From Taliaffero Hall, a balcony inside St. John’s Cathedral, Teresa Harrison taught a group of about a dozen artists how to make religious icons last week. A religious icon, or “window to heaven,” is a painting of Jesus, Mary or a saint that is blessed by the church and venerated as sacred. The idea, according to Harrison, wife of Edward Harrison, the dean of the Cathedral, is to engage in a project that contrasts hectic life with a peaceful, centered process that brings people closer to God.
Certainly religious art is nothing new, but this process allows the artist to create something that can prove to be beautiful spiritually as well as visually. It begins by taking an existing icon and using a tracing technique to duplicate the lines of the picture you want to paint. What follows is a time-consuming layering process that applies traditional symbolic colors. For example, the Virgin Mary is always either blue or red, divinity is represented by gold. The process starts with darker colors and is layered with lighter colors. The effect is to indicate that light comes from within the icon and shines outwards, not vice-versa. The artist never signs the front of an icon.
Harrison, who has studied under master iconographer Philip Zimmerman, said the reason is that, “It’s not about you. It’s about the visual expression of the relationship between God and humanity.” Harrison was assisted by the artist Baltha Noojin from Mentone, Ala., who came to Jacksonville for the week-long iconography class