Our Lady of Good Help: The Challenge of Writing a New Roman Catholic Icon
Faye Drobnic • September 19, 2017
Our Lady of Good Help: The Challenge of Writing a New Roman Catholic Icon
One little-known Marian apparition in the United States occurred in Wisconsin in 1859, when Our Lady appeared to a young Belgian nun, Adele Brise. Known as Our Lady of Good Help, she instructed Adele to teach the children of the area their faith. A chapel and school were built on the site of the apparition, and it became a place of pilgrimage in the ensuing years. In 2010, after considerable investigation, Bishop David Ricken of the Diocese of Green Bay issued a decree on the authenticity of the apparitions. (Read the bishop’s decree.)
A standing figure of St. Francis of Assisi, with the walls and buildings of Assisi in the background, will be our 12-Week Intermediate Class Project beginning in February 2024. This class will focus on the development of the standing figure, including the techniques of painting a smaller, more graphic face.
The teaching program for beginners at St. Elizabeth Icon Studio consists of an Introduction to Paint Mixing and Pigments Class (3 consecutive days) followed by a Beginning Project Class (weekly on Saturdays for 10 weeks).
Christian iconography is essentially the faithful transmission of the truths of the faith. The canons of the eastern Church tell us that new icons should be based on older icons when possible. In developing an icon of a saint, we first study existing iconography.
The Christian tradition teaches that angels are bodiless spiritual beings created by God who often serve as messengers between God and humankind. As such, they are portrayed in Byzantine iconography in the robes of the Byzantine court.
The most important tools in an iconographer’s supply box are our brushes. Many of us have spent years on a quest for “the magic brush,” hoping that once it was found all our brush strokes will be perfect and our brush control will be sublime.
St. John the Baptist — also known as St. John the Forerunner — is one of my favorite saints to paint! I love his wild hair, his long straggly beard, and his green camel’s hair garment that looks like water.
How do you teach someone with little or no painting experience how to paint an icon in an online class? That was a question I faced almost three years ago when COVID-19 closed the country, and Vladislav Andreyev asked me to teach a beginning-level online class for the Prosopon School.
Not long before we closed our local icon studio in Lafayette because of the start of the covidpandemic, one of our students requested that we paint an icon of St. Thomas Aquinas.
Surrounded by the heat of one of the warmest summers I can remember, I have spent the last week working on the drawing of the icon for our upcoming Fall Intermediate Class: The Protection of the Most Holy Mother of God.
The icon of the Kazan Mother of God is one of the most loved of all the images of Our Lady. It is the newest tutorial packet from St. Elizabeth Icon Studio. According to Russian tradition, this icon appeared in the city of Kazan in 1579.