Designing your own icon – 2
The icon of the Holy Family, which serves as an illustration of the icon consecration of Marian van Delft's class of Eikonikon editors, is not recognized as an icon by the Orthodox Church.
Let's start with the “illustration,” as Eikonikon calls it, of the Holy Family. Yes, you can hardly call that one icon if the Orthodox Church rejects it as I mention. I have a problem with that, that a remark from Eikonikon bulletin says that “this is a theme that is not officially considered an icon, certainly not from the Orthodox point of view.” I can see coming that you are going to call it a fine icon anyway. In doing so, you place the icon on a sliding scale. Today illustration, tomorrow quotation marks added, then “incidentally not generally regarded as an icon,” and the day after tomorrow icon, while it also being an unauthorized icon. I think the Orthodox position should be decisive, and if it is not an icon, then there is no arguing with that. At least that is how it has been all these years in Eikonikon bulletin.
Archbishop Gabriel of the Russian Church calls it “icon-like” and not an icon, because there is no feast day of the Holy Family. The design is by the Benedictine nun Marie-Paule from the monastery on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem around 1990 in my estimation. Nor, in my opinion, is it an argument that the painter in Eikonikon felt free because Martin Mandaliev had him painted. Mandaliev was sadly mistaken here as an Orthodox icon teacher out of ignorance. Just showing it to the church would have sufficed to call it off. You can guess what the Orthodox Church has against this design. Joseph is often not even the gray man of the icons, and the embrace, here as a hand on the shoulder, in iconic language means ulterior motive. Compare with the embrace of Joachim and Anna at the Beautiful Gate, of which there is also an icon, which is considered the moment of the conception of the Mother of God.
Of course, the embrace of two men and two women does not indicate ulterior motives. After all, everyone knows the hand on the shoulder of Christ at Menas on Coptic icons. I know of one more of two men, namely Peter and Paul, and also of two women, Mary and Elizabeth in Luke 1.
For those who want to design their own icons, and not repaint an old icon, almost the entire repertoire is in the painters' manuals, with the minimum information that should be on them included. You can then work with that. That means you then design within the tradition anyway.
If you want to make a design that is not described, you might have a theme that does not have a holiday. That is not commemorated on a day of the year. Then it cannot be an icon, think of the icon of the Holy Family. Rather, create an icon on an existing theme. Those who want to know afterwards whether their design is permitted can always submit it to an Orthodox priest.
If Frida Boland, also to be read in Eikonikon, publishes a Trinity icon with the three women's names Mary, Mary Magdalene and Salome underneath, it cannot be an icon.
Indeed, at the Supper of Abraham, three angels appeared as prefiguring the Trinity and not these three women. 130 years after Roeblev's death, his Trinity icon was set as an example to icon painters. Roeblev was canonized because of the icon. Frida's icon does not conform to the tradition of Orthodox icon painting and therefore is not allowed. With book reviews by Frederik and by Marjo, a rebuttal and a workshop announcement in the calendar on the website, she did get a lot of attention from Eikonikon.
Why does everyone want to call their paintings icons anyway? To gain the prestige of the icon? To sell them? A painter friend of mine also wanted to call his abstract paintings icons. I once went to one of those modern icon exhibitions at the gallery on Nieuwe Amstelstraat, Amsterdam, for nothing, because they were abstractly distorted cups. If you want to call it an icon, it must conform to the traditions of the Orthodox Church. The art historians and the dictionaries say that too, in fact everyone does. If you are talking about icons, you are talking about the Orthodox Church.