https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=1iEQHsNI6W0
I move around a lot so probably better this way. It’s great to be in Saskatoon. I had never been to Saskatoon before and I got this very strange message from Troy who said we want to organize an icon carving class in Saskatoon. To be honest with everybody, I get those kinds of messages all the time. People who ask me and say, oh we want to organize this thing, this event, this workshop or whatever and most of the time people have good intentions. Most of the time it doesn’t pan out. It’s not that easy to find people who want to learn to carve icons. It’s a bit of an esoteric art. It’s not that known. So Troy says we’re going to have this icon carving class. Would you come? I usually just say sure, organize it and I’ll come. And then usually I never hear from the person again. So that’s the conversation. It’s a good way to do it. But then Troy keeps writing me and he says how many people would you like? I said if there’s a minimum of maybe seven people I’ll do it. And then he said no but what’s the maximum you want? Maybe ten people is a good number. Maybe twelve would be max. He said well I don’t think we’ll be able to do under fifteen. And then maybe we’d have kids there. I’m thinking about twenty. Who are these people? So it’s been a joy really. Tomorrow is our last day. It’s been a joy to be here and to discover these large Catholic families and their amazing kids who are able to spend from eight to five working on an icon. It’s astounding to me. It’s very encouraging to me and it gives me hope to find this community. And so I guess that’s what I then I wanted to offer back maybe or to talk about is to talk about hope and to show some glimmers of hope for those of us who love the Christian tradition, for those of us who love the beauty which has been developed in the Christian way and have sadly seen our world move away from it, have sadly seen our world embrace a almost cult of ugliness. But there is this glimmer of hope that we’ve seen in the past few years. And so that is what I wanted to talk about with you tonight. This is Jonathan Peugeot. Welcome to the Symbolic World. So if you look at the screen, the first image that I am presenting to you is in 1936, the first image that I am presenting to you is in 1936, the first image that I am presenting to you is in 1931, Stalin finally had enough power to destroy the largest church in Russia, Christ Savior’s Cathedral, and he blew it up. So this is a picture of the actual explosion and fire due to Stalin destroying the cathedral. They estimate that the communists destroyed about 30,000 churches during their time. Burnt, a little blown up, turned into stables, turned into whatever, a decimation of an ancient tradition. And so in our world, we have been lucky. We’ve had freedom, and we haven’t seen this kind of persecution, at least not, you know, maybe since the French Revolution, we haven’t seen that type of destruction. But what we’ve been faced with is rather a kind of suicidal desire for ugliness. And so instead of having our church blown up, our church is blown up, we are given these churches. I don’t know. I don’t even know where that is. And I don’t think I didn’t really want to know. We have a church in the Middle East, we have a church in Quebec, and when they built it, it was this beautiful futuristic project of this modern building, and everybody was happy about it. But the people in the city basically said, you know what, it looks like a handbag. And so from then on, this church has been known as the handbag church. You go online on Wikipedia if you want to know earlier about this church, you can write, l’Eglise Sacosh, the handbag church. And so this is what we’ve sadly been faced with. And we’ve seen it not only, we’ve seen it within Christian culture, but obviously even more we’ve seen it in the secular culture, where we’ve actually seen an assault upon the entire tradition of our fathers, the entire tradition of Christianity. I don’t want to dwell on the ugliness, but here of course is an image by Francis Bacon, representing the Pope, as was a famous painting of the Pope by Titian, making him into a monster and putting him in this space of dead carcasses. And this artist, Francis Bacon, is a great example, is a great example of this lauding of decomposition and this praise of death, of ugliness, and also of shock value. That’s one of the things that is the most difficult for people to understand, especially when we look at all the modern churches, which were oh so modern in 1950, and now look oh so dated in 2019, it’s because we began to mistake the titillating feeling we get when we see something we’ve never seen before, this kind of desire for novelty and for surprise, we confuse that with actual beauty. And that’s why all these modern churches age so badly, just like shag carpeting or anything that was very much in fashion and then quickly went away from fashion because it was appealing to that desire for the new. And if you look, if you read the Church Fathers, you read the ascetic fathers, they actually describe this passion and they link it to a sin. They would call it asidya, and it was this boredom, this kind of desire to be titillated, this boredom with what we have and a desire, constant desire for the new. The demon of our world is basically asidya, the demon of asidya. And so we’ve had to face that. And then the final type of ugliness we’ve had to face is just the ugliness of the, you know, this ugliness, the ugliness of the banal strip mall, highway with signs, random, whatever, everybody trying to get your attention, to buy something, and no sense of proportion, no sense of beauty, but just really a kind of… And you know, it’s so funny because we’re so used to it, right? We’re so used to it. Anybody who, for example, has taken the time to go to Europe to visit an old city, or to even go to the old part of Montreal or Quebec City, all of a sudden you are surprised and you see this harmony, this organic harmony which just coexists and this natural beauty which is both planned, both organic, both hierarchical, but also very, a little bit of chaos, but nothing like the kind of madness that we have to face every day that has become our landscape basically. I just want to give one more example. And then within the church we’ve had, we’ve had these assaults, and some of them are like this. This, I’m sure the person who made this image was well intentioned, that it was not out of hostility to Christ or hostility to the church, but it does end up looking like superheroes I don’t know, playing around. I’m not sure exactly what it’s supposed to represent, but even within the Christian tradition we’ve had hostile images that are presented. I want to show you an image. This is