According to the master iconographer Archimandrite Zenon, 10,000 hours of practice are needed to become proficient. It takes many years to become a good painter. Also, Roman Catholic and Anglican/Episcopalian churches and individuals are increasingly wanting icons.īut given this demand, churches will be filled with mediocre work if our training of iconographers is mediocre. As the number of Orthodox churches increases, both in the West and in traditionally Orthodox countries, more icons and wall paintings are required. The effective training of iconographers is a pressing and practical issue. Or to put the question another way: What constitutes a well painted icon? Icon schools and teachers are working blind if we do not first give deep consideration to the qualities that we wish to nurture in the works of our students. In this article I discuss the training of iconographers, not primarily the practical ways that this can be achieved, but the more fundamental question of what sort of iconographers we are trying to train. TODAY AND TOMORROW: PRINCIPLES IN THE TRAINING OF FUTURE ICONOGRAPHERS Today and Tomorrow: Principles in the Training of Future Iconographers pt.2.Today and Tomorrow: Principles in the Training of Future Iconographers pt.1.Mapplethorpe once stated ‘I zero in on the body part that I consider the most perfect part in that particular model’. The images, which were published as Black Book in 1986, included photographs of fragmented bodies such as a torso, an extended arm, buttocks and thighs. He chose black models because, as his biographer Patricia Morrisroe suggested, ‘he could extract a greater richness from the colour of their skin’. ![]() His sitters were often athletic black men including models, dancers and bodybuilders, all with muscular and well-defined bodies. ![]() In these photographs, which were published in a book in 1983, Lady: Lisa Lyon, Lyon took on different guises and played with the idea of ‘types’ of women.ĭuring this time Mapplethorpe was also photographing the male figure. They worked together over the next few years creating various portraits and figure studies including both full and fragmented body images. ![]() In 1980 Robert Mapplethorpe met Lisa Lyon, the first World Women’s Body Building Champion. Her music on Waves reflects a new sense of calm, charm and sincerity and Mapplethorpe captures this in the image he took for the album’s cover. She had met and fallen in love with the American musician Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith, and wanted to focus on family life. By this time she had achieved commercial and critical success and had decided to take a break from her music career. Mapplethorpe photographed Smith again for her fourth album, Waves in 1979. But her raised arm pose gesture of playing with her tie, makes her seem nervous and unsure. She wears a disheveled shirt and leans against a wall staring at the camera. In Mapplethorpe’s photograph Patti Smith 1975, Smith’s pose is both vulnerable and confrontational. Horses went on to achieve iconic status in popular music and defined Smith’s androgynous and uncompromising style. He photographed her for the cover of her 1973 volume of poetry, Witt, and her album Horses in 1975. Robert Mapplethorpe took many photographs of Patti Smith. In 1970 they moved together into the Chelsea Hotel in New York, the historic hotel known for its famous residents including many writers, artists and musicians. They met in 1967 and lived together for the next few years. Musician and poet Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe had a unique relationship: they were friends, lovers, artistic collaborators and soul mates. Artists, musicians, pornographic film stars, and other members of the edgy New York underground scene were all captured on Mapplethorpe's camera. Two years later Mapplethorpe bought a more sophisticated camera, a Hasselblad medium format camera, and began photographing the people he knew. But he began to appreciate the quality of Polaroid photographs in their own right and his first solo exhibition, in 1973 at the Light Gallery in New York City, was called Polaroids. In 1970 he bought a Polaroid camera so he could take photographs to use in his collages. He experimented with mixed media collages, using images cut from books and magazines. From Polaroid to professionalĮarly in his career Robert Mapplethorpe was influenced by a range of artists including assemblage artist Joseph Cornell and dada artist Marcel Duchamp. When he was sixteen he enrolled at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where he studied drawing, painting, and sculpture. One of six children, he was brought up in a strict Catholic environment. Robert Mapplethorpe was born in 1946 in Queens, New York.
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