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

First I thought it was blood sugar and then I thought no this is more than blood sugar And if you can also besides describing the image say something about how you and mr. Edwards came to okay I think I'm I'm trying to interview him Monday because I realized that That's another side of the history of icons is that people actually would have them in there. Yeah in their home I guess the Catholics around here do that European to pray not so prone to have a like Placed and Southern Europeans are but Northern Europeans are a little bit Stodgy about that sort of thing So where should I

back back up if you could just start with the captive daughter of science start over. Yeah, okay Capital daughter of Zion is important to me to very important and it was one that I poured my heart into my family is Russian my family is Acostics with their famous Pilgrims against the Jews in the Ukraine The problem comes from the way polls had concentrated the Jews into ghettos But the Russians certainly didn't do anything to make it any better when they took over the western parts of Eastern parts of Poland And the awareness that in my own country skinheads and neo -Nazis are beginning to find a courage to come out from under the rocks That scapegoating which has been so much a part of Christian history is Once again Becoming permissible The realization of my own ancestors have

probably slaughtered Jews and the one of my great -grandmothers was a Jew Meeting Rick Edwards who believes so strongly in some type of a friendship Between Jews and Christians so that The fables we have against one another can begin to dissolve I decided to paint that icon as Russian as I possibly could That it's comes from an image of our lady of the sign which is famous in Russia The jewels everything in that is perfectly Russian So that in a sense it's like forcing a dog in a cat to come together and Learn how to live together you have Jew haters Russians and you have the victim and Both in one image so that the Russians who continue to talk about Jews as if they were Christ killers and everything else Have to look at their own icon and realize that she whom they venerate was herself a Jew

That he whom they worship is a Jew that The Bible that they talk about includes the Torah, which he is holding That the barbed wire behind them Is barbed wire that would have surrounded the two that they venerate so highly had they lived in the 1940s Religion becomes something very tame and sweet with a passage of time and Yet Every religion the divine mystery is something frightening in its profundity The divine mystery if we're true to it brings us back to dangerous memories and a religious image if it's worth its weight insult Needs to remind us of the dangerous memories at the root of what we believe God is not

sweet and Harmless God is a raging fire Also the sense that we continue to do The evil that we have done until we name the evil that we have done and The first step in stopping The evil is to name it and to look at it We Christians did very little during World War II from the Pope on down To help the Jews when they were being slaughtered. I Wanted to express that in a Catholic Christian image So that we those who saw it could not forget And then finally the Cathedral St. Francis If you just review you've got it already, but When they asked me to paint the Cathedral in Santa Fe, I was back in Vermont Working with my publisher.

I didn't know how big it was going to be. I didn't know anything about it I had lived at the Cathedral for three years as a Franciscan as a very young man and Remembered the dead I owed an old to the old Hispanic people. I had met in those days They taught me much about what it means to be a human being and I wanted to do something to say thank you to them. I Was the last person that they asked to paint the Cathedral During the process of painting the Cathedral Some misinformed person started a letter writing campaign a petition to get me out of there because I was not Hispanic because I was not from Santa Fe No one realized that they had tried to find anyone they could in Santa Fe particularly Hispanic people But the style of the church being Romanesque called for a certain type of art. I accepted the job

Gave for the most part the paintings to them, you know as far as the market goes. I gave them 11 out of the 14 And again poured my heart into it. They gave me Sour apples and I tried to make a sweet apple pie They gave me a sense of church from the top down based on giving glory to the leaders and I tried to find some way that would include the people at the bottom us Who have to go into the church and put up with the leaders? Something that would remind those who walk through the church on a daily basis people who go in there to pray That spirituality is not about death. That spirituality is about life The spirituality is about the life we live daily that it includes birds and turtles and guitars and violins and children and bright colors as well as black religious habits Authority figures and obedience Let's talk a bit about the power of the image as far as you can think of It's a 8 or 10 9 volts