called Christ with hangers. And you can see it’s actually right now presented in a church by an artist called David Mack and it’s just what it says, it’s what it is. It won a prize in a contemporary art competition to have Christ on the cross made with coat hangers. And there’s a little pun in there. It’s disturbing to the utmost extent. To think that this would win a prize of art and then would be put into a church. Yeah. All right. So I want to bring you back to this image, this image of this destruction of the, of the cathedral. And the talk, the talk that I gave today was the title was given by Troy because I was I was not answering his emails and he said, I’m just going to give the title for the talk. And he said it would be Beauty Among the Rumors, I think, was the title. And that really evoked for me the image of this situation. And as you know, I came into the Orthodox Church and so I was in the church. And I was in the church. And I was in the church. And so I came into the Orthodox Church. And so this is what the Orthodox Church had to deal with this attack, this desecration, the mere destruction, but not only destruction, but infiltration of the Orthodox Church that happened in the time of communism. But in that, yeah, in that rubble, in that moment of deep despair, that’s where also this seed of hope is born. That’s also where all of a sudden these little lights, these little flickers appear. And because of the darkness, because of the rubble, those lights, those little seeds, they seem so much brighter at the same time. And so in the, at this time, around 1930, up to about 1950s or 1960s, there are almost no artists, Christian iconographers in Russia or in Greece. It was dead. There was almost nobody. The only people who were able to keep, let’s say, the tradition of icon painting alive were what we call the old believers. They’re actually a schismatic group that were constantly hiding from the church and hiding from the authorities, but they were able to somehow preserve this tradition within this attack. And so some of the emigres who left Russia during the revolution and because of the revolution ended up in France, and among those emigres, this new little bastion of thought, this new little bastion of creativity began to be born. And among those intellectuals, a lot of the Orthodox theologians we know today come from that time, from that Paris, we call it the Paris School. And among those, there was a man named Leonid Uspensky. And Leonid Uspensky took it upon himself to renew the art of iconography. And they scoured old books, tried to meet with old people, tried to find what he could, the writings that he could, the councils that he could, whatever it is that he could find to try to reinvigorate this almost completely abandoned forgotten art. And so he tried how he could. He didn’t completely know what he was doing. He wasn’t even trained by a master. He was figuring it out. And he wrote some books, books about interpreting the icon, book about the theology of the icon, and painted icons. And he did that his whole life and remained a rather poor individual his entire life. But there it was. There was that little seed, that little seed that at first looked like nothing. It looked like this one man who here he is writing these books, here he is in his garage in France, leaning over his table and painting these little icons. But what he would like would become this raging fire. And we’re going to see it happen before your very eyes. That’s what I’m going to show you tonight. And so among all of these little icons, among those people there, there was also another priest. His name is Father Gregory Krug, who also tried to find a way to paint these icons once again. And interestingly enough, Father Gregory looked also, as much he looked at the ancient art of the church, he also looked at modern art as well. And so there’s a little bit of modern art in what he’s doing, but trying to keep it very tightly held by the traditional canons of the church. So there’s this interesting thing that’s going to happen. You’re going to see it develop also. In Greece there was a little mirror of a Spentzi in Greece. His name is Fotis Kontoglou. And Fotis, same thing, on his own, alone, with no one, was a secular artist. He had learned to paint in school. There were no icons left, pretty much no icon painters left. And he, on his own, decided to start up. And he started with this style that was a little more naturalistic. And as he moved on and he discovered and he studied and he looked at the ancient masters, he went towards this more hieratic, you could say, or more kind of abstract style. And if you look at an icon like this here, you’ll find that if you go to many Greek churches if you go online, if you look, you’ll find icons painted in this style today all the time. And this is all due to Kontoglou. And so in the West, and in Russia, and in Greece, and then there are a few others, some in Georgia, some in Romania, these little seas, these one, it’s always the same story, one man, sometimes one woman, who, for example, I teach at a school of iconography which was founded by a woman named Ksenia Pokrovskaya. And this woman was a chemist in Russia. And because she was a chemist, she was hired by the Kremlin to restore icons, restore the ancient ones that they had ripped out of the churches, put in museums, but they were falling apart. So she was hired to restore them. So she had to study them, she had to cut them off and look at the different pigments and look at all the different things. And so she discovered how the ancient icons were painted. And then, while she was being hired by the communist government to restore icons, she was secretly painting them and secretly teaching others to do it as well. So they would meet in basements, they would meet in places where they wouldn’t have the ears of the government and they’re in the guise of her official role as a restorer, as someone who worked for the government, then she was able to light those little flames. And so as we come to the fall of the wall and the, let’s say, the freeing of the Eastern Bloc, we hear, and a lot of people hear about this renewal of Orthodoxy, this renewal of Christianity in the East, in Russia, in Romania, in the United States, in the East, in Russia, Romania, Serbia. And the way that it’s portrayed for us in the media here is usually that it’s all political. It’s all Putin, it’s all this political ploy to control the people and to make them do what Putin wants. Maybe, I don’t know. Despite that, to the last of my knowledge in terms of counting, since Putin has been in power in Russia, they have actually built 20,000 churches. And so Stalin destroyed 30,000, Putin built 20,000, so he’s not done yet. Maybe he’ll replace all the ones that were