My Icon -- Tina's Personal Experience

My Icon --  Tina's Personal Experience
Aug 15, 2013

Tina Bessias has offered to share her experience with the Icon Workshop last week. Enjoy!

     I’m still processing the extraordinary experience of the last week, when I was a student in an intensive, six-day iconography class through the Prosopon School in New York.  Byzantine-style icons have been part of my life for the last thirty years, partly because they’re omnipresent in Greece and partly because my brother-in-law and a good friend are both iconographers.  Icons are not part of my religious practice, though, and I’ve never really had the chance to learn about them in any depth.  Thus the experience of studying and creating an icon took me into new religious and artistic territory.
     The teachers of last week’s class, Tatiana and Dimitriy Berestov, came from New York to teach at my church, St. Paul’s Lutheran.  They are Russian immigrants who combine deep faith with knowledge of the history and art of icon writing.  In a remarkably quiet, gentle manner, they led a class of twenty teenagers and adults through a series of 22 steps from a blank board to the contemplation of a completed image of St. Michael the Archangel.
     It was, among other things, the most compelling nonverbal activity I can remember being a part of.  Since my world usually revolves around speaking, reading, writing, and responding to others in all those linguistic forms, it was quite a departure to work quietly in the company of twenty other adults.  No one ever told us not to talk, but there was little need or desire to do so.   It was also a great chance to be the student who wasn’t able to take everything in, who heard instructions but forgot them, who sometimes needed extra help to keep up.  The tone of the class was gentle, caring, and patient.  Everyone was there by choice, and everyone was fully committed to the experience.  I wish I could reproduce those circumstances for my own students.
     So here it is: my icon of St. Michael the Archangel.  Nearly everything about it is flawed, yet it’s very special to have “written” it (as we say in this field!).  It’s also gratifying to have begun to learn how to “read” an icon: to understand some of the symbolism, to see the many layers that compose it, to contemplate it as window onto another world.