When I left the monastery, I returned to my teachers and to painting from life, but gradually my interest in icon painting grew. Since I was trained as a painter, the abbot brought in teachers so that I could learn iconography. Eventually, I wanted to try monasticism, and I went to a monastery in Georgia, where I lived for about fourteen months as a novice. O’Keefe: After my conversion to Orthodoxy, I began to intersperse my studies with monastery visits. Gould: Tell us how you decided to pursue iconography as a serious vocation. This led to many adventures and trials.Ī. Both John and Ilya, along with their families, are serious seekers, so I joined their search, soon joining them in the Orthodox Church. I was an atheist growing up, but by the time I went to Georgia, I was very hungry spiritually. Gould: And did you discover the Orthodox faith in Georgia as well? They helped me through many of my most difficult times, and to this day I still feel I am proceeding under their guidance, though I rarely get to see them in person.Ī. I became like a member of their families, ate with them, travelled with them, exhibited art, danced, sang, celebrated, and went through many adventures with them. For the final year of my studies, I went to Moscow where I rented a studio and studied under Ilya’s teacher, Nikolai Ilarionevich Kozlov, who gave me a very rigorous schedule of academic drawing work.įor me, the advantage of apprenticeship was the opportunity to develop such a bond with my teachers. The aim was always to train my eye to see things in relationship, and to express them as proportions. We spent time looking at the works of masters and discussing our work in this context. Throughout every task I was in dialogue with my teachers they corrected and guided me, and I watched their ways of approaching our subjects. We worked long hours painting and drawing portraits, still lifes, and landscapes, and I had various drawing exercises to do on my own. I chose this apprenticeship over college because it promised a more intensive classical education, but also because I had come to love and admire my teachers and their families, and I was enchanted by their way of life.Īs an apprentice, I lived at my teachers’ side, usually in Sighnaghi with John, but sometimes for a season with Ilya in a log cabin in a remote Russian village. My teachers saw that I was eager to learn, and they invited me to return as their apprentice after high school. I had never seen such a rich and adventurous culture. We put in long hours painting and drawing from life, but the summer was also saturated with amazing characters, Georgian song, dance, feasting, and spiritual activity. Sighnaghi is a mountaintop village overlooking the fertile Alazani valley where wine has been made for thousands of years, which stretches out towards the snow-capped Caucus Mountains. None of us anticipated the wondrous land that awaited us in Georgia.
FEMALE ICONOGRAPHER IN MALE ORTHODOX MONASTERY PROFESSIONAL
I was the youngest in the group the other four were professional artists. He invited me to join a group of five painters from America for a summer painting practicum in Georgia led by him and his classmate, Ilya Yatsenko. He studied in the studio of the master Vyacheslav Nikolaievich Zabelin, becoming the first American to complete the institute, and then moved to the village of Sighnaghi in Georgia where he married Ketevan Mindorashvili, the leader of a Georgian sacred/folk ensemble.
He had gone from MICA in Baltimore to the Surikov Institute in Moscow seeking the most intensive classical art education he could find. In my eleventh grade year, I met a man named John Wurdeman, from my hometown of Richmond Virginia, who lived as an artist in the Republic of Georgia. My work at that time was experimental, postmodern, and often quite dark. In my teenage years, art became the central way I related to life and explored who I was. Growing up, my three brothers and I were all inspired to identify with visual art, and we are all still pursuing it in various ways. From his childhood, my father had a talent and zeal for drawing, which he followed through study at Parsons School of Design, at Cooper Union in New York City, and into his career in marketing. O’Keefe: My desire to be an artist was inspired first of all by my dad. How did you wind up so far from home, and what was that experience like? You studied painting in the Republic of Georgia. Gould: Seraphim, tell us about your background as an artist. It is clear from the quality of this painting that Seraphim is one of the most talented up-and-coming iconographers in the USA.Ī. Cyprian Orthodox Church in Midlothian, Virginia. We are pleased to feature his very interesting life story here, as well as images of his most recent major project – wall paintings at St. Editor’s Note: Seraphim O’Keefe is a promising young iconographer who has already done some remarkable work.
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