Okay Okay, look about the power of image just as you've mentioned everything around us here as an icon just What we we relate to is I should say this part of the image as in this case, we're talking about sacred images What is this power which we humans have used and pondered since time before time? The power of the image is that its impact is immediate that it doesn't depend on education that it's an extremely democratic form of communication The image impacts us immediately We don't need to stop and think about it in order to be impacted. It helps to stop and think about it after the impact um We're surrounded by images whether we want them

to be in our lives or not and The commercial world makes more than adequate use of those images to convince us to do things we would not otherwise do The political world does the same thing most of us in the first world coming out of a word -oriented culture since the split from Eastern orthodoxy Value the word far more highly than we value of visual images or musical images therefore We discredit the power of the image and become passive consumers of images we become the victims of images instead of Surrounding ourselves with images. It could do us good Because whether we like it or not the images there if an icon is like a window Not to know that a window is a window doesn't stop it from being a window To be surrounded by by icons is a way of being surrounded by divine mystery

whether we call them windows or not It's a hard thing to answer I'm wondering all over the place You know Your house is filled with icons and images from other cultures, especially Native American Are you particularly moved by the images and icons of other cultures say tribal or primitive and what is their power for you? Christianity for me is like a Chinese own It comes out of a specific place in a specific time with all the limitations of that time and place Like the Chinese Elm it is spread all over the world The Chinese Elm came with with bales of flax from Russia a few seeds came across and they have spread all across North America and look at the poor Chinese Home it doesn't know when to put its leaves out in the spring time It puts them out too soon the snow comes and it breaks the limbs It doesn't know when to let loose

of its leaves in the autumn It still has its leaves the snow comes and its limbs break It grows like a weed it grows very fast it gives a shade and we're grateful for the shade But it's not a plant of this land and it will probably never be a plant of this land Maybe millions of years from now will adapt itself to this land Christianity is like that Christianity was brought by well intentioned missionaries without any sense for the sacredness of this place Christianity is very much concerned and so is Judaism with the sacredness of time and history But there is very little about the sacredness of place. You have the holy land. Yes, one place. It's called holy But where else in the world is holy the rest of the world is fallen It's a place to escape from its a valley of tears The reality is that there are spirits everywhere and that the people who have lived in a land know those spirits far better than anyone Who just comes a Johnny come lately, you know our ancestors who have been here for a hundred to three hundred years Perhaps know we're near long enough to know the spirits and yet we have the Native Americans who have been here for Tens of thousands of years who knows exactly

how long they have been here People who know intimately the spirits of this land to come in with our Gabriel's and Michael's and Ray Feele's and other Angels that our ancestors or perhaps Jewish people have learned about in another place and think that those are the only spirits There are as foolishness My interest in the images that I have around me is that they are they teach me the spirit of this land The land that I live in the land that I choose to live in the land that I hope to die in I know what's in the holy book the Bible. I Study that for 18 years I'm beginning to learn about the holy mountains here and the rivers the spirits that inhabit these places that are also holy I need to be like a poor little child like a Navajo child like an Apache child Living with these images on a daily basis so that just as they Learned by looking touching I can Be humble enough to

learn by looking and touching And you're out you we had talked earlier about how you made some discoveries about your own ethnic background Pre -Christian ethnic background is that somehow do you see a relationship with the Native American images around you? I never wanted to be a wannabe a wannabe Apache a wannabe Pueblo I think realizing the richness of my own pagan past gave me permission to Accept the richness of the of of of the peoples here without being a wannabe My Celtic ancestors my Slavic ancestors both um We're probably so similar to the Apaches And the Navajos more than the Pueblos That they would have been able to get along very well if they weren't fighting over a piece of land They would have understood one another very well spiritually um

But the spirits that they knew in the Celtic lands of the Slavic lands are not the spirits of this land What good does it do me to Investigate the fairy folk of the British Isles Or the spirits of the Slavic woods when I don't live there anymore when I never will live there Whereas knowing the mountain spirits the Cachina is the yea of this land um Impacts my life on a daily basis There's a certain abstract quality in their art and in what we call a lot primitive Art that's not uh present in the Byzantine icons are in the You just general western civilization. How do you suppose that is? There's probably more of it in the Byzantine art than there is in post romanesque western art A sense of the abstract There are things you can only say by moving into the abstract

