iconographers that followed.
I think you can see the culture in any given time and place influencing the iconography. And the people producing it should be producing with their whole heart and with their whole person. The ideal is for those kinds of influences to find a way of speaking harmoniously through the icons—not eclipsing the spirit of the icons, but contributing to it.”
Emerson: “That leads us to another question. Throughout history, the public's views on icons and iconography have shifted from more favorable to less favorable. Because icons are used to assist with worship, many Christians since the Reformation might have accused people who have used icons as idolaters. How would you respond to those accusations and paint a more accurate picture of how Orthodox Christians use icons to assist in worship?”
Seraphim: “Yeah, that can get complicated, and not having a Protestant background myself, it's sometimes hard for me to relate to those kinds of claims. My understanding is if you were to really equate iconography with idolatry, you would have to be implying that Orthodox Christians are somehow ritually locating gods or God within the actual object of an icon and making offerings to that object. This is what idolatry refers to. That worship necessarily includes sacrifice. And idolatry as practiced by pagans would have been where they would physically locate a god within an idol—not exclusively within that idol—but a god was capable of inhabiting various spaces at once, and one of those would be this idol. So in a pagan temple you would have an idol, and you would have iconography. You wouldn't be sacrificing to those scenes from the life of Zeus or something, but you would be sacrificing to this particular statue where Zeus was on some level contained.
So what iconography is more like is that we all have iconography in our home, and so rather than worshiping it, the word that gets used is veneration, which denotes honoring. So you're venerating an icon if you salute a flag or if you frame a picture of your grandmother. You might even have a picture of your grandmother and give it to your kids to look at and hold and even talk to—’hi grandma’ or whatever. This is more the kind of activity that iconography is involved in.
One other thing that can be hard for me to relate to in this objection is that a painted or visual image is not really different from a textual image. If you have a prayer, that prayer is going to contain images. They're just written rather than painted, so you might have an image of the ‘old rugged cross’ or something— that's an image. Or ‘I came to the garden and I saw Jesus there’— this might be a prayer that you say, but it also calls an image to mind. It's not that you're worshiping that image, but it's part of your prayer life, and it helps you connect to God in that way.
Scripture is full of images. You see Jesus in the scripture, and that's very much an icon. So the idea with iconography is it's part of a whole network of things, including the prayers and the music of our hymns, and the design of our building, and even the clothing we wear. And that all creates a full immersion into the gospel story and into the life of Christ. I would say that you can't avoid iconography in that way. Even just trying to make your church white walls and wearing blue jeans is an icon. It's just an icon that might say the kingdom of heaven is not a very interesting place or something like that, you know? So in short, it's hard for me to relate to that kind of objection.”
Emerson: “Yes, thank you. I think that about wraps up our interview. I want to thank you for your time, Seraphim, and your willingness to come and answer these questions.”
Seraphim: “It's my pleasure. Thanks for conducting the interview.”