destroyed by Stalin. But I want to tell you a little story to maybe help you understand how that little flame of love, of beauty, and the love of liturgical art can be rekindled. There’s a church outside of Moscow, it’s called the Church of the Protection of the Mother of God in Yatsenov. It is a gigantic church. It’s one of the biggest churches in Russia. And inside it, it’s covered in mosaics. It’s covered in gold mosaics, like in Venice. Gold mosaics with figures everywhere, the entire church is covered. I think it’s the second most covered church in terms of its interior of mosaics. And interestingly enough, the model for their Christ is actually the image which comes from Sicily, from those churches built with a mix of Romanesque and Byzantine style that we find in Sicily. So the floors are all marble floors in 12th century Cosmetic style. You know, everywhere it’s gold, there are chandeliers everywhere. I’ll show you some pictures of the dome and some of the marble revetments. There is no single large donor for this church. They received donations from 800,000 people to build this church. They did not have enough money to hire all the artisans or all the priests or all the artists or all the people they would need to build a church. And so the entire church, all the marble, all the mosaics were all done by volunteers. People would show up in the morning and then there was one person who was hired and who would give them the task for the day and the whole thing was made by volunteers. They didn’t have enough money to buy the tesserae, those little glass tiles that you get from Italy which are quite expensive, and so they made their own. And for the gold tesserae, people would send their earrings, their rings, their jewelry to the mail to the church and they melted it down and they built this church. And so that is a miracle and that is something which you can’t fake that. You can’t convince me that this is a Psyops. It’s an amazing testimony to the faithful who have awoken to their faith and awoken to the beauty that is possible. Now, to be honest, the Christians in Russia are still the minority. The Christians in Russia are not the minority. They’re still a minority. People who are baptized are still minority. People who are married in the church are still a minority but they have the fire. They’re the ones who are moving. They’re the ones who are making things move because they have something to fight for. They have something that has value. They’re not just sunken in their nihilism as so many of us are around us today. When was this built? It was built not very long ago. It was built not very long ago. I think it was finished about four or five years ago. I don’t think it might not even be totally finished. Like the outside, it might not be totally finished. And so this is one example but all over Eastern Europe there are churches being built. These monuments, crazy monuments, this is a church, this is the cathedral in Montenegro and it is completely traditional in its structure. It has beautiful ornamentation but the architect created this hierarchy of materials where he started out with these very raw blocks of stone and then as you ascend the church the stonework becomes finer and finer until at the top you have all these very little stones that are all hand carved and all done. So it’s an amazing church. I’ll give you a sense of the size of the church. And all around the outside they have all these yeah, I’m just showing you that for me. All around the church they have all these beautiful carved icons that are on the outside because they’re stone, they can survive the outside so they have all these, in these kind of raw blocks of stone you’ll find all these different carved icons on the outside. And on the inside it’s all once again gold and painted icons and chandeliers, it’s a stupendous thing. I want to show you a picture of the cathedral in Bucharest. Maybe some of you have seen it, it’s not finished yet but this is just what it looks like as it’s being built. I’ll give you a bit of a sense of what’s going on here. And so this is something that is happening. It’s happening now. This is happening right now, it’s happening all over. And that little flame that was lit by those first iconographers, those first people who rediscovered the church of the Lord and wrote about it, talked about the sacred meanings, talked about these sacred patterns that we find, this relationship between the liturgy and the architecture and the icons and how it’s this giant, huge, huge, huge, huge, huge of the icons and how it’s this giant dance, this giant pattern puzzle that all comes together and that you can’t separate it, you can’t pull it apart, you can’t completely separate the architecture of the church from the liturgy, from the things that are represented in the church, it all goes together like one giant cosmic dance. And so from that there is this whole flowering of iconographers, of painters. And there was that first generation that I showed you, Ustensky and Kontoglu and a few others in Russia and in Greece and a few other countries and now we have entire schools of icon paintings. We have masters who show the way and people follow them in different directions. And so there’s a variety of styles and a variety of explorations happening but all really tied into that traditional spirit and a desire to revive this traditional art. So I’m gonna show you a few examples of these artists and then I’m gonna start to show you a bit of my work. So this is Father Zenon. So Father Zenon, he is one of the visionaries of liturgical art right now. He is a, he’s an amazing artist in the strict sense. He’s an amazing draftsman, he’s a virtual, so in terms of painting, he’s just an amazing artist. But what he’s doing is he is plunging into the entire history of Christianity. And so he is, so for example in this image you’ll see a more kind of traditional Byzantine Russian image and then this icon that he painted, the other one of Christ entering into Jerusalem is based on Armenian art. And so he goes into Armenian art. He went into Russian Byzantine, he went into medieval, he painted some churches that have Romanesque style that are very simple, kind of like Spanish Romanesque that’s very abstract. And then he kept going and going and going and he started to paint in sixth century in caustic and he started to paint in frescoes that look almost as if they were in the catacombs. And so he’s plunging into the entire history of art and he’s just plunging into the whole history of art and just exploring like a little child who’s just exploring and saying oh this and that and this and that and this. And he does everything with absolute virtuosity and working towards what I believe is to be a synthetic language, to work towards a synthetic