Icon making involves spirit as much as art

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Just before Maria Leontovitsch Manley gets ready to apply the gold leaf to an icon, she prepares a piece of fatty clay called an Armenian bole. She will press that onto the surface of her icon to ensure that the gold will adhere without imperfections. Like the paint, the gold leaf and the technique for making the icon itself, the clay bole has been used this way for centuries. And just as iconographers have done for centuries, Mrs. Manley takes the small piece of clay into her hands and, ever so gently, breathes on it.

"You have to do it slowly," Mrs. Manley says. An internationally recognized iconographer, she became interested in her religion, Russian Orthodoxy, and its icons after the death of her father when she was just 16.

A gentle breath on the clay is all it takes: Breathe too quickly and the gold leaf will blow away. Certainly, it's an old technique. Today, there would be more-efficient ways of easing the gold leaf onto the prepared bole. But warm breath on cold clay also echoes the act of God giving Adam life so long ago. That's an important consideration for iconographers, who blend technique and symbol in a form that owes a bit to art and much to spirit.

The slow and symbolic work of the icon maker will be showcased at the Third Pan-Orthodox Icon Exhibit, at Saints Constantine and Helen Greek Orthodox Church in Northwest on March 13 and 14. Now prized by art collectors, icons are designed not as pieces of art but as objects for religious veneration.

"Icons were the books of the unlearned," says Father Nicholas Manousakis, the Proistemenos, or pastor, at Saints Constantine and Helen. "When you saw icons embellishing the walls of a church, you learned Christianity by knowing what the icons represented. They are windows to heaven."

Icon makers, called iconographers, rarely refer to themselves as artists and rarely sign their work. They speak of "writing" icons rather than painting or making them. Using techniques that have remained the same for centuries, the iconographer is more conduit than creator, participating in a spiritual journey that begins and ends in prayer.

"This is not art first, not art as is," or art for its own sake, says Irena Beliakova, a Russian iconographer who came to the United States in 1982. "There's something behind it called the spirit."