It has just gone 9 am, and fifteen iconographers have gathered in the atrium of Theodore House. For the next week, they will study the ancient art of iconography under the guidance of Deacon Nikita Andrejev of the Prosopon School of Iconography. For the next week, they will gather each morning to pray that God might glorify the work of their hands. Through the strokes of the brush, they hope that the light of God might touch the blank canvas.

The first thing I learned was not to call it icon painting. You do not paint an icon; you write them. More than just mere pigments spotted on a canvas, the icon is the Gospel drawn out. 

Right from the outset, the religious symbolism of the icon dominates the methods and techniques used. The students began with a blank board made of gesso, representing, according to Nikita, “the moment before the creation of the world where there was just the divine.” But as God formed the heavens and the earth by His hands, so too our iconographers transformed these blank boards into a holy image of Divine realities.

All the materials used in icon writing are natural. The paint is based on diluted egg yolk mixed with natural pigments. As the colours took shape, the students slowly added lines to their icons. We had moved beyond the first part of creation, where light, colour, and matter existed. Figures start to emerge from the dust of the board, a firmament creating definitive shapes.