In Mary Katsilometes' small studio at the back of her house in Westmoreland, a wooden icon leans against the wall. It is unfinished, and I find Mary studying it, as she puzzles over a technical problem: In the story of the paralyzed man who was lowered through the roof for Jesus Christ to heal him, how can she show the figures outside and above the house, as well as the people inside?
This icon is one in a triptych of “Christ the Healer” to be installed soon in the chapel of the Catholic Medical Association in Washington, D.C. Mary is an iconographer, one who “writes” icons; sacred depictions of the lives of the Christian apostles and saints, the Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ.
She grew up on a sheep ranch in Idaho, the child of a Greek immigrant father and a Danish Catholic mother. The influences of the Greek and the Roman church inform her work of writing icons for prayer and veneration in churches, chapels and private homes. “I can teach anyone to write an icon,” she tells me. A person of joy, with bright brown eyes and a ready smile, Mary tends to downplay any difficulties in her life, including the broken shoulder from which she is recovering.
Surrounded by her tools, wood, paper and paint, we sit down to talk about her work, and explain what an icon is.
Mary Katsilometes: Sacred art is ubiquitous across all cultures and generations and people. It is sacred in that it is tied to a religion and a belief in God. In Christianity, we believe that our God has a human face. In the gospel of John it is written that God became man and that man, Jesus, is at the same time the word of God. That is the theology of the icon. This is part of the reason that we say that icons are “written,” not painted.
Because of that human face, our God can be depicted. Because he can be depicted, the Mother of God and the Saints can be depicted. And we [Christians] are all trying to base our own images on the image of Christ. It’s the Gospel in written form. This idea was codified in the church in the 8th century; the icon was recognized as being on par with the Scripture, that is, the Gospel written in paint and egg on wood, natural materials, in the same way that a book is written on paper and ink or whatever. The icon IS the gospel.
Iconographers do have to be good artists. If an image does not work on the aesthetic level, it will not work on the spiritual level. If it can’t be prayed with, it is not a good icon.
Jane Salisbury: How does one learn to be an iconographer?
M.K.: I tell my students: “If they want to learn iconography, stand in front of the icon for 10 years and let it teach you.”
It’s like Japanese calligraphy. You have to do it for a long time. It really was 10 years before I started getting good. The technical issues are really spiritual ones. “Put your ear on the icon and ask it what it needs from you,” I tell them. “You don’t need to be the one to tell the icon — it is the image of God and it can tell you.”
J.S.: How do you explain the power of an icon?
M.K.: Icons are acts of social justice. There have been terrible events, for example, the war in Iraq or the atrocities carried out in Latin America by people trained at the School of the Americas. I know someone in Juneau who carried an icon to a protest against the war in Iraq. He was pushed up to the front of the march with the icon, because he was carrying the face of God, the Prince of Peace, showing that God stands with us in all tragedies. The icon is a real presence, what has been called a “third reality.”
There was a time in my life when I asked myself, shouldn’t I be out in the forefront marching? A friend to whom I asked this question answered, “No, you are doing acts of peace and justice by writing the icon itself. It is an act of peace and justice because it is grounded in Jesus.”
All artists, writers, painters, theater people are doing this; engagement with beauty truly does save the world. But here is an interesting dichotomy: you can have a really bad person doing great art and a really good person doing bad art. If it is simply art, it doesn’t matter if the artist is doing bad things. But in iconography it does matter because it shows in the faces.
J.S.: What do you think that really means, that beauty will save the world?
M.K.: Beauty will save the world because it appeals and comforts and stands against the profane. If we don’t have images of beauty to stand against the profane, we are lost. All the world is entitled to the beautiful. It causes us to reflect on a world full of goodness. When I was a child, the nuns told us to be careful what we let in; I think that’s part of what they were saying.
J.S.: You work on some very large icons, using a cherry picker and scaffolding to put you where you need to be. Are you afraid up on that scaffolding?
M.K.: No! (laughing) I was so thrilled to get my own scaffolding! I went to a mountaineering store to get a climbing harness, which is harnessed to the ceiling of the church. Here were all these young women and men, hard bodies — and me. I tried on a harness, in their fitting room right in the middle of the store. It has pink flowers on it. They were pretty sure no one else would want it!
J.S.: Maybe it isn’t right to say you have a favorite icon to write, but is there one that you return to regularly? A theme that you love in particular?
M.K.: Yes, the Mother of God. There are so many variations.
(Mary takes me to a table in the house, where a candle burns, and the Bible lies open. Our Lady of the Sign, an icon she wrote years ago and which came to her in a dream, hangs over the table. In this traditional depiction, Mary is shown with open hands, the Christ Child in her womb, shown not as a baby, but as the fully-formed young Christ.)
