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Audio drama retellings of the stories of the Christian Saints, Panel Discussions, Cast Commentary, Reaction Videos, Screwtape Returns, and more!
Cloud of Witnesses Radio
How Sacred Images Drew Me Into Orthodoxy | When Art Looks Back: Seeing Love Through Holy Eyes
Icons, Conversion, And A Life Reframed
We trace Sdn Michael Roeder’s path from ministry and publishing to iconographer and the deaconate, exploring how a single purchase grew into a collection, a craft, and a new spiritual home. Along the way we unpack technique, tradition, and why icons feel like windows that also watch.
Join us for this Cloud of Witnesses exclusive, a presentation on an iconographer’s journey from faith, to art, to transcendence, to Orthodoxy, given only once at Point Loma Nazarene University, Thursday, October 2nd, at 7 p.m. (PDT).
• early family loss, blended roots, and resilient confidence
• first icon purchase and the pull toward sacred art
• retirement, workshops, and apprenticeship in iconography
• Orthodoxy’s phronema and full-senses worship
• travel to Russia, Wales, and encounters with living tradition
• making, gilding, and finishing techniques for icons
• how tradition guides creativity without distortion
• parish life, service, and supporting church iconographers
• collecting ethics, provenance, and legacy questions
• why the eyes of saints communicate love and peace
What if a single image could rearrange your life? Michael Rader joins us to share how buying one modest icon opened a door to two hundred more, years of study and apprenticeship, and a surprising call to serve as a subdeacon. We follow his path from youth ministry and publishing into the world of egg tempera, gold leaf, incense, and chant—learning how beauty can teach as deeply as books and how a tradition can expand the heart without abandoning the mind.
We talk about the phronema—the Orthodox way of seeing—and why the liturgy engages every sense: candles and incense for scent, chant and bells for sound, processions and prostrations for the body, and a calendar that binds communities across continents. Michael explains how icons are made, from gessoed boards and warm red bole beneath leaf to fine painted gold for intricate lines. He shares the craft realities of commissions, timelines, and finishing, and the guardrails that keep iconography faithful to theology while still leaving room for personal skill and nuance.
Travel stories from Russia and Wales bring the tradition to life: cathedrals heavy with color, Rublev’s Trinity looming with quiet power, and small wooden churches radiant without marble or gold. We explore collecting with conscience, the peace guests feel in a home lined with saints, and a simple test from a trusted dealer: look into the eyes and see whether the love of God looks back. That gaze, Michael says, is what drew him deeper—past analysis, into adoration. Press play to meet the saints, learn the craft, and consider how sacred art might reshape your prayer, your space, and your week.
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My name is Andrew Nosell. I'm a biology professor here at Point Loma. And it's my pleasure to introduce you to our speaker this evening, icon collector Michael Rader, who curated that beautiful exhibit that just next door in Keller Gallery. A little bit about Michael. So he lives in Point Loma and graduated Valvictorian in USIU's last class at their California Western campus right here on Point Loma in 1973, before Pasadena College arrived and would eventually become Point Loma Nazarene University. His wife Lori is also collect uh connected to this place, having taught here for 12 years PE, and that was back when it was known as Point Loma College. Michael purchased his first icon in 2006 and has since then acquired about 200 icons, ranging in age from the 15th to the 21st centuries. He's traveled the world and first met Aidan Hart, who made the new transfiguration of creation icon. Met Aidan Hart in 2013 at the monastery of St. Anthony and St. Cuthbert in Wales. In addition to collecting icons, Michael also makes them. He and Lori are currently parishioners at St. Anthony the Great Antiochian Orthodox Church in Linda Vista, where Michael serves as a subdeacon. And interestingly, Michael was not always Eastern Orthodox. And so this evening he'll be talking about his collection, but also describe how he believes God used icons to draw him and his wife into the faith about 10 years ago. So please join me in welcoming Michael Rader.