In the Apostolic Nunciature in Canberra hangs an unusual portrait of St Mary of the Cross MacKillop, Australia’s only saint (to date). It’s not a sentimental rendering of Mary flanked by school children or Mary in the foreground of a bush landscape.
It is a transcendent vision of Mary’s familiar features framed in gold. Her eyes are contemplative but piercing. With an outstretched hand she beckons us into her golden aura. In the border are vignettes from her life story – Fr Julian Woods, the ramshackle school at Penola, school children at Kincumber, St Joseph, the patron saint of her congregation, St Peter’s Basilica, and Pope Pius IX. There are two exquisite illustrations of native flowers.
The artist who wrote – the word used for painting Byzantine icons – this striking image is Canberra-based Sue Orchison.
She has devoted herself to iconography for the past 20 years or so. Her works hang in cathedrals, churches, and private collections around Australia.
Not so long ago, the only Byzantine icon familiar to most Latin-rite Catholics was the image of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, a 15th-century image from Crete which is a precious treasure of a church in Rome.
But more and more sacred spaces in Australia are displaying Byzantine style icons nowadays.
What is their appeal, The Catholic Weekly asked Orchison.
“I didn’t understand icons when I was younger,” she said, “but when I started painting them 20 years ago, I found their richness and a certain pull of my spirit towards the icon.
“The icon is meant to be a doorway into the eternal and it has a power that maybe some of our Renaissance-type icons don’t possess. They’re more paintings that you’re looking at, whereas an icon is an image that you’re engaging with, a prayer whose focus is to be in the presence of God.”
The most renowned of Russian iconographers, the saintly 15th century monk Andrei Rublev, who was often referenced by St John Paul II and Benedict XVI, prayed and fasted for months before beginning his icons and frescos.
As Cardinal Ratzinger (later Benedict XVI) wrote in his book The Spirit of the Liturgy, “The icon comes from prayer and leads to prayer.”
Orchison agrees. “I always say the iconographer’s prayer before I start,” she says.
“When I get stuck, I turn to the Lord and say, I can’t do this. Help me! And always, the problem is solved. God is there wanting this icon painted (or written). And he wants it for the world to go out. So he’s on my side.”
Most contemporary art is an exploration of the self, so icons, with their traditional media, strict conventions and highly stylised techniques for portraying people, are perplexing anachronisms for many artists. Doesn’t the lack of originality bother you, The Catholic Weekly asked Orchison.
No, she responded. Before she discovered iconography, she loved painting portraits in pastels. It was a challenge to capture a face and to convey what was behind the eyes. A graduating doctor, for instance, might be holding a testamur and a mortar board signifying his achievements.
The icons which she creates today are portraits, but they also are windows onto a spiritual life beyond the workaday world. “It’s not a hobby, but a vocation,” she says.
“An icon is theology and colour, so the guidelines and the boundaries and the prototypes are important for me.”
“Originality,” so esteemed by contemporary artists, doesn’t capture the kind of challenge that an iconographer faces. Orchison compares it to the skill of a pianist interpreting the score for Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata.
“In every icon I paint – with gold leaf and pigments from the earth – I am reminded that our making mirrors God’s own creative act,” she told the Australasian Catholic Press Association Conference earlier this year. “We are co-creators, invited to participate in God’s great work of restoration.”
But she has created many icons of unfamiliar saints who lack centuries-old symbols to guide her.
Earlier this year her icon of St Patrick was hung in St Patrick’s Cathedral in Melbourne.
She has also created icons of St Kevin of Glendalough, an early Irish hermit and abbot; St Hildegard of Bingen, the mediaeval polymath whom Benedict XVI made a doctor of the church; the mediaeval English hermit and mystic Julian of Norwich; St Boniface, the apostle to Germany; and St Bakhita, a former slave from Sudan.
Clearly, the ancient art of “writing” icons has lost none of its power to draw people to God. As Orchison told journalists earlier this year, “Beauty is God’s whisper that says: ‘Look, I am here.’”