The Elder Paints an Icons
Peter Lyssiotis
M A S T ER T H I E F
An Icon was written in Cyprus in 2011 at the Monastery of Saint Georgios, at Mavrovouni in the district of Larnaca. The monastery was built on the ruins of a 12th Century Byzantine church. Now there are the sounds of the 6 monks chanting, talking, going about their allotted tasks, the bells and the worshipers. The monastery is cradled in a valley. On the dry, brown hills behind the monastery is a military checkpoint. There is razor wire, guard dogs, military vehicles and Greek Cypriot conscripts with automatics yelling instructions to each other. Across from these young men is a no-man’s land-mined and barren. And on the opposite hills there are Turkish-Cypriot soldiers carrying automatics, in guard towers, yelling at each other behind the razor wire. A white helicopter with its blue U.N markings monitors the zone between the two checkpoints. This is the green line. Some distance away, in front of the monastery, there is a bitumen road; and across from it there is a mine which produces the pigment, umber. The story goes that Vermeer insisted on Cypriot umber for his shadow areas. Around the mine there is a processing plant and heavy industrial equipment. So within this small space there are three distinct zones: the military, the spiritual and the commercial-and all three span huge chunks of time.
The text of The Elder Paints an Icon is by Peter Lyssiotis and is accompanied by two colour aquatints by Petr Herel, printed recto verso by the artist, Greg Harrison, Phil Day and Peter Lyssiotis at the Australian Print Workshop, Melbourne, in 2014.
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These etchings are printed in the colour of the Cypriot hills and the dry soil; they are witnesses to the journeys taken-perhaps by pilgrims-journeys unfinished and journeys imagined. It’s not to reduce the scope of the etchings to suggest that they map a journey across a sacred and ancient place. So there is a sharp difference between the icon the Elder paints with a painstaking acknowledgement of a strict and prescriptive tradition and the etchings here, which trace a similar world perhaps, but are open and unfettered and full of suggestion.
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In The Elder Paints An Icon there is a world we don’t know enough of and the book is a witness to what remains: are these the bones of angels or sparrows or ordinary farmers that we stumble across..are these the worn routes crossed by pilgrims, or those followed by birds as they migrate to Europe from North Africa? Which is the actual image and which has been offset……are these maps or constellations?
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The type setting is by Phil Day and the typeface Bodoni. The text has been printed on Magnani Incisione, 190 gsm. at Redwood Prints and is housed in a solander box. The book was co-published by M. A. S. T. E.R. T. H. I. E. F and Uncollected Works Press in an edition of 12, with one artists’ proof reserved for the monastery.
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(Yes, it’s acknowledged that iconographers do not paint icons, rather they write them…but paints sounds so much better!)
