https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=5KYqlzhZqMg
I think that your image is an apocalyptic image. I think that it’s appropriate in that sense that it’s completely coherent with an image of revelation which focuses on the summation rather than the judgment. And so although it’s an image that we’ve never seen before, I think that it fits perfectly well with our tradition. There are versions of that. Like in the West, you have these types of images that try to show the ontological relationship between Christ and the world. It’s not like there are many precedents, I think, for your image. It’s just that you bring it together in such a cohesive way, which in some ways is the thing that we can do, right? That we can stand on the shoulder of giants, as we say, and kind of say, oh, well, I see these threads coming together. We can just push it a little further and see how it comes together. This is Jonathan Pajot. Welcome to the symbolic world. Hello, everyone. It is my great joy to be back with Aidan Hart to discuss a wonderful image that he’s designing. Those that have paid attention to my channel have seen many discussions with Aidan, his insight into iconography, also his own mastery of the skills makes him really one of the modern masters of iconography, but also of understanding the role and the symbolism and icons. And he is working on a beautiful new image of the heavenly Jerusalem and its relationship to creation. And in some ways, it’s very akin to the images of everything that I’ve developed, you know, with the mountain and the crucifixion or the flood. And it really goes to show how you can show the same universal truth through different prisms. And so I really want to explore this image with him and see how he came to develop it the way he did. And so Aidan, thanks for talking to me about this. And so what is the impetus? Let me show the image first of all, and then we can talk about it. And so tell us a bit about what the impetus was for this image, like what prompted it? Yeah, thanks Jonathan. I got an email from an orthodox marine biologist. He’s a professor at Point Lovett University in the West Coast of America. And being a marine biologist, he was very interested in somehow bringing together evolutionary theory, not obviously in the sense of an atheistic one, but the sense of the gradual creation, let’s say, with Christ, with orthodox theology. So it was quite an exciting project, because I’d studied biology at university myself, and I wanted to bring together scientific discovery, an emphasis on Christ as the tell us, Christ as the beginning and the middle and the end. So it was a real challenge. I somehow wanted to bring together heaven and earth, as it were, and this movement towards the New Jerusalem. So basically the commission came from Andrew and he wanted it to be used as a point of discussion and teaching, really. It’s big. It’s going to be roughly two meters or something like that, perhaps traveling around a bit. Probably we’ll use it in England for about six months before we send it over. So it’s going to be a point of discussion, really. There’s already an orthodox creation group. So I think they’re discussing it there. So my main influence has been obviously the New Jerusalem, the Book of Revelation, but also St. Maximus the Confessor. So in a sense, it’s trying to indicate something of St. Maximus’ teaching in an icon. All right. So let’s look at some of the elements. I mean, I was really, I found it really beautiful, because what I see in the image in some ways, it’s taking this image of the cosmos really from an apocalyptic vision. And so the image of the heavenly Jerusalem is the top of the world. It’s something like the source of reality. Christ is in the center. He becomes in some ways the tree of life, the middle of the garden, and the waters are flowing down from him. So tell us a bit about some of the choices that you made in the image. Maybe we can start at the top. Yeah, probably the best place to begin is the end, really. We can only understand the beginning in the light of the end to which God is directing it. So first of all, the image itself is actually three by two in proportions, which means that the bottom half is a square, the bottom two thirds rather is a square, and the top is a dome. And Christ is situated in the middle of the dome, the circle at the top, but also is the middle of the top of the square. And four sided squares is a symbol of many cultures of the created world, the four elements, the four points of the compass. So Christ is at the heart of it. He’s the logos, God become flesh. So it begins and ends there. That of course, as you see around him is the New Jerusalem. And it’s the New Jerusalem, which includes the whole of creation. What struck me about Maximus’s teaching compared to say with Dionysius, with Dionysius, the Iopagite, it’s as though you’re sort of leaving behind matter and you end up just with sort of pure ideas. But Maximus, all the material symbols are taken up and a part of the end, they’re not sort of spat out. It’s a strange thing. So that’s why I’ve got sort of the divine things, the angelic realm at the top, the mother of God together with plants, mineral kingdom and all that. So that’s the starting point really. I wanted it all culminating in Christ. And behind Christ himself, of course, you’ve got this in microcosm, we often talked about the factual nature. So the whole icon is a square united with a circle. And behind Christ, again, you’ve got a circle turned as a diamond combined with a circle, his divinity. So Christ is fully God, fully man. The creation is also created by nature, it’s material by nature, but it’s called to be united to God by grace. So all through really got this square united with the circle. Another way to put it is the cross runs through everything, the vertical and horizontal. Yeah, it’s amazing. I mean, because in some ways it’s the symbolism of the church itself with the dome and the square, but it’s also just an arch, you know, like to see how universal this symbolism, you know, the arch of a window has the same structure as the church itself. It’s this little, it’s this