Looking to the Past to Understand the Future

Shortly after 2001, I visited an Iconography Exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and was struck by this description, “Icons were a source of comfort to a nation besieged.” I had been struggling with my work and pondered, “Is my art a source of comfort to anyone?”

This led me to explore a tradition/process of painting heretofore unknown to me, the world of iconography; a direct contrast to my Western European oriented training and individualistic leanings (which often led me more to the Vermeer side of the museum and, I might add, still do.) But to know who we are, especially in such times where misunderstanding is rampant between one side of the globe and the other, it is important to discover that which we do not know…

The two works above are both the outcome of such exploration. One looks back to the 6th century CE and the other speaks to the imagery of today and the future. The Sinai Christ Pantocrator , painted while on a workshop at Kanuga Camp Conferences in Fall 2008 with teacher Teresa Harrison, is created using acrylic pigments and gold-leaf. Like most icons, it is composed of a multitude of thin washes or layers of color one atop the other, and the outcome is a very flat, deliberately non-textured surface. Pale-Male: A Pilgrimage is painted using a digital palette of over 16 million colors which is then output not to a sanded board (like a traditional icon) but to an interconnected zone of ether that compresses thousands of layers into an ephemeral moment that can only be described as immaterial… the flattest of the flat. Going even further, this digital galaxy extends the parameters of the traditional icon, (which can be copied and shared in finite increments) to one that can be shared in the global sense… i.e, infinitely, or wherever anyone cares to plug-in.

There are many opportunities and challenges for artists to explore in today’s digital universe. Like the novelists and poets who shaped meaning from a democracy of words after the evolution of the Guttenberg Press, we find ourselves in an analogous world, however one where imagery is the new rising language. I would argue that the calling for today’s artist is to bring meaning and understanding to that world of visual information, loading our brush with media, intelligence and compassion. ~ by Roz Dimon

Roz Dimon is the Manager of Communications for St. Bart’s Episcopal Church in New York City. Visit her on the web here>