language of Christian art which takes into consideration all the best aspects of this iconographic style as it presented itself all over the world and trying to bring it together and show the threads that connect everything together. So he’s an amazing artist. I’m giving you all these names and you can all look them up on your own afterwards if you want. One of the most surprising revivals of liturgical art has been in Georgia. Georgia has a very particular style, a very kind of bold style which looks a little bit like let’s say early medieval art in France or in Spain. It’s very bold and very abstract. So there’s been a whole revival of painters and artists. Here’s an example of a dome mosaic. You can see in a sense of the size of the mosaic and you see the person standing into it. I have not seen as bold an image of Christ if you look at just the expression on his face, that strength. We’re so afraid to show that now. We’re so afraid we want Jesus to be nice. Jesus is nice, yes, yes, he is nice. But he’s also the Lord of all and the King of kings. And so to see, to me, to see that face that has a certain severity and a certain presence, to me that scene that gives me hope myself. And one of, and the, let’s say the, the kernel of this movement, like I said, it always starts with one person and his name is Amiran Goglitz. It’s hard to, I didn’t write his name, so Goglitz. He’s, and the same, he had the same story as so many. He started by restoring icons for the government and then slowly falling in love with this language and learning the inner workings of the language and creating a new image of Christ. He’s learning the language and coming to create a very, very beautiful style that joins the best of Byzantine art with the Georgian art. And Amiran was commissioned by Pope Benedict to replace the icon not made with hands because the icon not made with hands had become so covered and so dark that you can’t see the image anymore. And he was in the service during Easter, and so the Pope commissioned Amiran to make the icon which would serve liturgically at that moment. So this is the image that he made. And so in Romania we have everything from an exploration of a very deep classicism and this kind of virtuosic, luscious classicism that we see in some artists. This is Father Iliu Boveanu and I’m gonna forget his name, Daniel Neculi here. Everything on that side, and then we also see certain strains that actually kind of are exploring a little bit of a modernist sense, a little bit of those modernist, let’s say, composition. And certain sensibilities which are not as traditional are still interpreted within the traditional frame and within the traditional, let’s say, canonical world. And so obviously these types of images will provoke discussion, will provoke a lot of people. Some people are fine, they go too far, but the discussion is a real live discussion that’s happening and people take sides and people talk about it. If you’re interested in this discussion, I edit a journal called the Orthodox Arts Journal which is online and we feature a lot of all these artists from the most traditional to those that are pushing the limits that are trying to see how we can connect iconography to, let’s say, more modern art. And so that kind of brings brings a story to me. As, just as this happened, this kind of, let’s say, awakening out of the ruins of the modern world and we see this flowering now all over Eastern Europe, my little experience was something similar. I grew up, I was a Christian, I grew up a Christian in an evangelical church and obviously there’s a very, there’s a poverty of art in the evangelical church, it’s nothing, everybody knows, even evangelicals know that there’s a poverty of art in the evangelical church and I went to school, studied contemporary art and I just couldn’t get it to work. I just, I was studying contemporary art, I was doing really well in school. I finished, I actually finished first in my arts program, but I just couldn’t get it to work. I couldn’t connect being a Christian making contemporary art which is always so cynical, so removed from what they’re doing. You always, in contemporary art, you’re always making a comment on a comment on a comment of something. That’s not what I, I didn’t even know what I wanted yet. I didn’t even know what I wanted, but I had this yearning to, to somehow connect my faith with the art that I was doing and it just wasn’t happening. I spent my entire, I spent my entire bachelor’s degree trying to do that, trying to find symbolic ways of representing different stories from the Bible and trying to fit them together and to create all these images and it’s very funny because on the very last day of my degree, the professor who was kind of supervising me, they were giving us like a final evaluation and she sat me down and she said, she said, you know Jonathan, she said, don’t worry, you know, you’re getting all A’s, it’s fine, don’t worry, but what are you doing here? And she said, you really don’t, you really don’t belong here and you should go to seminary or something because, you know, it just doesn’t work and it’s so funny because I was, you know, 21 or whatever, it just rolled out my back, I didn’t take it, but she was right, she was so right, she doesn’t even know how right she was. She actually gave me the greatest service by telling me that, yeah, little did she know that I would really take her, her recommendation seriously and so, so having let’s say, struggled, I decided I’m going to give up art, I’m just going to, I was married at that point, you know, I found a job and I said, I’m just going to be a regular person, just nine to five, just going to throw, I’m just going to throw art out the window and that would be it because I just can’t, I can’t take this anymore. I destroyed all my paintings, closed down my workshop, that was it. I remember it’s funny because my wife, she just laughed at me, she’s just like, yeah, Jonathan, whatever, we’ll see, you know, for now, we’ll see what happens. And then almost immediately, strangely enough, after I kind of did that, almost immediately I started to discover this, this tradition that we all share, this beautiful, amazing story of Christian art which developed, you know, if you had gone into a church in the year 1100, let’s say, if you had gone to a church in Spain or a church in Syria or Constantinople or Sicily, you would have seen pretty much the same thing. Obviously, there would have been differences, you know, based on local styles or local, you know, local saints or whatever but you would have recognized Christ, you would have known, recognized His mother, you would have recognized several of the scenes that you were seeing because very organically, very naturally, a whole language of visual relationships