beautiful kind of fractal symbolism that comes in. And so I’m curious, why did you put the Virgin up at the top of the image or in the top part of the image? What was your thinking there? Yeah, in a whole lot of things really, the Virgin is like the microcosm of the whole church. You know, God became man in here, so in herself she’s like a symbol, a fruition of the church. So Christ in this humility humbles himself to raise us up. So Christ is in the center, so even though he’s not the highest, he’s in the center, so he’s always the logos, the heart of everything, but he wants to sort of exalt the church and that’s symbolized in the Virgin. I actually had a bit smaller originally, but the commissioners asked if I could make her larger. So all along I was sort of trying to balance Christ as God, therefore at the top, but on the other hand Christ as God in this humility, in his creation, wraps it around himself. He’s happy, as it were, to learn himself, to transfigure us. Yeah, and there’s also like an incarnational movement if you follow from the top and the glory of God here at the top, and then you have this descent of God into the world as a seed in the Virgin and then fully revealed in the end of Christ in the center of the whole story. So I think it works really well. And it also suggests the east and the aps of the church with the Mother of God there and at the, you know, kind of in the, if you were standing in the church, that’s what you would see, right? You would see her back there and then above you, you would see Christ and so there’s this reflection of that structure in the image itself. And of course it’ll be sort of dark blue at the very top. You’ve got the single sphere that the three prongs coming out, so that is the Holy Trinity, three at one. So again, we go through Christ to the Father and through the Holy Spirit. So in the sense that everything comes from the Holy Trinity at the top and moves toward the Holy Trinity at the top. So the horizontal gradually gets taken up into the vertical. So that’s why if we go down to the bottom, I was sort of struggling to unite what’s called the cronos clock time with keros, which is more sort of divine and vertical. So I decided to have the six days of creation in bands and at the bottom, just slightly curved, but as you go up, the curve gets steeper until ultimately it comes to a point toward Christ. So that at the bottom one starts with the flat, the sordid as it were, the world is about form and void. And gradually we rise up to higher order. But one thing I noticed… Yeah, I hadn’t thought of that when I saw it at the outset, because I was wondering why do you have these kind of tears going up and these circles? But now I can clearly see that in some ways it’s the dome of heaven that is flattening itself out to become the earth and the opposite is true, which is flat earth is kind of moving into this heavenly shape. That’s amazing. And the gradual sense of creation starts from the outside, it comes toward the inside. So Andrew told me that the likely phases of the development of the created world. So you’ve got actually extinct creatures on the left and the right and gradually as you move forward, you come to more recent creatures. So you’ve got this Kronos on the horizontal being consummated in the divine time. Okay, so that’s why you have the dinosaurs on the outside. I was like, what are the dinosaurs doing there? I guess it makes sense that they would be on the outside for sure. So in some ways it’s like this movement into our experience or the world in which we live. Yes, Christ has sort of overcome death, not just in the sense of our physical death, but death in terms of separation. So that in some sublime and comprehensible way in Christ or the extinct animals have sort of gathered together into the present. So they’re extinct in another sense in Christ they’re not. Some people ask me why I’ve got a hedge around paradise. Initially, just because the word paradise is a Persian word meaning a walled park where the emperor would enjoy time with his family and friends. So there’s a sense of distinction between paradise, which is planted by God initially, and the thickened world, wild world around. So the way I see it is that God planted the garden as like an icon of how he wanted us as the prophets, priests and kings and queens of the world to gradually expand the walls of paradise to make the whole universe a paradise. So this distinction between paradise and the rest of the world is important, not to create a sense of sacred and profane, but the opposite, that that’s the beginning as it were and gradually if we acted correctly, which of course we didn’t, those hedges as it were would expand the whole world, would become a garden city basically. I think your insight also to make a wall that is like a vegetable wall, like an organic wall and then have the heavenly Jerusalem being this stone wall. I think it’s intuitively very right. It just feels right. Because you feel that there was a border, there was a limit to the garden, like you said, that was meant to be expanded, but that limit would not have been the same type of limit that would be found in the city. So I really think intuitively it’s a very strong idea to have used the hedge. And also because gardens, we’re used to seeing hedges as limits in gardens. It’s a convenient thing. But I’ve never seen that ever. