![]() ![]() By then, I already made earlier attempts to break into the world of the icon painting but it wasn’t a consistent effort it was full of temptations, and in general nonproductive. It was useful to see how his disciples worked at the icons as it helped me to understand a lot about it. He gladly took me under his wing and became my guide in iconography. I just walked into this church and met the priest. Nikolay Chernyshev, the icon painter from the St. Was it when you grew interested in icon painting? Any distancing from the Church is exactly what at first makes art substance trivial and graceless-the aesthetic definition goes downhill next. It turned out that, on the whole, art outside the Church couldn’t be evaluated. What I never noticed before all of a sudden became vividly colored and imbued with particular beauty. Anything that was of value before had suddenly lost its meaning. Everything, including books, art, films, former favorites and authorities in art, had to change in order to be replaced with different content. I had ceased being a secular artist by that time and had cut off my social links to the past. It was as if I had been through a complete system reboot, including logout and update. That was the time when I studied at the VGIK Fine Arts Faculty. ![]() ApollinariaMy serious awakening as a Christian took place when Tatiana Nikolaevna was no longer alive, when I visited the churches restored from ruins, and held conversations with the clergy of the 1990s. I recall how I came home that day, and fearfully seeing an impressive row of men’s boots in the hallway, shut myself in my room. “She is a seeker,” I overheard my landlady Tatiana Nikolaevna once telling the priests who came for a cup of tea. Later on, when I had already moved from my native Novokuznetsk to Moscow, I still knew no “details” for a long while. There were also the words of a famous song that went: “Except that it is a pity that Christ was crucified” and I usually ended up asking: what for, what for? All I’d hear in response was: “For our sins.” No details. Long before that, there were childhood memories, such as the beautiful words like “Pascha,” “Christ Is Risen!” or “Trinity.” It was when the women working at the Soviet collective farm would secretly snatch away some meat patties at the worker’s canteen, cooked pastry, and then took their kids far out in the surrounding meadows to set up a feast on the long table clothes stretched out in the middle of long grasses, right on top of lungwort and forget-me-nots. ![]() It took another seven long and eventful years before I became a conscious, religious Orthodox Christian. The church there looked gloomy and its walls were covered with odd-looking and poorly executed oil paintings of biblical stories. Our whole family was baptized in Novokuznetsk. I felt the need to choose whether I am with the fallen angels or with Christ crucified. The Synaxis of New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church.-Yes, during perestroika, when the whole country went to church to be baptized. However, as I understood it later, I knew nothing about iconography at the time, so whatever I made at the time had nothing to do with icons. I diligently painted it using oil paints with all due honor and reverence. After I graduated from art college, I had someone order an icon of Christ that had to be painted on a brass plate. I remember the icon of the “Vladimir” the Mother of God, and the impression it made: something of a superb nature, strangely one-dimensional yet beautiful, requiring specific knowledge to understand and maturity to grasp its meaning. I was admitted to the children’s art school at the age of twelve and saw icons for the first time during art history lessons there. Alexiy Mechev- Olga, as you were growing up in the Soviet Union, did you know anything about icons? “ Art couldn’t be measured away from the Church” At the same time, she sought her path in iconography, and learned to understand icons. As a graduate of the Fine Arts Faculty of the Institute of Cinematography (VGIK), she worked in the movie industry, advertising, animation, and as a book illustrator. “ An iconographer is a creator, while an icon is the piece of art presenting to the world the Beauty that points directly to God,” says Olga Spiridonova, the icon painter. ![]()
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