Lisa Abbott discusses the life of the icon and the icon-maker animated by faith.
‘There is a gaze and a heart that penetrates to your very marrow and loves you all the way to your destiny, a gaze and a heart that no one can deflect from His course.’ Fr Luigi GuissaniI painted my first icon in a community for recovery from drug addiction. I was not suffering addiction myself but journeying through a dark period in my life, and the community had embraced me as one of their own. I had very little exposure or attraction to icons before this experience of my first painting, and it was quickly swept up in a torrent of other life experiences. Yet two years later, in 2016, I found myself once again facing an obscure crossroads in my life. As the figurative doors closed around me, and in dialogue with a close friend, I discovered a little portal of freedom from which arose the utterly surprising desire to paint icons. Within two months, I had moved to England to study with liturgical artist Aidan Hart, as a diploma student for the Prince’s School of Traditional Arts.
Painting icons has not been so much a choice of mine, as a small light gifted to me in times of darkness, the direction of which I have followed step after step and that now weaves together many experiences and desires of my heart. Aidan often said to us: ‘Love your materials, love your subject matter, and love the people you are painting for.’ What are my materials? I paint using earth pigments, an egg yolk mixture and natural-haired brushes. My canvas is a wooden panel whose surface is made of many layers of gesso, water and rabbit skin glue, dried and sanded smooth. I may use gold leaf laid on a fine film of clay and burnished bright. My materials are simple, natural and beautiful. The process of painting is like any other artistic work: messy, utterly absorbing, fraught with problem-solving, agonising lows and thrilling highs, each new layer of pigment both a death and a resurrection.
What is my subject matter? Ultimately, my subject matter is the Incarnation of Christ, His gaze of love and our destiny of eternal life. In design and making, I strive to be relevant to time and culture, while also studious of, and obedient to the tradition and history of liturgical art. The secular artists in my studio ask if I cannot be ‘freer’ to express myself in my painting: my freedom is in obedience and in ‘essentiality’ (the paring down of things to reveal their essence). My subject matter is my faith, the personal prayer life that I live in the heart of the Church, nourished by the Word and the Sacraments. My life has long been animated by cherished relationships with the saints; the stories of saints and a living relationship with them became the food of my early independent and vivid prayer life. The icon offers that space of dialogue, where their lives are told and relationships are forged.
Who are the people I paint for, who commissions icons? I didn’t realise when I began what a gift it would be to enter into prayer with the icon for the one who has commissioned it. The commissions I have been blessed with have all been for personal devotion: an unemployed teacher saving up just enough to commission an icon for his classroom in thanksgiving for his new job, a woman struggling to relate to the Virgin Mary in her prayer life commissions an icon of the Mother of God; a grieving son commissions an icon in memory of his beloved mother suddenly lost to him as he journeys towards the priesthood; a single mother struggling with bills and raising her child, commissions Our Lady of Joy; a priest asks for an image of Our Lady carrying a stole in memory of the moment of his ordination. I seek to tread lightly and humbly in this sacred space, as I am caught between the gaze of Heaven and the gaze of the human heart.
Lisa Abbott is a graduate of the Camberwell College of Fine Art and studied icon painting at the Prince’s School of Traditional Art. She now works full time as an artist and iconographer based in Shrewsbury.
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