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that represented that way. So I think it’s a great insight on your part. Tell us a bit about this vertical down here. So you have the cross and then you have these two trees. I imagine the tree of life and the tree of knowledge maybe. Tell us a bit about your decisions on those. Yeah, I’d always been perplexed, you know, why God should put this tree of knowledge of good and evil there. Often Protestant writers have said, always just to sort of test us. But it didn’t seem to sort of fit with my understanding of God that he put something there to test us. So I was really fascinated when Efraim wrote that the tree of knowledge and good and evil can be understood as the created world. So if we, Adam and Eve, had received it with thanksgiving, then it would have been knowledge of good. In other words, we wouldn’t just then have just seen it as a nice fruit, but would have seen it as an expression of God’s love. So we would have received it Eucharistically. But if we just grabbed it because it’s just nice to taste and turned our back on God, then it would become knowledge of evil. So that really made sense to me. You know, God in his humility wanted to create something in a sense from which he was absent, which is our free will. I tell giving you everything, I’m going to stand back now and I want you to be grown ups to live properly. You can live in properly if you want, that’s your freedom. So you’ve got the tree of knowledge of good and evil there, which we botched it up with. So that’s why Adam and Eve are then walking downhill, either side, closed down. But you have so Christ becomes a tree, of course, the word Ross in Greek is Stavros, but also Xiloh, which can be tree and wood of the cross at the same time. So above that is the tree of knowledge of life. I made it three. This is the tree of life is God himself, the Trinity. And the three colors I’ve used are those used in the Rubyloft Trinity icon. The sort of the pink and the red and the green and the father, the left son of the middle of the Holy Spirit on the right. And then, of course, you’ve got the cross. And this is a jeweled cross. It won’t just be a wooden cross. It will be a glorious cross. So Christ enters our fallen world. And as the tree of life becomes dead, becomes the cross, the tree of death, and that becomes the tree of life. And Christ said that the sign of the Son of Man will appear in the heavens before I return. So this is often depicted as a jeweled cross and early Roman mosaics. So the cross of death becomes the coming of the kingdom in the future. So that’s why it’s going to be a jeweled cross. And as you mentioned earlier, the four rivers come from the cross, the tree of life, and Christ above, because it’s not the cross itself. It’s Christ on the cross who is the source of the river. So you’ve got these four rivers there. Yeah, I like the idea that because we’re used to it. We see this image, you know, in the… It’s funny how you can see how at some point the iconographic intuition just becomes a language because we’re used to seeing in the image of the Last Judgment, we’re used to seeing fire come from under the feet of Christ. And then here, because you’re showing the order of creation rather than the judgment per se, it’s still an apocalyptic image, but it’s a powerful insight to have the water, which flows from Christ through the cross, through the trees, with all the images that we have of Christ’s side being pierced and the water flowing, that that was the water of paradise, all these images. I really love it because it’s completely new. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like this, but it is at the same time, completely traditional because all the associations, if you know them, they appear right away. It shows you how there’s all this room within the iconographic language. If you do it with the right attention to tradition, but also a deep understanding of it, that’s not just wrote copying, that you can come up with new images that immediately strike us as right, even though we’ve never seen them before. And so I really love that the image of the waters coming down. I am surprised that you don’t have four, you have like three rivers. You should have four. You should have four. Yeah, well, but there are actually four. There’s four? How’s that? I think it’s the, I think basically you’ve got, it’s been a while since the designers got a picture. I think the river at the top is the fourth one. Okay, so this would be the one and then these would be the three. Okay, so that’s how you see it. Like the one and then three more. Yeah, and you notice that the water goes uphill on either side. You’ve got this funny sort of- Yeah, yeah, I was wondering about that. Bishop Callistos once said that Christ comes to us out of the future as well as out of the past and in the present. It’s one reason why we face east, we’re sort of moving toward the rising sun, but Christ, and I’m fascinated by the Roman apse, the early Roman apse. A lot of apse have been asked to fesca, been inspired by this. So you have an image of Christ there, of course, in the apse, but behind you have brightly colored clouds normally, which are sunrise colored clouds. So on the one hand, you’re looking at Christ present here as we worship. But on the other hand, we’re looking at Christ coming in the future. So time goes forward and backwards in God. So I wanted the river to go uphill as well as downhill, just to sort of play with that sense of the elasticity of time in Christ. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, but I mean, there’s also a way in which we know that the water goes up. I mean, this is a weird thing. We know that there’s this cycle of water and there’s this relationship between heavenly water and earthly water in Genesis 1. But visually, what’s interesting about it is it has this, we have a structure that’s very, very primal. And I don’t know to what extent we can explain it, but there’s a structure. You see an iconography and you see it. You see the central pillar across and then two things on the side that are doing something like that, whether it’s the two snakes on the crozier, whether it is sometimes it’s sometimes foliage that will be coming back up on the two sides. So there’s this deep insight about that this being right. And so, you know, even if even when I looked at it and I didn’t know what your intention was, it didn’t matter because it feels right even structurally, even if I don’t totally understand the meaning, there’s something about it which I recognize as being something like the center. And then these two aspects that are, you know, coming up to praise, coming up to react, coming up to even attack sometimes like it could be different versions of it, but it doesn’t it really is the center and these two sides. So I thought it looked intuitively right. And so the other part, which is really interesting to me and I love is that