Faith & the Artist
Living Icons
Rebecca Irvine Bilkau talks to Sylvia Dimitrova
Issue 21, Spring/Summer 2009
St.Aldhelm
On the second page of Sylvia Dimitrova’s website Canon Dr Graham Kings states that Sylvia’s art is ‘a vibrant gift from God’. As I move slowly through the images on the site, that vibrancy is indeed remarkable. Saint Clare glows serenely beneath a petrol blue mantel; St Demitrius’s cherry-coated horse paces through holly-green fields, a colour picked up in the Saint’s own cloak; the forehead of St Aldhelm seems to reflect the light of the world. Within all this vibrancy, though, is a sense of time arrested. I am reminded of tiny field basilicas that have inspired both holidays and poems for me: those were unsigned, made by artists unknown, or at the very least centuries forgotten. In the age of the celebrity artist, what is the pull towards creating these apparently era-less icons. It must be faith, surely?
St.Demitrius
Speaking quietly as we engage on the telephone, Sylvia confounds me: “I grew up in Bulgaria, where religion was not tolerated at the time. The church was banned for fifty years. I started to paint icons because that’s what my parents did, as part of our history and culture.” The extent to which religion was not tolerated is reflected in Sylvia’s memory of wanting to discover exactly what went on in churches, and at one time she and her school-friends decided to investigate: “We had to sneak out, so we could go and have a look, but the teachers caught us, and we were sent back to the dorm.” When she went away to study art, everything was on the curriculum but icons. Instead the students there received an all round training which Sylvia clearly still respects: she learned representational art, sculpture, ceramics and so forth.
Christ Saviour and Giver of Life
It was only when she had finished her training that she went on to study with Georgi Tchouchev: “The best icon painter in Bulgaria. He may have been self-taught but his icons were beautiful, even though they were not done for religious purposes, but as a celebration of Bulgarian culture. Also, he had been my mother’s teacher. I was really his apprentice, living in the studio, and eventually doing the little fiddly bits for him.”What, I wondered, earned him so great a reputation. The answer came easily to Sylvia. “His works were closest to the original. Iconography is about constant reproduction. An icon is never signed, you know. In fact, the artist is known as an icon writer. This is because the iconographer is the transmitter of a message or a story. Each one bears the name of the saint or holy person involved, and it is only when those words are actually painted on it, that it is considered finished.”
St. Clare
This must surely require some transcendental concentration, some effort at the suppression of ego: “To me it comes instinctively. It is the only form of art that has not changed since the tenth century, and maybe this is why when I am painting I seem to enter a different world. The radio or television, if they are on, seem very far away. Painting is a cleansing process, I am most at peace when I am working.”
Though that peace continues now that Sylvia is working in England, moving to a country without an iconographic tradition has presented new challenges. “In England, I have been approached by both Anglican and Catholic churches to make icons: that is why I came in the first place. These icons, though, are often completely new, because here you have different saints to those in Bulgaria. So I have had to create images from scratch – there is no tradition to rely on. The very first one I did was of Saint Benedict. It is to him that I owe everything that has happened in the last ten years I feel. And I had to make him up, first for Downside School, and more recently for Worth Abbey.
Sylvia was, in short, creating a whole new iconic template. Which seemed to beg again the question of whether she felt her painting was a gift from God. “I hope so” she says simply, “I hope I’m also passing on an ancient way of making prayer.”
I imagine that this can be daunting at times. Sylvia pauses before she tells me about visiting Wells Cathedral where her icons of the ‘Stations of the Cross’ are the subject of Lenten lectures. She went along to hear one, and as the lecturer turned to leave, he bowed to the icon. Sylvia was shocked and felt awkward: “But then I remembered it was an icon, an icon I had painted, but an icon. And I found it amazing. Fabulous. Beautiful.”
It sounded like a blessing, too.