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you, Andy. Okay. Sound, sound. Check, check. Thumbs up, okay. Well, the last time I addressed an audience in this campus was in 1973 in the Greek theater, a hundred yards away. As I was saying farewell to my college career, uh, little did I know I'd be back. Uh today, what I'd like to do is give you a brief biology autobiography. I promise I'll keep it short at the beginning. Uh, as you probably have heard on television like Saturday Night Live, I was born at a very early age. I actually came a few hours early. We were aiming for San Diego in a Navy transport and had to put down in Oakland so that my mother could hustle me out. Uh so instead of being born at Miramar Naval Air Station, I was born just off the runway in Oakland and got to San Diego a day or two later. Uh so you could call me a San Diego native if you wanted to. Um that's my sister there. We lived in Hawaii because my dad was being transferred out. It was during the Korean War, and shortly after we got to Hawaii, he was killed in a plane crash. He's he was a pilot. So basically, uh we grew up the first four or five years without a father. Then we moved back to San Diego, and my mom remarried my stepdad, Al, and we became what they call a blended family nowadays. So Al had four children from a future uh former wife. Uh, he inherited the two of us, and then they had two of their own. But my sister and I see they're in our mature, cynical-looking high school uh and stylish garb. Uh and my mom was always a fashion statement. So uh my sister and I just didn't feel like we were part of the deal. So when we graduated, we left and never really went back to the family home. I was uh in Seattle at that time. That's where we had moved to. And I found a scholarship available at Point Loma at that time. It was called Cal Western. A different uh university was here, and they sent a rep to the Seattle area and they said, We've got money for out-of-state students, and I was like this, uh, raised my hand, and a couple of months later I was on the bus headed for San Diego. Uh that's my dad at the same age as I was when the pictures were put together, and I'm pretty sure he's my dad. It looks like me. He looks like me. You know, I feel like him. Um and you can see if you're familiar with Point Loma campus, uh, that was the Greek theaters in the background, and that was my graduation day with my girlfriend Lori, who is uh hopefully still my wife. Yes, there she is. She's over there. Um I like the uh you can't really see the ruffles on my uh tuxedo, but uh I had baby blue with tuxedo uh ruffles all down the front, and that was 50 years and um a month ago, roughly. So now I'm kind of jumping uh decade by decade here, and I wanted to uh talk a little bit about how my mindset developed over the period where I talk to other people and they always say something like, My dad is an FBI agent. Raise your hand if you said that to me. Brad. Okay. My dad sells hostess Twinkies. Kirk. Kirk used to wear a costume, the Twinkie the Kid. Um my dad works with Ronald Reagan. Martin's not here tonight, but uh my dad is Billy Graham's right-hand man, Bob Smith from Lamb's Players. Um, my dad invented snowy bleach. Well, that was actually my grandfather. If you were in the U.S. for a long time, snowy bleach, glass wax, Mr. Bubble, those were all products my grandfather developed. So I didn't have a dad to claim for, but I had a grandpa. And finally, um, my dad was mayor and governor. Now, Lori's uh great-grandfather was the mayor of Avalon on Catalina Island. My great-grandfather was the mayor of a town called Paradise or Paraíso in Mexico, in the state of Tabasco. And then he became the governor of the state of Tabasco. Before it was a hot sauce, you know, it's a state in Mexico. But just like things are constant, uh times change. Two other governors were carried out feet first. My great-grandfather decided to walk out instead of wait for the revolution. And uh so he sent my grandmother and her sisters to the United States with a missionary who was leaving the country. And he later, 10 years later, got a permit to come. So that's a little of my history. Now, on the other side, people always say, I know a guy. Like this is an Italian thing, right? You got a problem? I know a guy. He can fix it. My Aunt Lotsi. Now that's a quote from my friend Martin. His Aunt Lotcy Bush happens to be Anhouser Busch. And if you like Micheloba Budweiser, you know, you see Aunt Lotsi. Um, my Uncle Dick, Richard, was the uh president of the largest cold storage, frozen food storage warehouse in the United States. So if you wanted uh, you know, abalone or you needed something frozen, Uncle Dick was the man to call. My cousin Mark assembled the Martian rover that landed on Mars and crawled its way around. So he's good with his fingers, never graduated high school. But if you needed something mechanical, Mark's the man. My friend Donna lived in C.S. Lewis's house, the kilns, for quite a long time as a uh caretaker and tourist host until she happened to forget to have a work permit and got caught and deported. Uh my uncle Neil, if you know anything about TVs, he has all the patents on a flat tension mask vacuum TV tube. So TV tubes went from very curved to mostly flat, thanks to Uncle Neil. Next door neighbor Neil, lived next door to Lori's dad, invented the phone mate answering machine. So why do I tell you this? Because I grew up feeling that there weren't six degrees of separation between me and somebody that was one or