Situation

Dear Friends, we apologize!!!

The President of our country started a horrible war against our neighbour country. We probably could have stopped him, but we did not. We are deeply sorry for what he and other people do in our name. We tried to protest, but when we saw that no reasonable argument could ever influence that man we quitted.

Some people say that different people and situations we encounter in our lives may not necessarily be important. Well, what we all are facing in these last weeks pushes us to reconsider a lot of our habits. The question is – why were we meant to? I think now we all are forced to check our values and intentions, desires and strength of connections. In our case, we simply had to move away from home as in Russia now it is impossible to work peacefully in connection with the rest of the world. We decided to temporarily relocate from our home country. I share a longer story below, – have a look if you are interested, but here I wanted to share some personal discoveries I believe may be interesting from a professional point of view.

My first discovery in this period was to see what my life really consists of and how little can be enough. Getting ready to relocate we had an entire day to gather our belongings, so we had to decide what to take with us and what to leave (considering the space of a regular car). Of course, we did not think in terms of “leaving forever”. Our plan still is to just be “somewhere else” till the end of the “Special Operation” and to wait till the re-opening of our country to the world. We hope this may happen in several weeks or months, and yet, the moment we were getting ready to leave and had to make crucial choices was the moment of truth. You understand that you can only take what you need, and at the end of the day, there are so few things you can’t live and work well without!

Same thing as settling down in a new place. Moving into an empty apartment you face the same type of questions: – which of the kitchen appliances do you truly need? How much cutlery and other stuff do you need for living? Will a set of 4 forks/spoons be enough for 2 people?

Another question, maybe we should apply the same principle to our iconography? – Why not let our image “say” only what must be said, constraining them to the most essential expressiveness only? Maybe it’s my usual tendency, but the very feeling of being “wordy” in the art for me means making it diluted, less powerful. Maybe it’s just the situation, I don’t know.

And through all these little difficulties of ours, we keep comparing ourselves with those, who are in much worse circumstances. With those who have lost their dearest relatives, families and homes entirely and now start from scratch with no money in some alien country.

For us as for everybody in the world today this whole time is a threatening and insightful experience. Of course, we are in much better circumstances, and we are so grateful to people, who supported us and continue to support us in these difficult times!

Online Courses

Recently we have had some more inquiries about learning iconography online. We thank everybody who expressed their interest, and here is our plan for 2022. Students, coming to Course 1 can see all the next courses on the calendar. Here is the schedule:

Course I: Drawing Symmetrical Faces: April 28 – June 9

Course II: Drawing Asymmetrical Faces June 16 – August 25

Course III: Space in Iconography September 8 – October 20

Course IV: Half-Figure of Christ Pantocrator May 8 – October 13

Online Iconography Drawing Courses

If you are among those, who have recently finished Courses 1, 2 and 3, or you simply feel secure drawing traditional icon faces, we invite you to join our Course IV starting on May the 5th. So far it’s the most complex and the longest among our courses, providing learners with the largest variety of skills and concepts. If you would like to know more, please refer to our website Iconography. Online.

We worked hard to make the descriptions of all our courses as extensive as we could. If you think we should mention something else, please, let us know.

New Courses

Now we work hard on the new place and plan to make 2 more new online courses. They will cover two topics we always planned but never had time for. I will be making a theoretical course, dedicated to Theology, history and the theory of iconography. It will be a good chance to summarize my knowledge and complete it from other sources. It’s been a while since I was seriously reading scholars’ research on iconography. It’s time to review what is new and make it accessible for practising iconographers. Olga is planning a course, teaching to professionally paint with Egg Tempera. From what I see, she builds it up in her usual manner, step by step adding blocks of information to summarize everything at the end. I believe it is going to be cool. We began practical planning some weeks ago, but we don’t know yet when we announce the dates.

Hopefully, we will be able to schedule them for the second half of this year, possibly in July or August.

Apart from working on courses we also have a strong hope that we will paint some commissioned icons (those, who are waiting for commissioned icons to be painted, – thank you so much for your patience!!!).  The climate in Georgia is much warmer than in Saint Petersburg, – we see much more sun every day, – it already fills us up with much more energy. We all hope very much that the war will soon be over and life will start getting back to normal. After all the devastating actions the world will slowly get back to constructive activities.

Sale of Textile Icons to Help Ukrainians (sold out all)

Now some words on another matter. These words are mostly written for those, who looked at our icons on fabric thinking about a possible purchase. Here in Georgia, we are free to choose what to do and what not, we feel eager to help Ukrainians. Now we think about selling some textile icons and passing all the money to help Ukrainian refugees here in situ. The money will be given to the Helping to Leave Fund

We made a special page with available images. Please, let us know which one you like to buy, so we mark it as Reserved and make sure no one else will take it. We will carefully pack and ship the purchased items within 3 days from the moment of purchase.

May the PEACE come ASAP!!

Philip and Olga
Sacred Murals Studio