| AS I travelled along the Thames Valley recently, I wondered whether the artist Edward Pond had ever visited Bisham Abbey or Mapledurham House. On the strength of the two architectural vistas on the railway-carriage wall, I decided not.
Familiar to travellers on trains in East Anglia and across the South, Pond’s characteristic sketches have in several instances outlived train companies themselves.
His is a recognisable style, as visitors to the parish church where I serve know from his drawing that we use for our pewsheets and notices. His work has always had the telltale freshness of freehand work, whereas the graphics I now faced had been rendered with a ruler and set-square. It was no surprise to find them signed “Edward Pond Associates”.
The broader issue that this posed is as much about design as it is about craft. Van Dyck had so many studio assistants that he refused Charles I entrance to his studio for fear that his royal patron would find out exactly who was painting his portraits. All those paintings labelled Lucas Cranach the Elder cannot have been painted by one man, as the current RA show argues. Nor should we expect to find Damien Hirst hanging around the knacker’s yard or Anish Kapoor at the smelters. Both artists, like Bridget Riley, put their work out to “fabricators”. So who is the artist and who is the fabricator?
In the Eastern Orthodox tradition of religious iconography, the answer is unchangingly simple. I recall the not-so-gentle rebuke from the guestmaster at the monastery of Ayíou Viassaríonos Dhousíkou in Central Thessaly when I asked him who had taught him to write the icons he had shown me. “These are my masters,” he declared proudly, and his capacious hand swept across the central space of the church to indicate the cycle of frescoes (1550-58) by Tzortzis, one of the great painters of Mount Athos. He had learned from what he saw around him every day as he said his prayers.
But there are other Greek artists who strive to make for change even in the sacred. Fr Stamatis Skirilis in Athens has courted disapprobation for his modernising techniques (Arts, 31 March 2006). George Papadopoulos is a young Cypriot artist who has rethought the medium altogether, convinced that “to succeed as an artist in the non-Orthodox world, you had to come up with a new visual vocabulary”.
He has depicted the “Holy Mother” in sheet glass, often fracturing the image itself and then sealing the fragmentary pieces between other layers of coloured glass. The basic outline of the Madonna remains static, conforming to the norms provided by the Church of the artist’s childhood in a unified free Cyprus.
Its expression is freed up with the radiant use of colour, and the resulting icons in the gallery run by a College friend in the shadow of St Peter’s, Notting Hill, provided one of the more exhilarating experiences of the past few months.
The interplay of light behind each of the images is only part of the game. In a light box in the lower gallery, the visitor or worshipper is drawn into the darkness to find a Virgin Glykophilousa. As the Virgin leans to offer the Christ Child a holy kiss, the whole image flares up in fiery reds, a veritable blaze of glory. The crackled surface and the softness of the outline seem to be imprinted as if made from blood vessels. Elsewhere, an outrageous pink suffuses the Mother of God, while, in hiding, olive greens afford concealment to the Holy Child.
The artist has said that it was in retreat on Mount Athos that he convinced himself that this use of glass would be his medium to suggest the human and the divine, as “glass is both transparent and capable of bearing an image.”
The exhibition feels at times intensely private and interior. If commercialism interferes, it will only distort the real artistry in which Papadopoulos is happily engaged: beware the fabricators.
“The New Icons” is at Vessel Gallery, 114 Kensington Park Road, London W11, until tomorrow.
www.yorgosglass.com
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