two. And there was nothing that could stop any of us from making that one step we could learn from from Neil, or we could learn from uh, you know, our grandparents or whatever. Everybody's got something they can do. So that gave me confidence. I didn't have a dad, but at least I had friends and connections with people, and I didn't have to reach very far. If I needed somebody, you know, threatened, I could call Brad's dad. He'd show up, you know, with his hat and his black suit, and uh you didn't have to say anything. Everybody knew what an FBI man looked like, right? So now Lori and I are growing up, and at this age, basically, I can't see the slides there, so I have to look with you. Uh I was working for David C. Cook, a Sunday school publisher in Elgin, Illinois. Lori was working at the YMCA here in Point Loma, Peninsula Y, and I was a youth director at First Press, and then later at Lemon Grove Lutheran Church. We bought a house so we could lead Bible studies. You can't really do it in an apartment if you have half a dozen kids sprawled out, you know, on the couch like they do, like I did, like we all did. And uh who was anybody here who was at some of those first Bible studies in our house? Kirk, Carol, Peggy, right? So Bible study ever. See, I have to be careful what I say because there are fact checkers in the audience. Uh Lambsplayers Theater, you could see Bob Smith there. Uh Bob is not with us tonight because he's not healthy enough. Uh, but Bob's dad was Billy Graham's front man who organized all the Billy Graham crusades around the world. So one guy between me and Billy Graham, you know, that's the way I looked at it. So there's no reason why I couldn't do something like they do. That's that's the way I thought. So that was about 25 to 30. Then we get to uh more of a middle-aged situation. I was shifted, they wanted me to move to Illinois. I said, No way, Jose. I got a job here in San Diego doing automotive publishing. And that was a great job. I got to travel around the world. The men in black are from Canadian Tire. Is anyone Canadian here? Canadian Tire is a big outfit. It was like Sears used to be in the US. Uh we had 430 different locations with service base, 10 or 12 bays. And the group at the top is a bunch of French people that we met traveling in Europe. Sometimes you might meet someone on a vacation and you say, you know, if you ever get to like uh San Diego, give me a call. They all got to San Diego and they gave us a call. You know, French people they don't just show up, they show up, you know, ready to be entertained and fed. Yeah, 18. Yeah. That was our old house. So we had to move so they wouldn't find us again. We moved to this other house. Aiden, uh, do you recognize that picture on the right top?
SPEAKER_02:Um, uh, I cut out St.
SPEAKER_01:Cuthbert, but that's uh Lindisfarne. Uh Holy Island. And we've been there four or five times. Now we're uh honorary residents. They said if you come back more than once and it's not in a casket, you're an honorary uh citizen of Lindisfarne. So that was about age 30 to 50, and we were both working, busy, traveling. We had a lot of friends, and uh now we're kind of getting mature. You can tell, hair's thin. Uh Lori's looking frazzled because of me mostly. So 50 to 60. I was doing math textbooks. Anyone here love math? Raise your hand. All right. That's your man in the middle there in the blue jacket, Brad Baker, publisher of Excel Math. If anybody used Excel Math in school, uh he bought the company from Janice, who started it, and uh Kirk's wife Carol and I ended it. Uh no. No. And so on the right, so your left uh is a retreat group from San Diego First Presbyterian Church, uh, men's retreat up in Pine Valley. Uh down below is a uh bronze casting of uh Friar, one of the California missionaries. It's called The Word. I bought it from a local artist. Next, Daniel Mitsui, a Japanese American man, does these pen and ink drawings. Awesome. Detail. And in the middle is the first icon I ever bought for$400 in 2006. Next to that is a stained glass sewer from First Presbyterian Church. And adjacent to that is an illustrated manuscript icon by Aidan Hart, if I get the artist right. Uh that was about 2000, probably 2004, 5, in the in the uh St. John's Bible. And the last is a carving of the um tablets and a goblet, uh chalice, and a snake. And it has some symbolism. I bought it from a uh a priest in the UK about uh 30 years ago. I don't remember its name. But that was what I had in the way of artwork until my mother passed, and we inherited about 20 or 30 paintings and a bunch of sculptures. And I began to think, hmm, there must be something to this. And around that time, I retired, uh, 2011. I decided to stop working. The state of California was on our backs at the math company, and I just decided I didn't eat the grief. And my tax man agreed with me, so I retired. Carol, where are you, Carol? Carol took over my job and uh as publisher uh sorry, managing editor. What did what did they call you?
unknown:Yep, that would be it.
