The second mistake that I see over and over is people don't know how to use color. “When I look at the iconography in this country, produced by North Americans, the biggest mistake that I see constantly is that people don't know how to draw. I'm almost 70 now and only now feel that I finally know what I'm doing, even though I never stop learning.” Then the rest of the time I looked at endless icon books to learn the language and try to do things properly. I also studied for eight weeks with the iconographer Fr. Nicolas Ozolin would come to teach iconology, the seminary always let me take his classes as a special student. The seminary was very gracious to me because whenever Fr. I did that for a semester and stayed for the year taking other classes. You need to come.” He arranged a place for me to stay near the seminary. Thomas Hopko contacted me and said, “Helena Nikkanen is going to teach a class in egg tempera iconography at St. “Later on, I tried to be a nun in Canada. And he begrudgingly let me watch what he was doing. Nicholas would accompany me downstairs so that the iconographer wouldn’t throw me out. Nicholas would call me and say, “He's here”. I lived just around the corner, so every time he would show up to paint, Fr. Nicholas set up a place in the basement of the church at Christ the Savior Cathedral to paint these icons for their iconostasis. Nicholas had ordered icons for the church but Fr. Nicholas Boldireff was serving because they had more services. “During my first Lent in the Church, I started going to the Russian Orthodox OCA parish where Fr. And I thought,’ If a woman could give Christ his human image in her womb, why can't she paint his human image on a board?' He was an accomplished iconographer himself but he didn't think women could be icon painters. Three months later, I was chrismated by Fr. John had introduced me to the Orthodox church earlier so I decided to try that, and I ended up going to the Antiochian church because they used more English. “I returned to my Anglican parish the first Sunday that I was back in Canada but in the middle of the service, I heard that same voice again saying, “You don’t belong here”. So I went back to Canada even though I felt like I was throwing myself over a cliff. Every time I looked at this icon, I heard this voice in my head saying, “You don’t belong here”. I was thinking about joining L’Arche in France, but there was an icon of Christ over the table where I was filling out immigration forms. “I used the money that I saved from not going to the university to travel and visit different contemplative communities. It was an icon of Our Lady of the Sign and his wife said he used it in his prayer corner for the rest of his life. The first icon I ever painted–I was still an Anglican–was for him. He gave me an article “Tradition and Traditions” by Leonid Ouspensky and Vladimir Lossky and showed me icons. He was very interested in Orthodoxy although he never converted. I had no idea he was even a Christian when he was my professor at York but that brought me back into the church after an absence of several years. Would you like to come?” He was an Anglican. Someone who had been one of my professors, who was also an art critic for The Globe and Mail who had written about some group art events I had been a part of, John Bentley Mays, contacted me out of the blue on the feast day of St. Out of frustration, I decided to switch to philosophy and literature but the university informed me that I couldn't change majors midstream. But this was the 1970s, when they had stopped teaching anything about technique. “I was a visual fine arts major at York University In Toronto, Ontario. We asked her to tell you how she became an iconographer: Nicholas Church in Portland, Oregon, and later with the finished icons of the saints of North America at the same church. You see her here on the scaffolding working on the iconography program at St. She takes in students to teach iconography, fills in as choir director wherever she is working, and attends all that parish’s services. Heather MacKean is our Woman of the Week, nominated for her work as church iconographer.
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