developed in the Christian story. And there was a, you could only call a universal language of Christian art, Christian imagery. And it’s astounding. And so at that time, I just, I stumbled onto this medieval art and I’m looking at these medieval images and I’m seeing that, wait a minute, this is, there’s something going on here. First of all, visually. And second of all, all these images are all talking to each other. There’s this pattern between the different images and there are these, there’s these, let’s say these codes, you could call it, kind of a sacred algebra of imagery of things relating to each other. So it’s basically a language that’s being used and I realize this is it. This is what I’ve been looking for all my time in university and this is it. This is what I want. And at first, of course, I was like, well, too bad. The Middle Ages have been finished for a long time. So I don’t know, I’m not sure what to do with that. Maybe I could make contemporary art with medieval, no, that’s not happening. And so that’s when I discovered the icon. And I was like, I discovered the icon. And when I discovered Leonid Uspensky, who I talked to you about at the beginning, this Russian man who rediscovered the icon, who wrote about it, who wrote about its theology, who wrote about its history and who painted icons also. And so reading that book, following some priests who were encouraging me in that direction, I discovered the icon and I discovered orthodoxy. And I remember when I discovered medieval art and looking through all these paintings, looking through all these objects too, not just paintings, but obviously the reliquaries and the jewelry, everything about it was just so beautiful. And the architecture, I thought I had the secret prayer and the secret prayer that I could make that maybe one day I could make liturgical art. But it was very secret. I didn’t tell anybody because who makes liturgical art? That doesn’t happen today. So I’m not going to tell you the whole story of how it happened, but slowly that’s where I ended up. And so here I am today, strangely, making sacred art as a job. And so I’m going to show you some of my work and hopefully talk about it a little bit. And so when I had this strange little prayer that I had and I kind of secretly asked God that I would be able to make liturgical art, I also had a strange list that I had. And I had all these things that, if I could just make all these things, if I could make these images, if I could make a reliquary, if I could make a crozier, if I could make an altar, if I could, like I had all the things, if I could make those, if I could just make one of each, that would be amazing. And so what’s interesting is that I’m almost done with my list. I think there’s just a few things. I haven’t made an altar yet, but I’m making a crozier right now for the Catholic Archbishop of Montreal, so that’s going to go off my list. I’m working on that now. And so slowly I’m working on my list. So here this is an image of, for those who don’t know economics, this is an image of the baptism of Christ, so the image for theophanies, so the image for theophanies, and the image for the Nativity. And so this is carved in wood and this one is carved in stone. So one of the things that happened in this kind of revival of the churchical art is that at first it was painting. It was the painted icon, because that’s the main art of the Orthodox Church. But then the second generation, or maybe the third generation, then it became carving and embroidery and mosaics and all these secondary arts, you could say, also started to revive. So I’m like in the third generation. I didn’t have a teacher, so in terms of icon carving, I’m the first generation. There was no, there really weren’t any, the people who were doing it professionally in my, when I started, they were also all self-taught and so it’s like this, this is, there’s a new beginning, you could say. So here are a few more icons. So these both are in stone. Can everybody, did you know, everybody knows what that is? Yeah, so it’s an icon of Jonah and Saint Michael, the dragon. So here I wanted to bring a few more. These are more kind of, these are based more on Western types and so there’s Christ kind of represented as a Frankish king, maybe you could say. And then this is the creation scene from the church in Palermo, Sicily. So this is the mosaic that is on, in that church. So I also started to make miniatures. That was also a part of my, my hope that I could maybe one day make some miniatures. These are pendants for priests. So to give you an idea, that’s maybe about three inches, three inches. And that’s carved, both of those are carved in boxwood. All right, so these are, these are stone carvings that have in them semi-precious stones that are inserted as well and then some gilding to go with them. And what’s interesting about these images, it kind of shows you also the way that tradition works because no one has ever made images like this. There’s never been anybody who has made, you know, like, let’s say, marble or stone carvings and semi-precious stone inserts with gilding, you know, and then also some metal. That’s just not, it’s not something that happened. But if you look at it, you think, right, you could think, I mean, this is the impression that I get. I think like this could be a thousand years old, you wouldn’t know. But then no one has ever made that. So there’s something about a traditional view, vision of the world, something about a traditional way of engaging the world which unites the present and the past together. You know, and so there’s nothing nostalgic about these images. You know, there’s nothing sentimental where I’m hoping for a time past. These images are used in churches by people they’re prayed with they’re part of people’s life. They’re not for museums. I don’t want to make images for galleries or for museums. I refuse to do that. I want to make images for people who will use them in their prayer lives, who will give them to their priests or their newly baptized, you know, nephew or, you know, godson. It’s like that’s real art. That’s art that actually exists in the world that isn’t just a fetishized object of commercial exchange. It’s not an object of commercial exchange or prestige. So some of the things that I wanted to make of course also were liturgical objects. And so this is an altar cross which was made with a good friend of mine named Andrew Gould who’s a liturgical designer and he also designs churches in the US. You know, here in the north, so this, this, this, it’s interesting because here in the north where all the churches in Quebec, all the churches are becoming whatever, bars, condos, who knows? They’re all being gutted, you know, but even in the south of the US that’s not