in some ways you have the creation of the physical cosmos at the bottom of the image in some ways because it’s the most material. And so you have the six days of creation here moving up towards Eden and then up towards the final revelation. So you have this idea in some ways of the, you know, this relationship of the different heavens. So you have the firmament kind of under the Garden of Eden, which is which just sounds a little weird, but maybe you can tell us a little bit about those decisions. Yeah. So when I became Orthodox 40 years ago, I remember my parish priest, Father Yves Dubois, reminding me that the Sabbath is actually the Saturday and the Sunday is the eighth day. And I got fascinated by this concept of the eighth day, which is joined to the previous seven days of creation. But the eighth day is also called the first day of eternity, after which there are other days. So at the bottom, you’ve got these different layers gradually getting steeper in the middle. So you come to seven and the seventh day, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Yeah. So I had to maneuver sort of walking down the sixth day. Then you got this sort of seventh there, but then everything above the top river is the eighth day. So I wanted that sort of movement, that progressive movement upwards. And a bit of an aside, but relevant nonetheless. One method I use for painting is to do a sort of puddley, especially if I’m doing garments and ground, a rather messy puddle, and then gradually add more detail. So the garments, for example, might end up with quite crisp highlights. So this made me think that creation and movement toward Christ as the Talos isn’t leaving chaos behind, replacing it just to pure order. So you’ve got pure order. You’ve got chaos below, bubbling up all sorts of potentiality. So instead of seeing it horizontally moving from chaos to order with no chaos, I thought vertically stacking up. And it happens like that, of course, in nature, that you have mutations happening all the time, the sort of chaos of mutations. And once in a while, one mutation helps you adapt better. Without that chaotic mutation, you wouldn’t have the opportunity to select the best to adapt better to one situation. So that fascinated me. So you’ve got this rather sort of chaotic water, there is some order to it, the ground to be moving up, but nonetheless, the basis is this sort of, I would think of this chaos of the physical world as the freedom that God has given to the inanimate world. You and I as human beings have a free choice in a way that water doesn’t, but God has given water a certain freedom through this chaos. So at every point, God and his humility gives things a certain freedom according to their nature. Yeah, I think the insight is quite right. And I always say that, the Tohubohu, the primordial waters of creation, they’re still there. God didn’t remove them. He basically pulled creation out of them. But they’re still there as this potentiality at the bottom of the world, out of which, like you said, possibility emerges. And then we cast light on those possibilities and we select them and we choose them. And then we tend them, you could say, in order to make them thriving. So no, I think the basic structure is intuitively quite right. I really enjoy it. The other thing that surprised me though is that if I had done this, I would have flipped this. I would have put the sun on this side and I would have put the kind of night time on the other side. Just because I’m used to seeing the sun on the right hand of Christ, you know, like Adam and Eve and then you see the sun and the moon. That’s the one thing that, that was one of the very few things that I look at. I was like, I would have flipped that. But you know, when we look at each other’s work, we look at it through the prism of someone who, when he sees a beautiful image like this, wishes he, I wish I would have been the one to make it. It’s like, oh, this is so amazing. I wish I was the one to have made this image. Well, it’s still, I’m still I’m still taking in advice. This is the first draft in a way. Andrew got people to give feedback, but it’s interesting that the Hebrew day begins with sunset, not sunrise. In Mount Athos, where I was for a while, we would set the clocks by the sunset. So there’s a movement from darkness toward light and we tend to read left to right, of course. So there is that progression from dark to light. And on the left, you’ve got sort of the little speckles there. That’s like the dust, which gradually regulate into the planetary constellations. So that’s again, a chronologic movement. Now, one thing I’d say that, who do you think is to the left and right of Christ? Well, my understanding, you know, it took me a while to think about, to realize what it was. But then when I looked at the way the image was structured, I think I really, because I was like, it was clearly not the mother of God and and John the Baptist. And then I thought it’s Adam and Eve. That’s it. Again, why did you flip them up here? So you have them, is it because you wanted to have the Virgin and Saint John the foreigner structure at the top? Yeah, good point, really. I can’t remember why I put them on that way. Yeah, because that because you usually see Adam at the right side in the last judgment. So that’s what that’s the thing that threw me off a little bit. I was like, oh, perhaps I ought to change them over then. Yeah. So that people relate that to the resurrection. Yeah, the Anastasis has that. And then it’s often you see in the last judgment, you see them kneeling at the altar, you know, beneath the feet of Christ. And so they have that order. Yeah, I think it’s a great idea, you know, because it does tell the final story in some ways, you know, in a manner that I’ve never seen told because, you know, we represent this idea often, the idea that you’re representing here, we often represent it as the apostles, you know, sitting and ruling with Christ, that type of imagery. But I think the idea of showing Adam and Eve as a king and a queen in the kingdom, it brings it all together in terms of creation, right? If we’re talking about an image of