A Blessing

In January I was blessed by Bishop Thomas to be an iconographer.  I have not spent as much time writing icons lately due to my work here, but I hope to have more time when my children are all in school.  I started studying with Randi Sider-Rose, my dear friend from Immanuel Icons about 5 years ago, right before we moved away to DC.  Both she and another iconographer that I studied under said that it takes 10 years to really be an iconographer, so I still consider myself an apprentice.

Randi and I worked together on a family icon for my god-daughter's wedding present and we hope to work collaboratively on a church or two in the near future.  I have a few good things to add, but I must say that most of the knowledge and experience are on her end.  Which is why I will be working under her.

Before we bought our big fixer upper house (and I decided to spend hundreds of hours scraping paint on a 30 foot ladder and painting the whole interior...) I used to spend many evenings working on iconography or chant.  I am trying to work less on the house so that I can get back to that.

I don't think that I realized until recently how much ByzB requires of my creative energies.  Many of the materials and games come to me "in the shower"---at those times when you least expect them.  Many also come at 1 am when I can't sleep at night because I am excited about something new here.  Every year that I taught elementary school the first two weeks of school were late nights because I couldn't stop thinking about all of the great ways I was going to teach my students.  

The icon below is an icon that I finished in December.  It is a present for Holy Cross Antiochian Mission in Dorr, Mi.  My father-in-law and brother-in-law are both priests there.  They have a relic of St. Maximos the Confessor and requested this icon (I changed the spelling to the Greek spelling after this picture).  

St. Maximos the Confessor