quite what’s happening. So my friend who designs churches, that’s what he does for a living, he designs churches and he builds these churches in the US. He built a Catholic church, a brick basilica in Greenville, South Carolina. You can find it online. It’s quite beautiful. So gospel covers. And I also had the chance to have Catholic patrons who have asked me to do some statuary. So I don’t make statues for orthodox patrons but when I get a Catholic patron who wants me to make some statuary I’m quite happy to do so. And so obviously diving into the medieval imagery, diving into the medieval aesthetic but then also with a hint of Byzantine let’s say flair to what I’m doing. And so these, like this statue could never have existed. It’s not, there’s nothing, it’s not a copy of anything. You know, it’s a traditional image that is not a copy of something. So she’s a, here are the crucifixes she made. And then here’s my, my Saint Michael. So that is the little message that I wanted to give everybody today. Hopefully it is, it is a small message of hope and it is also, I think it’s a message to remind us that it’s us. Right, it’s us, we’re the ones, there’s no one else. There’s no one else who are gonna do this. If you want an awakening of beauty, if you want an awakening of, of a remembering of all that our ancestors gave us of all this amazing, this amazing language that was handed to us you know, over the centuries that, that’s it, it’s us and all it takes is one, strange Russian emigre in Paris or some lady, you know, who’s a chemist in Moscow who just starts to take it seriously and to teach other people to do it and you know, and, and, and 30 years, 20 years later it’s a blazing fire. So, so hopefully that was my, hopefully I’m bringing you a bit of, a bit of hope for that. So, so that’s it. I’m bringing you a bit of, a bit of hope for that. So thank you very much. Okay, so before I start there is a, a nice lady who came to see me and she was very distraught by the fact that I spoke of Putin in a certain manner and wanted to remind you that Putin is a very ruthless politician to which I completely agree. I do not want people to think that I, that I approve of his methods or of his intentions and I mostly wanted to show what had happened since the end of, of a communism and especially contrast it to the fact that it is presented to us in the media as only a, a political play. Whereas I do believe that there is some of that happening but there is also these beautiful authentic stories like the one I told you about the church in Yassen Ebro. So hopefully that is clear. Alright, so some religious traditions design the architecture to accommodate their music which is chanting. How much is the acoustics a part of determining the architectural designs? Your focus is visual art it seems. Is there also a musical revival that is influencing how churches are now designed? And so yes, the design of churches in the Middle Ages were extremely influenced by acoustics and that is something that is being discovered even more now in recent times there have been some really fascinating studies that may be a little bit out there but are fascinating to think about where people have been comparing the iconographic program of churches to the architecture. And so for example they had certain domes that were made in a certain manner and then if certain tones were sung then the sound would bounce off that particular dome and would seem to emanate out of the image. And so there is this idea that somehow representing like they would represent angels or something like that and so then the singing of the choir would resonate in a certain manner that it felt like it was coming out of the church. Of the angels on the walls singing and so this is a theory that has been proposed recently and there is more study that is being done on the relationship between the acoustics the architecture and the iconographic program all working together in this kind of hole. Now in terms of designing a church for acoustics I have a friend his name is Andrew Gould I mentioned him I think during the presentation and he designs orthodox churches he is also a choir director a musician and one of the things that he does is design his churches for acoustics it is part of the way that he designed the church and luckily we have an entire tradition it’s not mystery you know the basilica structure the apse the dome all of these elements of traditional church architecture are also even though they have a powerful cosmic symbolism in terms of representing the dome of heaven which is on earth they also participate in the acoustics of the church and to the answer is there a musical revival in the orthodox church yeah there is a massive music revival in Georgia Georgian chants in Russia all over even in the US there are some composers who are composing new orthodox music who are interpreting orthodox music so it’s an interesting time and for Perish’s music it is the first reality in an orthodox setting it is more important than even the icons because it is every week it is all the time so getting the music right they have massive conferences in the US for choir directors for composers to come and participate in this this trying to get the music right and what does that mean in America in North America which tradition are we going to follow the Byzantine tradition with all that chanting or the Russian tradition with four part harmony so there is all this discussion happening right now so how did the artistic tradition first go off the rails and what role did Neon Batista Alberti play so my question is Alberti is the one who developed perspective is that right whoever wrote this question is that right yeah well you want me to make enemies here so if you want I do think and so many of you will not agree with me and that is totally fine I do believe that the artistic tradition began going off the rails in the Renaissance I do not believe that the Renaissance I do believe that the Renaissance was at its foundation a Christian movement I believe that at its foundation it was a revival of pagan thinking and a revival of pagan imagery which doesn’t mean that there weren’t beautiful things that were produced at the time and that doesn’t mean that everything that comes out of the Renaissance is bad but I do believe that that’s where things started to slowly go wrong and then you have this these pendulum swings that start to appear and so you have the Renaissance and this crazy one point perspective and then right after you have mannerism and a kind of excessive elongation of the figure and a kind of weird expressive movement then it goes to romanticism neoclassicism and so you have this pendulum it swings and swings and then goes into modernism and from abstract expressionism to hardcore linear