By Bedelia Melville
Year 11 students at Bethany College, Hurstville, along with four teachers and Fr Tomasz Lepek CSMA of St Michael’s parish recently attended an incursion on icons and other religious art.
As part of their Studies in Catholic Thought (SICT) course, they had the opportunity to learn from Australia’s leading iconographer, Michael Galovic.
The SICT course, taught in Years 11 and 12, is a one or two-unit subject structured around two central themes of the Catholic tradition. Namely, “Who is a human person?” and “The Good Life.”
Through exploring these themes, students gain a deeper understanding of Catholic belief, thinking, and tradition. A key component of the course is examining how the mystery of God has been expressed in various works of art, particularly icons and religious art.
Teachers throughout the Sydney archdiocese are receiving professional development on how to embed more liberal arts not only within the SICT course but throughout the religious education curriculum from Years 7-12.
The liberal arts is a Christ/Logos-centred educational approach that draws on both Catholic traditions and the history of human thought—faith and reason. The SICT course aims to transform and liberate a young person’s life through the contemplation of truth, beauty, and goodness through the Trivium approach of knowledge, thinking, and communication.
At a recent professional development day for teachers at Bethany College, members of the religious education department learnt about the need for teaching religious education through the lens of liberal arts because students were ‘drowning in AI and starving for truth’.
Furthermore, not only do Catholic educators have a responsibility to teach NESA and the RE curriculum, Catholic educators also have the responsibility to teach an awareness and a desire for a life of truth, goodness, and beauty.
In an effort to help build character and the cultivation of wisdom, it is through teaching about truth, goodness, and beauty that students are informed that there is more to human learning than the regurgitation of content, facts and information.
One of the ways Catholic educators can demonstrate this is to invite students to look beyond reality to the metaphysical world with curiosity, joy and wonder. This is to discover a transcendental connection in their world, nature and the work of human hands. Through the teaching of truth, goodness, and beauty students can be inspired to know and to love God, to live and see beyond the superficial and materialistic dimension.
To quote Pope Francis: “There are three languages: the language of the head, the language of the heart and the language of the hands; education must go forward by these three ways.”
On Wednesday, 6 August, as part of the liberal arts component of the course, students learned how it is possible to “make the invisible visible” and have an encounter with the divine through the ancient practice of icon painting and contemporary art. Students were able to observe traditional icons up close, as well as one contemporary religious artwork created by Mr Galovic.
Mr Galovic discussed the students’ ideas about what an icon is, comparing them to what icons actually are, with a specific reference to the Archangel Michael. He spoke about archangels in general before delving into the process of creating icons. Students learned about the traditional and intricate process, from gessoing the board to gilding and painting with egg tempera.
The technical aspects were followed by a discussion of the symbolism in colours, the differences between depictions of Christ and Mary, the significance of Christ’s halo and the reasons why icons show stylised, distorted images of the earthly realm.
Mr Galovic explained that contemporary religious art does not need to adhere to the inner structure or rules of traditional icons, as there is much more artistic freedom. To illustrate this, he had on display one of his own collages—an artwork showing a detail from the crucifixion, with just the arm and hand on the cross and an angel hovering above.
The presentation concluded with a projection of several contemporary artworks from a project he is currently working on titled Kyrie Eleison. Through these works, Mr Galovic exemplified the difference between traditional icons and contemporary religious art.
Students and teachers walked away with a deepened understanding and a renewed appreciation of icons and religious art in general.
Bedelia Melville is a religion and VET teacher at Bethany Catholic College in Hurstville.
