¡Colores!; 407; Icons: Windows to the Soul; Icons

And he's Roman Mars. And we should just start, since we're kind of changing, shifting gears, just the brief story of how orthodoxy came to Russia, just because of that, I don't know if you can tell. The whole story of how orthodoxy came to Russia as a myth, Vladimir was a pretty sharp cookie. He knew basically the pros and cons of the various religions, not world religions in those days. They were the power for religions of the Western world, Islam, Judaism, the two branches of Christianity. And he knew his own people, and he knew that if he was going to ever become part of this greater world, if he was ever going to stop being a primitive people in the woods that the others came to buy furs from, that the others came to buy amber and incense. He was going to have to take one of those religions on. The myth is that he sent ambassadors to the various

religions and they brought back what was going to have to happen if people in Russia would convert. He rejected Islam and Judaism because of their stricture, Islam because it didn't allow drinking. And he knew the Russians loved to drink Judaism for other strictness that he knew the Russians would not put up with Roman Catholicism because he was afraid of the Pope, who was already beginning to make claims to universal power in Europe, to be the arbiter of all disputes, to be what he became in the late Middle Ages, the greatest power, political. He went to Byzantium, his ambassadors went to Byzantium in Constantinople and walked in the Agia Sophia during a service, and they came back saying, you know, we didn't know if we were in heaven or on earth that the service moved us so deeply. It was as if we had been transported into heaven. And in many ways, you know, the truth of this myth

is extremely powerful. Byzantine Christianity has never lost sight of the importance of smell and listening and eyes and touch and taste. That when you go to a full Byzantine service on a holy day, it starts the night before and moves through the following morning. You may be in church seven, eight hours if it's in a monastery, ten hours. You are given incense to smell, clouds of sweet incense. You're surrounded by images that depict heaven, windows into heaven. It's constant singing, very little spoken in the Eastern church. I think it would be very hard for Eastern Christians to become Western Christians simply because they would find it so boring to listen to all of the spoken words, the reading and the haranging and pulpits, et cetera. In Eastern church things are sung, bells are rung. You walk around in processions in the middle of services. You're given food to eat apart from communion, there's bread and there's wine and

you're given rose water to splash on your face after standing for five hours the night before to wake you up, you're given rose water which smells so good. There was truth to that, that through the senses we touch the divine and that his ambassadors felt that they had touched the divine through the ways that these elements had been combined in Constantinople. They brought Christianity eventually up into Russia and it was the harsh Greek Orthodox Christianity. The monastery I studied and was a fierce place. They talked constantly about the heretics, this, the heretics that. Russians can be borish, the Russian monks can be borish, but their hearts are gentle. And when Christianity reached Russia it took about 200 years but after 200 years everything the Greeks brought had been softened, whether it was the icons, whether it was the music, whether it was the law, within the parameters available to them

the Russians had softened it. And much of what they had brought in was pagan. Russia is one of the few countries it's called Mother, Mother Russia and so many things of the ancient worship of the mother came in to the Russian church, Moscow is the one church in the world that wears red on Easter Sunday. Red is the color of menstrual blood, the color of birth blood and connected with the resurrection wearing red on Easter Sunday is something that comes straight out of matriarchal times. The giving of red Easter eggs, the egg itself are all pagan images that are very important in Russia. St. Elias the prophet took the place of the old fire god and it's found in every Russian home. This is how Christianity came into Russia. And after all of the years since the revolution Christianity that form of Christianity is not completely died out in Russia. Probably it's stronger in Russia

than other forms of Christianity are in the free world. And then if you could recount, I guess it's a myth also, but the story St. Luke painting the first icon and how they came to be so important in the Russian and Greek Orthodox church. The myth is very important, whether Luke was a painter or not we don't know. But the fact that the people wanted to remember him as a painter, that icons, the first icons were ascribed to him, is saying that you say the gospels are important, the icons are too because the gospel writer painted the first one. And if you want to reverence these words, then reverence the image too. It was one of those really healthy human impulses that became a Christian myth about St. Luke. And it's helped keep Eastern Christianity sane in a way that West, I mean there are very few fundamentalist Eastern Orthodox. Then I was curious if you could mention something about

when you were in Russian Orthodox church, you went to Chile and if you just recount something about how you felt compelled to go to South America as part of your religious service, what you encountered there and how as you could mention to me the first time we met, it really takes a lot to get a first world white man to get it, that life is not white as it is and how that played itself out in your life. My family grew up in my family in rural Colorado where we were in minority, I knew what it was like to be unpopular, I knew what it was like to have, to have to learn how to fight so that you could defend yourself when you went to school because you were a Catholic. And I don't think I ever took it for granted that I was part of the majority from the time I was a child. There was always something about our family

that made us less American in a lot of people's eyes than your ordinary wasp. As a Franciscan I lived in Mexico City and I knew firsthand people who lived in Shacks made out of discarded cardboard and crates. In the Orthodox Church I don't speak Russian very well, I barely speak Russian and therefore it was not of much use in most parishes because the Russian parishes wanted Russian speaking priest, I knew enough theology to be ordained and suddenly there was this need for a priest down in Santiago Chile to take care of orphans in an orphanage, there were Palestinian nuns, there was a priest who refused to do services for the nuns because of an eagle trippy was on and you have these little kids who were in an orphanage, I speak Spanish fluently and it made a lot of sense to send me down there to finish the last six months of my training to be ordained to be the priest for this orphanage. I went down, I had read everything I could about Chile and knew not to take anything