creation, I think it’s a wonderful insight. And quite a bit in the way that those figures will be dressed, it’s a bit difficult on this tiny scale, but they won’t just be king and queen, but also the prophets. So they’ll probably have a prophet hat. And also, you notice that they’re offering bread and wine. Oh, yeah, I was wondering, I didn’t catch that. Okay. Yeah. So this is a symbol of them using creation properly. In other words, they’ve changed from partaking incorrectly of the created world and are taking properly, which is to fashion it well to make good wine and good bread. But also then offer it to God with thanksgiving. In other words, to see the logos within the log of all his creation. So they’re being restored to their role as prophet, priest and king. And above them, of course, are representatives of the whole of the church. People of all different races there and different ages, male and female. So as with the Mother to God, that group behind will be a summation of a church, but also in Adam and Eve, it’s a summation of the church, our fall there’s because they’re being raised. That struck me actually, when I first saw the resurrection icon, when I became Orthodox, that was wonderful that the very people out of the need for whom the whole of creation fell, are actually the first to be saved. I thought that that’s God’s forgiveness. The ones we missed about are the first to be raised. Yeah. And there’s already an insight of the cosmic aspect of what’s happening at the resurrection. Like you can feel that this is hinting to this cosmic moment that you’re showing here, which is in some ways, I really love the idea. It really just all of it comes together because in the book of Revelation, you have this idea that the kingdoms offer their crowns up. And also in some ways, all their good works are kind of offered up to Christ. And using the bread and the wine, because people who don’t know, but the traditional idea of the Eucharist was that the people make the bread, and then they bring it up so that it will then be consecrated. So it’s like an offering of creation. You’ve talked about this, I think even with me before, the idea that it’s this offering of all creation ultimately in the Eucharist is what’s going on. And so having that up here in the heavenly Jerusalem is a great way to create that summation. One of the things too that you mentioned about the seven days, I don’t know if you thought about it, but if you have the seventh day being here, that’s also the Sabbath in the sense of the cross, right? Because we have this idea that the Holy Sabbath is the day that Christ, the day of Christ’s death, it’s the perfect Sabbath. I was rereading parts of St. Maximus the Confessor this morning, and I was really taken by how he talks about the cross. He says, all visible things, phenomena in the Greek, need a cross, and all intelligible things, spiritual things, invisible things, need a tomb. And what he meant by all visible things need a cross, Maximus is saying that, I’m looking at the horizontal part of the cross, God created great diversity and embraces that diversity. Everything doesn’t melt down to big blob that trees are tree and rocks are rock, et cetera. But then the vertical, you’ve got to go down first to the logos at the heart that created all these, and then they’re raised up to the heights to return them to the logos without losing their distinction. And then he says that the intelligible things, our spiritual perception of things, needs a tomb. In other words, we need to go beyond, and this is the whole symbol thing, isn’t it? God comes to us through symbols, but then there’s always something beyond the symbol. So if we cling to the symbol, we die. So we’ve got to receive that glory, but also take it to the tomb. You think, well, there’s another one beyond even that, and one beyond that. So that was one aspect of his teaching I wanted to show that the sort of centrality of the cross, not just as the death of Christ, but as you often say, it’s like a tree, isn’t it? It’s rooted in heaven, rooted in earth, it spreads out, but yet it’s one. Yeah, it connects. Connects the unity of all that we see together. If it doesn’t have depth, it will die. If it doesn’t have depth, it will die. To the sky, then it will die. Definitely. Definitely. So tell us about the plan for this image. You said it’s going to be in a church, and are you going to be documenting, I mean, I imagine you’ll be documenting the making of it. It’s quite an undertaking. Yeah, yes. Well, probably actually it’ll end up in the university. Okay. I don’t know if it’ll be in the chapel, but in the university anyway, but because it’ll be painted in egg tempera, and I like to leave egg tempera at least six months before I varnish, Andrew suggested that I have it and use it in England. In fact, I’ve been asked to give a talk at the Bath Orthodox Arts Festival again. So hopefully I’ll have it ready by then and we can take it there. But I’d quite like to have it as a talking point. I mean, it is an icon and the sense that it’s iconographic. It’ll be painted on the panel. It won’t be painted. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. A two meter panel. Well, I haven’t decided entirely, but it’ll be big anyway. Yeah. Between 1.6 to 2 meters. 