Iconography

For this project I worked as an iconographer under the artistic direction of Tatiana Melnikova to complete the painting of traditional Russian-style icons for the interior dome in church of St. Nicholas of Bari in Colima, Mexico. The process began with creating a scaled grid drawing on paper, where we hand-sketched the outlines of each icon figure. Once the drawings were finalized we coated the back of the paper with chalk, and placed it on the prepared canvas, tracing over the sketch as a means to cleanly transfer the sketch to the canvas. Once the image was transferred, I carefully outlined the transferred sketch in paint, to establish the structure for the remainder of the process.

The painting process relied on traditional Russian iconographic technique, using many watered-down, almost translucent layers of paint to gradually build the highlights and shadows. Each layer required precision, as the luminous quality, giving Orthodox iconography an “inner light” emerges from the deliberate layering of many translucent layers. Throughout the several week project, I completed two full icon figures independently and contributed to various layers across several other figures.

Because the icons were painted on long sections of canvas, each portion had to be scaled consistently in order for the figures to align cohesively once placed together. After all of the painting was complete, Tatiana carefully cut the figures out from the canvas and joined them together on one big sheet of canvas, before installing them onto the curved surface.