political. I had been there for two months when the secret police knocked the door down to my house about five in the morning, rain was pouring into the house, six of them came in with machine guns, pulled me out of bed, handcuffed me, tore my house apart looking for guns, anything else that I might have, simply because I was from North America and was therefore suspicious as being perhaps a revolutionary, learned later that ten others were surrounding the house with machine guns so that if I tried to run out of door, I'd be shot. After they found nothing, after they had humiliated me, mocked me, they simply left, took the handcuffs off and left and I was left there trembling, very close to an awareness of what it might be like to disappear, to be one of the desepate seals. It was a month before I could walk out into the dark alone without fear

and the government, these had been the secret police, the government pretended they were communists and yet people who I described them to said, oh well that's so -and -so, he's the captain of the squad, this is so -and -so. They posted army people around the compound of the orphanage supposedly to keep other communists out. I came down with viral pneumonia and there was very little that they were able to do for me, they didn't even diagnose it correctly, I was near death and finally the Russian Bishop pulled me back to the United States and I was given medical care and my experience in Chile ended. It was very important for me to know what it's like to wear handcuffs, it was very important for me to know what it's like to have no rights whatsoever, to be at the mercy of brutal macho men whose power is unlimited, to be close to death, I don't think I would ever take life for granted again.

I'm sure that that has had as much influence on my painting as the teaching of Gregory the monk, my teacher. Okay, well, I guess finally can you draw some kind of contrast between just the iconographic symbol, whether it's these abstract, problow images or whatever, or painting in the wall in the cave of Moscow, or in the Byzantine icon, and what I'm reaching for is just what is the real tradition of icons, given that our deepest impressions come in our dreams, I mean we are creatures of the image, therefore I'm wondering in that sense, is there a tradition beyond the tradition? The tradition beyond the tradition is human nature, you've intimated that. What makes a Byzantine icon, Byzantine is a style, you know, what makes Russian

poetry, Russian is the language, poetry is poetry. You can translate the poetry out of Russian and relax something, because the original language that it was written in was Russian, Byzantine iconography is a language, it's a language that in late Russian history it was used for portraits, that didn't have anything to do with icons, portraits of the Zars and the Boyars. You can say many things with that visual language, Byzantine icons, Byzantine icons that are Byzantine Christian icons, will be icons painted with that visual language, treating subject matter, which is defined by the Byzantine church. My icons are Byzantine in their language, but I no longer feel compelled to depict only what is defined by the Byzantine church. I use the Byzantine language to express that which I experience

personally. And so there are those who would say my icons are heretical, and I would agree with them, they are. I am not painting strict Byzantine Christian images. I am painting Byzantine images of that which I know. And if they want to call my experience heretical, it's their right. It obviously is not in line with what they have defined. That's how I would compare my work or contrast my work. And the reality which is underneath is the divine mystery, which contemplatives of all races and times, if they could sit down together in peace, would find themselves in harmony when they speak about it. They may use different images, but if they could listen carefully and hear what the other person is saying, they would realize they were talking about the same thing. That's what's so important to me. Dogma, quite often, wants

to shut truth into a tiny box, a box far too tiny to include the truth, to enclose the truth. When you try to put the truth into a box that's small you've killed it. And then the contemplatives throughout the world are not going to recognize it at all. It's obviously a distortion, it's too small to be true. I'm sorry, I forgot that I wanted to ask, how does the form work then? What is the dynamic of the Byzantine icon? The language of the Byzantine icon? What is the dynamic? How does the form, if we're looking at all this Byzantine icon? How does the form work then? What's valuable to me about the Byzantine form is that the language expresses something transcendent by an abstract depiction of light more than anything else. Light, in many cultures, is seen as an expression of the divine in an icon. Light is the all -important factor. And it's not light that shines from the outside, it's light that's coming from the inside out.

That's one way that it's expressed is through the abstract highlighting on the garments. Cathedral, as Western as it had to be in Santa Fe. If you will look at the garments, it's as if light, electrical light, short circuiting all over the garment. Light is coming out of the face. The faces are highlighted, highlighted in ways that are sometimes totally irrational. If you're thinking about studio light, the light is coming out. The light is very bright around the eyes, in particular, sometimes the eyes are made very large for gazing, because gazing is far more important in the east and in the third world than talking is or hearing. We're a culture of words in North America and in Western Europe. We're a culture of words. We have to listen to those words. We have to analyze them. But in the Byzantine east, in so many cultures of the third world, gazing is all important.

And therefore, in an icon, the eyes are the most important thing. When the Turks took over churches in Asia Minor, in the Middle East, in Greece, in the Balkans, if they couldn't destroy the frescoes, they took spears and they scratched the eyes out, because once the eyes were gone, the icon was gone. Figures are elongated, or hands are elongated, gestures express what's going on within the soul in a stylized way. And these stylizations as specific as they may be to a particular part of the world are understandable in the same way that the beauty of a sand painting or the grace of an African West African sculpture is understandable. There's a universal quality that's captured in a culturally specific way of depicting something. These things are important to me. And therefore, I retain the Byzantine style

in my work. If you can pan in and out

of it, it's something you know where it feels half of the frame. You know, I do this one more shot on there.