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Workshop on writing icons offered this summer in Lexington
2003-035-6
2/18/2003
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[Episcopal News Service]
A 'Six Days of Creation' Icon Writing Workshop will be offered this summer in Lexington, Kentucky, organized by St. Andrew Orthodox Church, exploring the dynamics of icon writing and the place of icons in Christian worship and the history of art. The July 27-August 2 workshop will be on the campus of Lexington Theological Seminary.
In addition to St. Andrew and the seminary, the workshop is also sponsored by the University of Kentucky College of Fine Arts and the Gaines Center for the Humanities. Besides the intensive instruction by master iconographer, Xenia Pokrovsky, the worship offers a five-part lecture series by the Rev. Thomas Hopko, dean emeritus of St. Vladimir Theological Seminary in New York, and four scholars from the University of Kentucky which will host an exhibition of icons at its art museum.
Although icons have always occupied a central place in the devotional life of Eastern Christians, both Orthodox and Roman Catholic, there has been a recent surge of interest in icons among western Christians. Icon-makers inherit and transmit a millennia-old tradition where individual expression yields to a prescribed canon of palette and forms, according to background information for the workshop.
During the workshop each student will complete an icon which will be displayed at the reception for the Six Days of Creation Icon Exhibition at the university museum on August 1.
Pokrovsky began learning iconography in the 1960s when it was a dangerous endeavor in her native Russia still under the atheistic yoke of communism. Yet she sought to fulfill her spiritual father's prophesy that she would become a leader in recovering and teaching icon writing throughout the world. She laments that, in the United States, the sacred art of icon writing is being turned into a commercial enterprise.
For more information call workshop director Mary Lowell at 502-868-5461 or visit the web site at http://www.standrewlexington.org.
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