The work on the ten iconographies turned out to be an open end study. Instead of really rush and finish the icons i decided to stop my work and continue studying for the really important step of the iconography for the faces of the Saints. The faces of the Saints are the A and Ω of Byzantine Iconography, a phase that must be studied carefully and with strong devotion of the Iconographer. I am satisfied of the Digital Icon result. I have acheived my purpose of creating my digital Icon of the Saints i love but the creation of the Byzantine icons with the traditional technique is a technique wich i feel that i am yet far away to master. My devotion to master this technique is true therefore this research turned to be a great pathway to study this art. Digital art has the advantage of fixing errors by undo – redo instead of the difficult to fix errors done when practising iconography.By trial and error i was able to focus on the right decisions avoiding mistakes.
The images are shown below:
The creation of the icon paintings was also hard because of trying to follow the technique of Photios Kontoglou and creating icons that differ in a way of the prototypes in order to follow my own style of work. These works were studied well and the next face of creating the Saints faces is the next goal of this open end research.
For example when i started Saint Nicolas i decided not to copy a prototype therefore i studied varius icons of Saint Nicolas including icons created with Renaissance technique and also icons created in Byzantine technique as shown below.Ofcourse imitating and copying the prototypes is not considered fraud or lack of expressing the personal style. Famous artists have copied other great masters because they loved their works and wanted to study a known image. In the case of iconography is the honored image of the Saints that is drawn and not an image to honour the iconographer.
The icons had also the size of 30×40cm therefore the size for creating an Icon for the three Saints Raphael, Nikolaos and Irene was a difficult work. The Icons drawn for churches are bigger so i will consider practising iconography on larger board in the future.
June 24, 2008 at 12:06 am
[...] The practice and study of iconography was really helpfull for the creation of the digital icon and also the other outcomes of this research: I will continue traditional iconography and Byzantine Art research and the exploration of the possible interraction with the Spectacular digital Art: http://chrysanthosvoutounos.wordpress.com/2008/06/23/3w26/ [...]