SIJ26 ~ icon workshop

Not preachy and I like the image even if the 'production line' seems a little inappropriate.

Yeah, I see what you mean. It seems to be the way this teacher works, though, in order to get each student to have a finished work by the end of a single week. There is a definite procedure that's normally followed, though, and it's apparently different from what students might normally expect. I know very little, but they lay down the darkest colors first and then lighter and lighter ones in layers (Early Photoshop?!) so that the light in the final image seems to emanate from the figure itself, rather that appearing to shine upon it from without. In this photo, the teacher's model is at the top left and each student is working on her own to learn the process "from the ground up." from that "from the ground up."

Really, that's not too much different a thing from the way apprentices spent years copying their master painter's style, and it ties in with the whole general way the Orthodox have preserved the faitho of the original church under nearly constant and highly oppressive persecution over the centuries.

But, having said that, I'd also have to say that my sister, Katherine, who has an MFA in painting, agrees with you that it's not quite the way she wants to work.

Yet again, she is an Abstract Expressionist.......