wfn.org | Icons bring new 'visual scripture' to Church Center's chapel

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2000-012

Icons bring new 'visual scripture' to Church Center's chapel

by Kathryn McCormick

     (ENS) To artist Kathryn Carrington, icons are visual 
scripture, meant to complement the music and liturgy that 
regularly fill a church. The fact that two icons she has painted 
were recently installed in the Chapel of Christ the Lord at the 
Episcopal Church Center in New York City seems a natural step if 
the church is to consider all forms of art in worship.

     "I'm delighted, of course," she said in an interview on 
December 8, the day that the icons were dedicated in a service at 
which Presiding Bishop Frank T. Griswold presided. An 
Episcopalian, Carrington noted with a smile that of all the icons 
she has painted in her Manchester, Vermont, studio, these were 
the first to find homes in an Episcopal church.

     Griswold himself commissioned the works. After seeing them 
mounted on a wall, joining two other icons mounted elsewhere in 
the chapel, he declared he was "pleased beyond words. They are 
more beautiful than I had envisioned they might be."

     The dedication was a pleasing step in a remarkable journey 
that, Carrington admitted, "hasn't always been a piece of cake."

     The fact that she had painted them at all would at one time 
have seemed at odds with her life and work. "The first time I saw 
an icon I thought it was awful," she recalled, laughing. A 
graduate of the University of Michigan, where she earned 
bachelor's and master's degrees in fine arts, she also studied at 
Yale University, L'Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris and Chelsea 
College in London.

     It was an impressive start, she agreed, but acknowledged 
later that her life also had taken her through some hard times. 

As a young widow with two children, she struggled as a single parent, 
then endured a long and debilitating illness that, for 
all its pain, nurtured her spiritual growth.

     She recovered, and eventually met Gregory Norbet, a former 
monk who has won distinction as a composer, speaker and retreat 
director. They married in 1987. 

Icon on the mantle 

     "A friend sent us an icon card for our wedding," Carrington 
recalled. She said she set it on a mantle and found herself 
lighting candles near it and saying prayers. "After a year, I 
wondered if I could paint one. It just wouldn't go away."

     At that time she was busy as an artist (landscape 
watercolors and abstract paintings on her handmade paper) and an 
art consultant to many big firms and agencies. Her works are in 
the collections of IBM, Hyatt Regency, the U.S. State Department 
and Gannett Publishing, among others. She made room in her life, 
however, to study the art of icons and their history.

     "A big part of icon painting is Tradition, with a capital 
T," she explained. That tradition, she added, "has been treasured 
and protected for us by the Eastern Church."

     Although icons grew out of the mosaic and fresco tradition 
of early Byzantine art, it was the Russian Orthodox Church that 
embraced iconography after Constantinople fell to the Ottoman 
Empire. Unlike western art, which sought to reflect space and 
movement, icon art focused on the symbolic or mystical aspects of 
the divine being.

     Carrington studied this tradition for years, working with a 
nun and a priest, and studying with masters of the technical 
aspects of medieval church art. The work combined beautifully 
with what she had learned earlier in the Spiritual Directors 
Program of Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation in 
Washington, D.C.

     Her first icon was painted for a Roman Catholic parish on 
Long Island. She has painted others for churches, as well as 
private collections and for a monastery.

     She met Griswold through her husband; the presiding bishop 
first visited Norbet's monastery as a priest in 1965, she said. 
She added that she got to know Griswold's wife, Phoebe, during 
the years that Griswold served as bishop of Chicago. The bishop, 
in fact, commissioned a small icon from Carrington, which he 
carried with him while traveling during the discernment period 
before he was elected presiding bishop in 1997.

     When Griswold asked her to paint icons for the Church Center 
chapel, she said, she was proud and pleased to do them. Griswold 
noted that another icon in the chapel was the work of the Rev. 
John Walsted, an Episcopal priest from Staten Island, New York. A 
smaller icon was a gift to the late Presiding Bishop John Allin.

     "There are so many creative people in our church," Griswold 
said. "I believe one of my functions is to bring attention and 
provide support to the talents of all those in our community."

Painting in prayer

     Carrington began painting her icons in late 1998. "I paint 
each icon in prayer," she said. "I believe that I am receiving 
help as I work on it, that Christ is in my work for people to 
see."

     Each icon slowly evolves, revealing itself over months of 
time, she said. Of the icons in the chapel, she said, "I wanted 
Christ to look very serene, and I wanted Mary to look tender, but 
strong."

     Both Christ and Mary are portrayed as dark-skinned people, 
not discernable as members of any specific race, she said, 
adding, "I strove to make Christ raceless. He transcends that."

     "Icons have their own power," Griswold said later. "They are 
a form of pictorial scripture. Growing numbers of people in the 
West, who have been starved for something more intuitive to 
balance western rationality, have found them to be a window to 
divine mystery.

     "They are profoundly interesting. Because they come from the 
East, they transcend all the divisions we have experienced in 
western Christianity. Maybe it's through icons that we are 
receiving a sense of mystery that has been so much a part of 
eastern Christianity."

--Kathryn McCormick is associate director of the Office of News 
and Information of the Episcopal Church.