1.6. Okay. All right. Wow. So yeah, I mean, I want it to be a talking point. And it’s more, I suppose, more like an illuminated manuscript in the sense that it’s not something that you put in the church to venerate. But I suppose you could say that if there is one day of the liturgical year where it would be appropriate, it would be September the first, which the previous patriarch appointed as the day of creation. So it is actually part of the church calendar now. So I suppose. But it’s also, I think that your image is an apocalyptic image. I think that it’s appropriate in that sense that it’s completely coherent with an image of revelation, which focuses on the summation rather than the judgment. And so although it’s an image that we’ve never seen before, I think that it fits perfectly well with our tradition. And there are versions of that. In the West, you have these types of images that try to show the ontological relationship between Christ and the world. It’s not like there are many precedents, I think, for your image. It’s just that you bring it together in such a cohesive way, which in some ways is the thing that we can do, right? That we can stand on the shoulder of giants, as we say, and kind of say, oh, well, I see these threads coming together. We can just push it a little further and see how it comes together. The general idea for the arrangement came from an icon, All Creation Rejoices, a new Russian icon. The idea of the arch at the top and that’s very different in the bottom half. But the sort of the white upper area with the arches, that was inspired by that. I wasn’t sure how to depict the New Jerusalem, which is a square basically with 12 gates. As I came across this image from, it’s a fresco from Italy, painted in 1090, I think, San Pietro Almonte in Civati in Italy. I think the reason why they’ve done it like that is you want everything to be visible, nothing is hidden. So this is the only way really you can get all 12 gates visible. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s sort of a square, but it’s not. I wanted all 12 gates visible. That’s right. Okay, so I see. It’s a great solution to show an iconographic space that reveals itself, but that still suggests the square without hiding the different parts. Yeah, yeah. It’s a lot’s been written recently, really, from the time of George Pavel Frunzey on the different perspective systems used in icons. Inverse perspective has sort of stolen the scene, but in fact, I figured there are about seven types of icon perspective. One is multi-view perspective, like in this one. It’s as though you’re viewing the square or cubic, whatever it is, New Jerusalem from all different angles at once. So all gates are visible. Of course, in God, God is not limited to space. So in general, an icon confounds our rational faculty to help us to go from there, which is good, but it has limitations into the noose, into the noetic faculty, which can… This is the real tesseract, not this scientific stuff about four dimensions. This is an actual tesseract, but you can show everything simultaneously in a space. But it’s interesting to think about that, what you said, because in some ways, if you think of the… I would say that this is a meaningful cubism in some ways, where the cubists did it in a manner that was aesthetic and not necessarily trying to point to meaning, but now you’re flipping space and you’re showing all these different facets simultaneously, but rather to reveal something about creation and the relationship between one and 12. So I think it’s a great… I think in fact, probably all of the, as it were, discoveries, which are really new discoveries, of 20th century art, color field painting, for example, saying, well, the surface is flat, so why try to make it three dimensional? They’re using perspective or whatever. All these things, really, have always been in the sacred tradition. But as you say, cubism, for example, is always there in the icon, that we kept it in the realm of the sacred, just haven’t taken that one aesthetic tool and sort of separated it, which is really exciting. I think a lot of research has been done on a lot of the orthodox roots of early modernism, often in a based way, but it’s there. It’s not actually a discovery at all. Yeah, and there are ways that we can recapture. I mean, I think that’s some of the work that you’ve done, Father Silouan, many of the Romanian artists as well, who are trying to kind of say, okay, well, let’s get… We can also take some of the best elements of these traditions and reintegrate them into a vision that is hierarchical and doesn’t try to just transgress to transgress, but rather is able to kind of mold our vision so that we can have a better insight. So tell me a bit about the carving that’s back behind you, because it’s like you’re tempting me by putting that up, right? I’d put it there for you, Jonathan, just for you. Yeah, this has been quite a complex commission. It’s the three, the years and the furnace, and it’s commissioned for an orthodox church to have an interior door, and it’s going to be the upper panel of the door. So it’s carved and… But this will be in a door? Yeah, set into a door. Yeah. It’s quite large. You can see from the… Yeah. Quite large. Nice. Whatever that is. Three feet, three feet high or something. Yeah, it’s about… Beautiful. I mean, it’s also, I’m so jealous. I’ve never had the chance to do a color carving, to have it painted. It’s quite, it’s really amazing. Wow. I found sometimes it’s quite good to polychrome. As long as you do justice to the wood carving, you don’t have to sort of take it and paint so you can see the wood coming through. Because you don’t depend so much on good lighting to show the detail. With low relief, if the lighting isn’t good, it just looks a bit like a blob at a distance. And so, yeah, you’ve done it with stain instead of painting it like… Yeah, I used oil paint, but put lots and lots of turpsin, so it’s almost for stain, really. So I semi-sealed the wood first and then used oil. You can’t really use any temper in a situation like this. And then put a thin coat of varnish and waxed it over the top. Yeah. It’s really beautiful. Is that the only… Are you going to make other panels for this? This one. Yeah. Yeah. I hadn’t seen you carve in a while though. Have you? Because it seems like this is, it’s been a while since I’ve seen you make such an elaborate carving. Yeah. Well, I don’t suppose so many people commission carving, so I just do what I’m commissioned to do. But yeah. I did two carvers about two years ago, but yeah, they’re big gaps where I don’t get anything. Stone is more common because it can be part of an icon screen or whatever. Actually, I don’t know about you, but I find stone easier to carve than wood with wood. There’s so many chisels and you’ve got to worry about the grain. Yeah. Stone, you just have flat chisels pretty much. And then wood, it’s like this whole… And you have to keep them super sharp. With stone, you don’t have to think about it so much. Sharpen them a little. Not too