Christ Writ Large

Here is a fascinating video of my friend Dr. Stephane Rene drawing and painting an enormous Pantocrator - the Blessing Christ. Stephan is Coptic Orthodox and is one of the foremost exponents of the neo-Coptic style pioneered by his mentor, Isaac Fanous. The medium used is egg tempera of silicate ground. Note how fluently and easily he creates those perfect smooth parabolic lines!

His blog is copticonography.org

Pantocrator from Daniel Wild Corbett on Vimeo.

The Coptic Orthodox View of a 21st Century Renaissance in Catholic Culture

I want to draw your attention to a new blog from my friend, Dr. Stephane Rene, who is one of the foremost proponents of neo-Coptic iconography today. You can find it here: copticiconography.com.

Stephane is not only a wonderful painter; he has a deep understanding of the Christian tradition, and he is always worth reading and listening to. He is based in London and teaches at the Prince of Wales’ school of traditional arts in Shoreditch. Here is an example of his work.

His latest post is intended for a Coptic readership, and is an appeal against the influence of Western kitsch art in Coptic iconography. It is interesting to me to see how sentimentality and kitsch are so virulent they can infect just about any milieu, even one that I had viewed as resiliently traditional as the Coptic culture.

While he is critical of some Western traditions, most notably the High Renaissance, (and he is in good company here; Benedict XVI was too), he is refreshingly open to the first developments taking place in what he sees as a renewal of sacred arts in the Roman Catholic Church. As a member of the Coptic Orthodox Church, he is making such observations as an outsider. After first making some kind comments about my book, The Way of Beauty, he mentions two artists by name. One is known to me already, Ian Knowles the British iconographer whose style is influenced by that of his teacher Aidan Hart. The other is a French painter that I had not seen before, François Peltier who, he says, “has a more contemporary approach and uses modern materials, but his content and vocabulary are steeped in tradition.” The image below is one of his Stations of the Cross.

This is interesting work. It brings to mind the scripturally based work of the 20th-century Jewish French artist Marc Chagall. Benedict XVI is an admirer of Chagall’s art; I wrote in an article in 2011 that while I can see potential for devotional art in his style, I was skeptical about its value as liturgical art and the likelihood of it inspiring the rejuvenation of tradition. At the time I wrote:

Chagall’s work is highly individual in its stylization, and it relies much more on an interpretation of ideas that is directed by intuition rather than reason. Unless we can discern the principles that underlie it and characterize them very clearly, we can copy his work, but it is going to be difficult to do so with sufficient understanding for it to be the basis of a new tradition.

There is another factor that mitigates against Chagal: we live in the age where the tradition is one of anti-tradition. Today’s artists spend most of their time trying to be different be from everyone else. So even if Chagall does represent the beginning of a fourth liturgical tradition and somebody worked out his system of iconography, no tradition derived from it is is going to emerge as long as artists spend most of their time chasing ‘originality’ and consciously trying to differentiate themselves from other work.

Time will tell!

I’m not sure it is to my taste, but perhaps time is telling me something after all through the work of M. Peltier! Below is his Divine Mercy, which I prefer to the common image, as he has managed to purge it of the sentimentality which is so strong in the original.

The Hard Work of Re-Establishing an Artistic Tradition - The Icons of Dr Stephane Rene

Some NLM readers will be aware of the Neo-Coptic iconography of Dr Stephane Rene. He is one of the main figures in the group of iconographers who are working to maintain the momentum of the revival of the Coptic style of iconography, a student of the man who is generally seen as responsible for reestablishing Coptic iconography in the mid-20th century, the late Dr Isaac Fanous.

In my opinion, the Coptic revival demonstrates just how a tradition can not only be re-established after a hiatus in practice, but it can be done so in such a way that the new work surpasses the quality of the old. This latter point is just a personal opinion, but I am struck by how powerfully distinctive and instantly recognizable the neo-Coptic style is. It participates in the tradition of Coptic iconography, but at the same time has a wide appeal to contemporary Christians from other rites and churches, as well as, presumably, Coptic Christians. I have seen Stephane’s icons in Catholic churches on a number of occasions, for example.

Furthermore, (and again, this is just a personal opinion), although the style originates from a very different starting point, they do not look so “un-Roman” as, for example, a Russian icon. I would be interested to know how readers feel about this.

I wanted to bring his work to your attention again for a couple of reasons. One is that I had occasion to talk to him not long ago, and he sent me examples of recent work.

The second is that he told me of his concerns about ensuring that the tradition survives, and has started to take on students who are committed to learning and maintaining the tradition. He is in touch with a number of students in the US and Canada whom he tutors via video connection. He told me that he was initially skeptical of the potential for such distance-learning, but has now changed his mind.

“I now have three promising young Coptic students, two doing a BA in fine art in Canada, and a third from California who already has a BA in painting. I had been following them for the last 2-3 years on Facebook, and they eventually contacted me separately, begging me for some kind of tuition. I accepted and started weekly group video calls on Messenger (for now). It has been quite an interesting experience so far, and I now see that my reservations about teaching iconography online were not warranted. I give them written assignments, exercises and a reading list that includes The Way of Beauty, which I consider a must for any student of Christian sacred art. As you may already know, the very existence of Coptic iconography is now very much in jeopardy and I want to do whatever I can to contribute.”

In the Roman Church, we are lagging behind the Eastern Churches in this regard. This is going to sound harsh, but in my opinion, we are still looking for our own Fanous who will re-establish the distinctive Catholic traditions of art, such as the Gothic or Baroque, with such great effect. I hope that this story will inspire artists out there to believe that we can have beautiful liturgical art again.

If anyone wishes to contact him, you can do so via his website: www.copticiconography.org.

Also, here is an excellent interview with Stephane, who is a deacon at the Coptic Church in London where he lives, in the Orthodox Arts Journal.

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