modernism and so I think that’s sadly where it started and you can see it it’s not just a visual thing but also that’s the place where the traditional this universal language of signs or this universal language of ways of representing scenes that had very powerful symbolic meaning started to break down as the artist wanted to show their virtuosity wanted to show their capacity to innovate and didn’t seem to understand the structures that were there in the middle ages if you look at iconography in the middle ages or all over the middle ages the images speak to each other the images refer to each other and so certain signs that certain elements which appear in one image will reappear in another and then other elements will come in this one and so you have this discussion that’s going on so the way that it’s represented is completely creates this symphony you could call it like a visual symphony and within the church for example in the church the way that the images would be represented when they were painted was also related to the actual space so certain images go in a certain place and other images go in another place it’s not fixed it can vary but there is that whole thinking of how these images talk about the space so that’s something which started to become more and more arbitrary as time went on to a point where we just forgot what these images were about and what was part of them so yeah alright so if a person wanted to be part of a reviving Christian art would there be any other root other than iconography itself is it really the traditional beautiful language that can transform any medium any type of art okay so I believe that I believe there is I call it a hierarchy of art I think that liturgical art is the root that is it’s the most important art because it is the art which is made expressly in the service of God which is made expressly to serve the sacramental life which is meant to hold the body and blood of Christ which is meant so all these objects that are made by us in within the liturgical life I believe that’s the highest that’s the highest form of art because that’s what’s most connected to our lives and then also pointing towards the divine within that is also this whole the whole liturgical life it’s not just the paintings it’s also the yearly cycle of us celebrating all these different feasts of celebrating of celebrating of celebrating of celebrating the Pentecost of celebrating the Ascension all of this all goes together so that exploring that exploring all those relationships exploring how they represent how they manifest themselves in the visual realm in the hymnography in also how they they recast a lot of the patterns that are already in scripture I think that that that is if you if you want to revive Christian art in any way if you want to write novels if you want to make movies if you want to make comic books that’s where you need to go no matter what it is you want to make if you don’t want to make liturgical art that’s fine but you need to know those stories you need to know your Bible you need to know the lives of the saints you need to know all those beautiful patterns so that when you end up writing something you can write a story that’s not at all Christian we were talking about this yesterday I forget who it was with Tolkien wrote this book Lord of the Rings there’s nothing Christian about it it doesn’t talk about Jesus it doesn’t talk about God it doesn’t talk about anything but then every Christian reads it and recognizes these patterns that remind them of their Christian tradition he had integrated those patterns so deeply that he can write a fantastical novel that has no characters that you recognize but you recognize that way more as a Christian story in parenthesis than you would have than going to see some horrible Christian movie about some horrible moral tale that you rent just bad stuff and so that’s it we have all these stories they’re so powerful and we’ve forgotten them so diving into that is what I think is the key so what do you consider to be your greatest achievement in your life oh my goodness horrible question can I answer that on my deathbed is that ok except for having kids and my family I would say that would be my greatest achievement in my life I don’t know it’s a very odd question to ask let’s say this in terms of the way you think you’re going to be I think let’s say this in terms of professionally you could say the thing that I’m the most joyful about is the fact that I can do this if you had asked me 10 years ago do you think you could make icons and then make a living and support your family I would have laughed in your face because yeah in America how is that even possible so I think that to me I would say that that’s the greatest blessing in my life at this time is to have this opportunity that has been kind of presented to me that I can engage in the world in this way alright is there something symbolic in the way icons this one has drawings on it very funny is there something symbolic in the way the icons hold their hands and especially fingers spaces between fingers there’s a drawing of a hand and the word space space okay so there is sometimes a symbolic meaning in the way that icons hold their hands not always there is obviously if you look at an icon of Christ often you’ll see him blessing with his right hand and if you see often I don’t know I don’t know if priests still do that today but traditionally the priest would bless with the same gesture that you would see in the icons of Christ and so there are different there are also different types of blessings that you see in the icons there are also there are also how can I say this there are gestures of supplication in icons too if you see a saint who have their hands out like this that’s a gesture of supplication if you see a saint that has their hands covered it’s a gesture of submission so you often see that sometimes you see angels they have all their hands covered and they’re kind of bowing and they’re holding this cloth so that’s a gesture of submission so there are all these little these little symbolisms of how hands are held alright and what is the deal with the big circle around the people’s heads what’s the halo anyway okay now I can answer that so the halo halo is it’s a glory it’s the glory of the person being represented think of it as a circle of light it’s the it’s a visual sign of that person’s holiness it came from pagan times it’s not a Christian invention the Romans represented halos around the emperors to show exactly that to show their glory this is the emperor and he’s a glorious person and then Christians took that and there was some hesitation for a while but they also had it for emperors and saints and then finally only for the saints and so today we only have halos