much. Even if you don’t want them to be too sharp. Yeah. I prefer carving stone by far. Yeah. And primarily soapstone, isn’t it? Or steatite rather. Yeah. That’s mostly what I’m doing. Have you ever tried to carve the steatite? Well, you really kindly gave me a piece, but I just haven’t got round to carving it. I really like to. Yeah. Once you carve that, you won’t be able to match. You’ll start writing me emails saying, Jonathan, I need more of that steatite. Yeah. I have carved ivory. That’s a bit similar, I suppose, in that it’s got no grain at all and very dense. When I was at Mount Athos, I was commissioned to carve something for the patriarch. There’s a wood called flamuri, which I never come across before. It’s virtually grainless. It’s not boxwood, but a bit like boxwood to look at, but not as hard as boxwood. I did an icon of the Portatis icon with it, and I really enjoy that. Have you ever tried carving boxwood before? Oh, yeah. Yeah. It’s really amazing. Yeah. It’s good stuff. Yeah. All right. One thing I wanted to say about the icon is the challenge was being pedagogic in the sense of teaching, but I just don’t like images that are just like illustrations of things you read in one’s mind. That takes away that soul-ishness of the work. I think the work of art should always hit you right in the soul of Texas, and then you can unfold the inner meaning. I just found the only way to get that unity was to really have a reduced color scheme. Basically, it’s virtually all green and blue, which would be close. Then I started reading a book, this one, actually. I’ve got it here. She uses the Greek term inargia, not innergia, but inargia, which is really the immediate impact of aesthetics on the soul. If they’re done in the right way, then it brings us closer to God rather than just being titillation. Apart from all the content of the icon, I really wanted it to have it beautiful in its own right, and the composition, and the color. I was really struggling with that, but then I found if I really limited the color palette, then the details there, it sort of becomes one. Yeah, because there are a lot of details, and you’re right. You could get distracted by all the little animals, and all the dinosaurs, and all these things. But like you said, you don’t have that experience. I think a lot of it is also because Christ, let me share this again. I think that it’s also because Christ appears very strongly, and the colors here, the kind of orange, yellow color, and also Adam and Eve. The characters in this center, because the colors are stronger there, then all these little details here, maybe at first seem ornamental. They kind of fuse together, but if you pay attention to them, you can see them. But they don’t call out. It’s like a limited those color palette of the trees and animals to the left and right. So they’re there, but they’re not different colors. If I put green leaves everywhere, then they’re respect from Christ. What is this here, this little image here? The lion with the kid, the prophecies of Isaiah. So you’ve got them there and on the other side as well. So it’s the prophecy of Isaiah that the lion shall lay down for lamb and so on. You’ve got on the right there, you’ve got the wolf. The wolf and hear the lion. And this is just a person that’s with them. The child shall put a hand in the asps fold. And also you’ve got dinosaurs eating grass there. So you’ve got this now. Yes, on the left there, you’ve got a tyrannosaurus rex eating grass on the left there. I have to say that the dinosaurs, they weird me out a little bit, because I would have put dragons is what I would have put in dinosaurs. I can put one in for you, just for you, John. If you did that, if you put a dragon in there just for me, I would be grateful for it. I should put that in. I’m putting notes down and everything. I’m enjoying it. So I’ll change it over and even around and I’ll put a dragon in. And so what tell us a bit about about your future plans because you’re in a new workshop now. You’re focusing on that giving some trainings and everything. Maybe tell people what you’re up to besides this particular image. Yeah, thank you. Yes, I just moved to a larger studio because my two previous apprentices, Jim Blackstone and Martin Earl have moved down to Chichester now. I was approached by them two years ago, the Anglican Cathedral, to help them set up a liturgical arts centre. So it has two elements to it. One is to train people to much higher standard, not just an icon painting, but fresco carving, that sort of thing. So Jim and Martin are heading that. But the second arm of the centre is to also educate priests and decision makers. And as much as anything, how to help them brief people like architects. If you’re lucky enough to someone like Andrew Gould who knows what they’re doing, it’s fine. But a lot of architects haven’t done church work. So A, we’re trying to get involved with seminaries, Catholic Anglican, Orthodox, to equip the decision makers just with the main principles of commissioning work. And priests can’t tell an architect, for example, or an iconographer how to do things, but at least they can say this is the atmosphere, this is the state of soul. This is how the liturgy operates. So what you do is got to work liturgically and spiritually, you know, basically how to give a brief. So anyway, Martin and Jim have gone down there. So that meant that I had space for more apprentices. So I have a lovely young man, 25 year old man from New Zealand, who’s joined me a few months ago. And then another is coming from New Zealand for a shorter apprenticeship. So yeah. For those who don’t know, like you’ve been following the whole story, the Snow White book that we published with Heather Paulington, you know, beautiful, beautiful book. And now Heather is studying with Aiden. She’s been studying now with you for a few months now. And I’m already seeing, we’re doing Rapunzel now, we’re doing the second book. And now all the stylistic choices that she’s making, I can see that she’s mastering folds and she’s mastering certain elements of iconography that, you know, take some time to dive in. And she’s creating these beautiful