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The Way It Is<br />
Icon Writing<br />
Text and photos by John Harrison<br />
For some years now, a group of foreigners has been<br />
studying icon drawing, as it is called, in Moscow under<br />
the auspices of the Prosopon school. I caught up<br />
with them in the Philippine embassy of all places in<br />
November where Irina Alexevna Vorfluseva was taking<br />
a group of ten students through the basic stages of<br />
icon writing. During a break for lunch, I talked to Irina<br />
and some of the other students about the course.<br />
This was their 4th week, and some of the icons were<br />
already incredibly beautiful.<br />
How long has this group been functioning<br />
for?<br />
About 16 years.<br />
What is the school called? (Irina)<br />
The school is called the Prosopon<br />
School of Iconology:<br />
www.prosoponschool.org<br />
Prosopon is a Greek word that means<br />
image, or action of God. We use this<br />
Greek word because icon drawing came<br />
to us from Byzantium. The word means<br />
image, or mask of the unseen face of an<br />
unseen God. Some of the traditions are<br />
pre-Christian.<br />
20 January 2011<br />
How do you teach this? (Irina)<br />
There is a very well worked out method<br />
established in Russia by Vladislav<br />
Andreev who was born in 1938 in St.<br />
Petersburg. After finishing art school<br />
he travelled around Russia in search<br />
of groups of religious believers who<br />
still kept the traditions of icon drawing<br />
going, in the depths of Soviet Russia.<br />
He emigrated to America in 1979 and<br />
taught icon drawing in New York for ten<br />
years, and has become something of<br />
an icon master in the west, and in Russia<br />
too. At the present time, as art of the<br />
Prosopon School, about 20 icon draw-<br />
Irina Vorfluseva<br />
ers are working on various projects in<br />
Kostroma and Moscow. The classes we<br />
have here today are specially organised<br />
for foreigners to familiarise them with<br />
icon art and with the traditions of Orthodoxy.<br />
Icon drawing is more than simply an<br />
artistic experience, it is spiritual in that<br />
it isolates a person from the material<br />
world and helps that person attain spiritual<br />
qualities. I can’t say that we do an<br />
awful lot on the spiritual side with this<br />
particular class, it is specific. Usually we<br />
hold all day classes where we spend half<br />
of the time studying Orthodox theory,