Things about mystery That you can only say about moving into the abstract when you become uncomfortable with mystery You become uncomfortable with the abstract You uh and perhaps that's the fascination with western Europe in the last four or five hundred years with the absolutely literal visual image uh That uh western europeans became more and more uncomfortable with mystery And therefore more and more uncomfortable with the abstract There is more of the abstract present in Byzantine art Stylizations the way clothing has represented things like that and those same things make western europeans uncomfortable with icons icons are also called primitive you know they're You take up a book of art history and icons no matter whether they're painted in the 20th century or the first century are somehow grouped back with medieval arts And yet there has been a constant progression within iconography and style not in content in style Uh, I'm the rebel who's changing content, but I have plenty of

uh Examples in the past of how style has changed And the more eastern europeans became enamored with the culture of western europe the more realistic their icons became So that you reach a point where as an iconographer I could go completely Abstract like some of the ancient icons are and probably not communicate with anybody in the first world My desire is somehow to communicate to create bridges Basically for Caucasians and if I'm going to do that, I'm going to have to compromise some of the abstract a bit so that uh, you know, I'm actually communicating I could speak um Russian here in front of the camera and probably very few people would understand what I was saying and yet I'd be saying something What good would it do me? It's far better to speak english um Did liberation theology have an impact on you about everything to do with your Liberation theology was one of those things and monasteries that I've been taught to be afraid of touched by

communism scary radical out in left field What limbered me up for liberation theology was encountering human suffering in San Francisco In my own life and in the lives of other people meeting refugees from central america from south america knowing them intimately uh, even when I was russian orthodox going to chile to one of the orphanages trying to work there for a while Getting arrested by the secret police Discovering the brutal face of injustice It's one thing to take the holy book and talk about it in platitudes of often Rome or somewhere It's another thing to be in the streets that are filled with mud where people are living and dying Um, there's a story of St. Nicholas that he came down to earth with another saint who's um Is so obscure his name is john cation Uh, they found a peasant trying to push a cart out of the mud in the middle of the russian thaw out in the woods And john cation got up on his high horse and started

talking to the peasant about the value of suffering and Nicholas got in to the mud without either of them knowing Knowing it pulled up his bishop robes and started pushing the cart out of the mud God saw it all and as a result Nicholas has four or five feasts in the russian calendar and john cation has his feast on the 28th of february, which means he gets one every four years It was god's way of saying this is what's right and this is what's wrong All the fancy words mean nothing unless you're going to do something And what that says to me this folk story the mythology behind it is that unless you're willing to get into the mud Your syllogisms mean nothing When you're in the mud you know life you know life intimately and you have a right to speak about the problems of life Whether they be abortion divorce remarriage um Homosexuality it doesn't matter Don't pontificate about any of these things until you've walked a while in the mud and you know life So what role does religion play in your life now and how has Your vision of religion moved and changed during your span as an iconographer I would say the religion has

very little to do with my life anymore I interact with religion because I have religious customers spirituality is my life um My living room is a place where I pray My life is prayer, but it's not religion um I try to stay as far away from religion as I can these days It doesn't have a lot to do with life So what do you hope your legacy will be? I hope that my legacy will be that A few people through my art will find the strength To walk out of the four walls and begin to experience God for themselves And that their lives will influence a few others It will be like a stone thrown into a pond that as the ripples go out farther and farther People with white skin recover That which people with brown and black skin have known for millennia That our own experience is the truest way we have of knowing anything

Okay, then in order to recap I was just gonna ask you about um The the purpose of icons in the orchard ox church and the story that st. Luke painted the first icon So if you say something about the you know the legend of st. Luke painting the first icon and then how they became to be such an integral You You

You