Icon Painting Girl's Night

It’s the best feeling finding a group of holy women to walk with in the journey towards heaven. Even better finding one as creative as Gianna Club, where throughout each month we have a few gatherings that range from a book club to social activities that promote sisterhood.  On Saturday, a group of us gathered to learn more about iconography.  To begin, we had a thirty-minute skype lesson with David Clay, an artist and author that specializes in Catholic art.  His brief presentation taught us key elements of that particular style of sacred art.  He went over the symbolism, colors, style and the differences between painting and writing an icon- and icons and devotional art.  Though brief, his presentation really enriched our Wine & Painting night.

After the background lesson, we began our process of recreating an Icon of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.  We had three hours – which we soon learned was not enough time to complete such a complex painting.  Though icons can look simple because they are usually flat images, simplicity doesn’t mean easy to recreate.  Even though we cheated (by tracing the image onto canvas with the help of carbon paper) all the small details were very time consuming and difficult to do.  Especially the face!  We were all amateur artists and we couldn’t stop laughing at our hubris thinking that the task in hand was possible.  At the last hour we all realized that though the image we were trying to recreate looked easy, in reality it was much more complex than we anticipated.  With much laughter we humbly learned our lesson.

 Sustenance for the journey

 and Inspiration.

 Our materials.

A little bit of helpful cheating.

Final product - I ran out of time and quickly finished the background and just failed at his face.

My buddy was more patient and decided to finish hers at home.

Though none of us will probably be the next big icon artist- it was a great night to meet new friends and to share our faith in such a creative way.  We kept laughing wondering what Jesus thought of us as we ruined his image (smile).