for the saints and so you can think of it as a even as a crown maybe something akin to a crown this round golden thing that surrounds a person’s head and in Christ’s halo we always place the cross first to identify Christ make sure you don’t confuse because obviously Christ is different from all those other people he’s not at the same level and so to be able to recognize Christ put a cross in his halo but also to remind us of the cross and also to remind us of this idea that he’s he’s that middle he’s in the center and then there’s the four directions of space with Christ in the middle like a church that’s a cross and then there’s the middle under the altar you see Christ in the dome in the middle of the church in the middle of that cross so it’s kind of like the same idea so how does one approach the question of relativity in the idea of beauty how can one be sure well beauty like beauty has a objective aspect and it also has a subjective aspect okay let’s say it this way to the extent that we are in communion together that subjective aspect is going to mitigate itself and move towards the objective aspect and if we are in a society that is fragmented and is fragmenting then the opposite will happen we will become more and more capable of seeing the communal beauty or the beauty that binds us together and we’ll only be able to notice the beauty that titillates our individual passions and so that’s one answer the second answer is that we are human beings are beings of pattern that’s how we exist in the world we are pattern recognizing machines everything we know everything we see we are always seeing pattern we see meaning that’s what we are we are meaning creatures that’s what makes us in the image of God that’s what makes us different from the animals and so the objective aspect of beauty is the aspect of beauty which will be manifesting the cosmic patterns the same types of patterns that actually appear and we can notice in nature that we can notice in these geometric patterns that we see in a flower that we see in nature a flower has a as a pattern we can extract from that the pure pattern you could say because the flower also has a chaotic aspect to it it has an individual particular to it so we can abstract that out and then we can put it up we can make a same glass and we can say that’s a flower but that’s not the same flower it’s a purified flower and so it participates in the same types of patterns and so it’s not the same pattern that we find in nature but it is refined and we’ve pointed to the pattern and that’s how people recognize beauty so it’s variable it’s not just one thing there’s not just one thing that’s beautiful but our capacity to to engage in patterns and to see patterns and to be attracted to patterns is the objective you could say, aspect of beauty so hopefully that helps alright, so what would you say to a parish that is planning to build but is experiencing tension between those who would spend more on a building and those who would rather see those funds given to the poor so that’s a that’s a that’s a real tension and it’s a tension that’s been there from the beginning it’s been there forever there are homilies by St. John Chrysostom where he complains about churches that are too fanciful and he says that we should we should be giving to the poor and then he ends the homily by saying what if there’s gold in the end there’s gold left over then obviously that should be on the altar so he doesn’t totally say it’s horrible but he’s saying you should there’s a story I was telling at the table there’s a story of Emperor Justinian who when he built Hagia Sophia there’s this legend that he wanted to build I think it’s the actual doors of the church the doors of the the altar area something like that he wanted to build them out of gold completely out of gold and the patriarch said okay you can build that out of gold but if there’s only one beggar left in Constantinople after you’ve done that then you’ll have to answer for that on Judgment Day and so the legend says that he just made them out of silver so he got out of that one but that tension is real and you know it’s a complicated thing it’s not easy to be a Christian we need to we need to be attentive to the poor as Christ asked us to and to show love to those who who need that attention but we also are liturgical beings and we also glorify God by our hands by the things we do and we also show God’s glory to the world by doing that and for some reason our ancestors you know in Quebec you go up the coast of Gaspé you go up this coast and there are all these villages one after the other and you know these villages must have had like a thousand people 500 people who knows but every single village has a more and more beautiful church as you go it felt like it was like this competition about building beautiful churches so our ancestors these poor these poor farmers and then woodsmen these poor farmers who were on the coast of Gaspé who barely had anything they still wanted to build a beautiful temple for God despite all their difficulty despite you know having 14 kids that was still one of their priorities and so we need to do it all that’s the problem we just need to do both I don’t know how to help the actual practical part of that but I think we need to do both okay tell me when you’re tired of this because I could just keep going here okay you showed an example of icons with a modern influence what does modern mean in art is it the comment on a comment on a comment that you mentioned so when I use the word modern I meant it most at the beginning of the century there was a movement that was really a break of of a kind of neoclassicism and late romanticism the reason why some artists are looking to that period is because although there was a destructive aspect to their work there was also a desire to show spiritual aspects in their work as well so there was this kind of desire to to kind of call forth something spiritual in their paintings so you have artists like Kandinsky or Mondrian and several other artists that’s what they wanted because art had become just this strange photographic representation where we tried to represent visual reality to the best that we could and it was this feeling that there’s something missing there’s something missing and so some iconographers have the sense that if you look into modernism there are little strands of things you can pick in that you can take and that you can maybe use to integrate into icons but it has to be subtle those that do it in an extreme way they’ll just be rejected it’s not going to hold but there’s that little discussion happening alright I think we’re probably done, huh? everybody? are you good? I think it’s enough I think we’re done alright everybody, thank you so much thank you for coming