I had a dream which showed me this image, and that was it. Later, when I began my training as an iconographer, I was startled to discover this very image in Byzantine iconography.
J.S.: Are you really free within the art of iconography to take on new subjects, such as your icon of St. Kateri Tekawitha, when she was canonized?
M.K.: It is very free! I knew a Jesuit priest who worked with Native people in La Conner, and he wanted me to do an icon for them. I did not want to dishonor their tradition, I did not want to appropriate images. I was concerned about it. But I had a dream: I was inside a house, brightly lit. A beautiful Native woman came to the door, all in ochre and browns. With a tear on her cheek, and a child in her arms, she wanted to know if I had any canned goods. I took all the canned goods in the house and gave them to her.
When I told this dream to the priest, he told me that the significance of all those canned goods was survival, that canned goods were what had kept people alive in difficult times. He got me going. He said “Come up to Mass in La Conner and meet the elders and see if they want you to do something.” He asked me speak to the elders, which I had not planned on! I showed them a mockup of a figure of the Mother of God of Lasting Things, which was an idea that emerged from my dream. The “lasting things” are those things which sustain us and which will last: canned goods, the lasting spirituality of Native people, the Native people themselves and the world itself. I had depicted the Mother of God of Lasting Things in dress of cedar bark and a cloak of dog hair, surrounded by leaping salmon and curling waves of water. She is framed in an almond shape, representing the connection between heaven and earth.
I told the elders my dream, and I also told them I have a hide as thick as a rhinoceros, to quote Flannery O’Connor, so they did not have to like my idea. So the grandmothers circled around me, and blessed my hands. I wrote that icon for them, and later an icon of the newly-canonized St. Kateri Tekawitha, whom I depicted in the tunic and leggings of her Algonquin people, surrounded by elements of earth, plants and water. The National Native American Council and the Seattle Archdiocese and Idaho Diocese all funded part of it, and so did the Nez Perce Tribe. And both of those icons are now in the church at the St. Paul Mission in La Conner, Wash., on the Swinomish Reservation.
J.S.: I’d love to hear about the effects icons have on people when they first encounter them.
M.K.: Years ago, I had an exhibition of some of my icons at a gallery in the Pearl District. I was sitting in the window painting to demonstrate the art. I watched the people coming in. One man stepped inside the door and turned around immediately and went out. But the street kids came in, with all their piercings and black clothes and hair and everything. Some people were just anti- anything religious, but not the street kids. They wanted to know all about it. They asked me questions. The icon is supposed to stop you dead in your tracks.
J.S.: What is it about the icon that stops people like that?
M.K.: Every aspect of the icon is designed to let us know about the truth, that God is coming to us. The geometry, the inverse perspective, shows that God is not going away, but coming towards us, pushing towards us. That is the inverse perspective. In Western art, we are in charge. We paint in a perspective that goes to a point on the horizon. In an icon, we are not in charge, but instead it is God who rushes out at us. God looks at us as his image and likeness and calls us into being. We are God’s icons. God writes us.
Before I leave Mary’s studio, she hands me a card of her icon of St. Kateri Tekawitha, standing tall in her dark red cloak, the color of martyrdom, and her Algonquin leggings, a rosary in one hand and a cross in the other. At her feet are green trees and a swirl of water. In the manner of a traditional icon, her right hand points in an ancient gesture to the cross.
You can see some of Mary Katsilometes’ icons at Resurrection Church in Tualatin, and read about the process of writing icons at the parish website: www.resurrection-catholic-parish.org/icons
Mary's icons are installed at the Trappist Abbey in Lafayette, the University of Portland, the Queen of Angels Monastery and in many other churches and chapels. Every summer she teaches at the Iconographic Arts Institute, in Mount Angel, Oregon.
More in-depth reading about icons, their meaning and history is available on Mary Katsilometes’ website: www.anastasisicons.com/iconographer.htm
Writer Jane Salisbury works in outreach for Multnomah County Library, and has lived in Portland for 30 years.
The NOTHING MORE HOPEFUL series originates from a workshop taught by Martha Gies. “Last fall, as I tired of hearing the ISIL Hour, interrupted only occasionally by a warning about Ebola’s imminent arrival in Europe or the U.S., it occurred to me that the media was deaf to good news,” Gies says. “I remembered my friend Sr. Rosarii Metzgar once telling me she believed all the terrible news with which we are daily battered must surely be offset by small and unseen acts of good.” Gies resolved to enlist some writers who would hunt down and write those stories.