bridges between kind of secular illustration and iconography. And so I know that I have you to thank in large part for that. So I appreciate that. That’s been a real joy having Heather. I’m so pleased that she’d been working with you because it would have been a vision of hers to be a full-time liturgical artist. And it can be really hard to find an opening, but things open up very, very quickly for her. And I do go on about garments quite a lot. I tell my students, since I’ve run this three-year part-time icon course, faces, they’re not easy, but at least all faces are more or less the same. In the sense that they’ve got two eyes and nose and a mouth. But garments, draperies, so much more complex. There’s so much subtlety. And it takes a lot of work. So I really sort of hammer, it’s got to be a certain logic to it, that we transfigure the world, we don’t distort it. And I think a lot of iconography, it distorts folds, doesn’t show understanding. So I think I really, really like that. So I’m pleased that she’s coming along well. I think that’s definitely in your work, it’s something that I really appreciate because you can see that in late Russian iconography, especially at some point, the garments just become abstract shapes, which is beautiful to some extent, but at some point, it becomes almost disincarnated. And I think in some ways, even the fact that you started as a carver, and me also as an icon carver, the vestments have to make sense because or else you can’t carve it. If it’s just like lines and just abstract things, it looks horrible. And so this desire to kind of come back to something which, like you said, is both makes sense, but has a transfigured element to it. I think it’s definitely the way forward because at some point, the abstraction just falls apart and it’s just disconnect with reality. I think it’s a general principle of life, isn’t it? When I found the Bionidas, my spiritual father in Wales, in a blessed memory, he said that if you want to know God, you must know the soil from which you came first. If we try to leap to higher things, then we’ll crash down very quickly. So I think just understanding the laws in creation, like how a branch comes out from a trunk, for example, just basic things like that, all those should be embodied in the icon. Yes, I’m doing that. Some interesting fresco work, well, silica paint, probably rather than real fresco for apse. So things seem to go through different phases. There should be a lot of apsidal commissions at the moment, which is great. I love because that wraps around you, of course. And because there are apse in churches which probably won’t have scope for other work, you’ve got to say a lot, albeit hopefully with elegance in that one space. So that’s why I go back to these Roman apse, where you’ve got Christ and a few saints, but also the New Jerusalem indicated by Bethlehem and Jerusalem, and often sheep moving toward the center. So that’s like all of the faithful and time moving toward Christ. Yeah, and these, I think your intuition about apse is one that I caught right away when I started looking at your work and I thought was the right way to go. Because you see a lot of Orthodox churches end up in either Catholic buildings or Anglican buildings, and so they don’t have a dome. And so then they want to kind of maintain the iconography of the church of the dome with the apse. So they’ll end up putting the Virgin in the apse, but then they don’t know where to put Christ. And so they’ll sometimes like stick up like a flat disc, you know, at the ceiling. And there’s a perfectly Orthodox solution to this problem, which is to understand the apse as a little microcosm of the whole church and to have Christ at the top. Sometimes you can even have the Virgin underneath him. You know, you see images of that where you have Christ in glory and then the Virgin with child and the apostles. Like there are different ways to do it, where you can capture all the same symbolism, not in the same scope, but at least the essence of the same symbolism in the apse without distorting your architecture. Well, this is something, this is exactly what I’m talking about, the need to educate priests, seminarians, anyone who makes these sort of decisions. What you said, it’s just the most basic thing, work with what you’ve got and don’t try to make it something you’re to dissent. If it’s a basilica, treat it as a basilica, not a dome church. I don’t think it would require much time in a seminary to get these things across. You know, to three days you could, even in a day, the three basic principles could be communicated. So I hope that anyone’s listening to this podcast who can have influence in seminaries, please, please, I beg of you, you know, just have it as not optional, but mandatory for everyone in the seminary to have at least a day or two, not in how to pay the icons at all, but just principles. And, you know, and ask Jonathan and Andrew myself, you know, put down two sides of A4, the principles type in mind. I beg of you, whoever’s out there. We’ll make a video for you and you can just show it to the students. Like, we’ll do that. Yeah. So all of you are listening at St. Vlad’s, St. Ticon’s, you know, all these American seminaries and the European seminaries. Yeah, I think that’s a great insight. A great insight. Well, Aiden, thank you so much. You know, I always love talking to you and I cannot wait to see this image come to fruition. You know, I’ll, once you have pictures of you working on it, please send them to me and I’ll also share them because I think it’s going to be a wonderful work. Lovely. Good. I’m starting a Patreon site in hopefully a few days, might be because of your advice. So I’ll be putting updates on that as well, but I’ll let you know. All right. This is a way to support Aiden’s work. You know, the iconographers, they give their life to sacred art and give their life to the church. And so we need to, we definitely need to help them be able to do that. And so I will definitely be checking out your Patreon as soon as it’s up and I encourage everybody to go there. Thank you. Lovely to talk to Aiden. Thanks, Aiden. Great inspiration. Bye.