SPEAKER_01:Managing editor. Okay. So then I was free, and I signed up for an icon painting class the following day after I retired. So jumping into the fire, and this was with a teacher named Teresa Harrison. She learned from some Russians. Uh she's an American, her husband is an Episcopal priest, and she has taught hundreds of workshops over the last. Oh, yes, she's the one with her head circled with a yellow. And the man next to her is Colin. He is a priest at uh Episcopal Church in North Park, and he was the first one to commission me, actually pay me to paint an icon. So that's uh the reason he's uh and she are circled. The icon that you see at the bottom at my feet, that's uh St. Barnabas, and that's the icon I did for that commission. It was for a friend of uh Collins who was being ordained to the priesthood. So now we're getting into Oh, sorry, sorry Aiden. Oh, at so he built a hut okay, so this is the monastery where Aiden lived in Wales. And I put the picture up because Shropshire. Oh, it's on the English side. Okay, so I put that up for you.
SPEAKER_05:And it just You visited it as part of the Right, I was there.
SPEAKER_01:I took the picture, and on the other side is a icon sale that was arranged at the Rokor headquarters, that's Russian Orthodox Church outside Russia. It's in the middle of Manhattan, is it yeah, 90th Street or something like that. And the Russians loved the fact that I was I was the only uh non-Russian person there. I'd been invited by a dealer. They loved me, they fed me vodka, poured it down my throat. I caught a cab and I had to go from 90th, if you know Manhattan, like all the way to the bottom by the where the World Trade Center was, was my hotel, and I had to get all the way back there, but my eyes were on springs, like the you know, the guys in the cartoons. Some of you, how many of you here are Russian? Russian Orthodox Church? You familiar with vodka? Okay. At this point, I knew enough about icons that I thought I better learn some more because they're sucking me in. And I it's like the undertow or getting caught at the beach. You know, you feel yourself being pulled, but you don't know how to stop. St. Catharines on the right. Constantine and Helen in the middle. And the church on the left side. Does anybody recognize that? No. What's that? It's in uh New England. It's it's the church where uh Matushika Karen and Father Peter worked before they came to California. And so the uh I had another story about it, but I'll I'll keep moving. So we decided orthodoxy was interesting. We thought it was just a fringe kind of movement. In fact, some of our family thought we're getting involved in a cult, especially the uh sort of Methodist type or uh you know uh mega after church type people.
SPEAKER_05:What is the yellow butt bulletin on the right hand side? Liturgy learning a state following.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, oh, these were the things that uh we had to come to grips with. Like we had to understand what the liturgy was. Lori was from an episcopal background, so she was more used to the uh sign of the cross and bowing and so forth. I wasn't. And we had to learn to say father, you know. I because I didn't the reason I put in the thing about my early life is I didn't have a father, and I never had to use the word father, and I didn't really know exactly what it meant. We didn't have children, so I wasn't one. Other people had fathers, but now I was saying father to a guy in a black robe. And uh some people who are converts to orthodoxy understand that it's uh sometimes it's a little bit of a leap to say this about that man. Uh, we had to do confession, that was even more of a leap for some people. It wasn't, I didn't have too many sins. If you thought I was a drug addict and you came to this presentation hoping for grave uh you know confessions, I'm sorry, but uh it wasn't that big of a deal for me. Uh so I just want you to see that even though it's a fringe movement in America a few years ago, it isn't in other parts of the world. And this is a cathedral in Moscow we visited when we were there, and those are all monks and priests. And it's an awesome picture. I just like looking at it. So, unlike today, a decade ago, you could freely go to and from Russia and many other countries, but doors open and close all the time. And when we we went around Russia, we realized, you know, this isn't Disneyland, that's a real church, the Cathedral of St. Basil. That's the original Rublev's Trivian Trinity icon. That's how big it is. That isn't me, but I took the picture of the guy standing there so we could show the scale of it all. And that's my wife looking at the great cloud of witnesses painted on the ceiling. In this was in St. Petersburg. I had never grasped the degree of love and devotion and unrestrained uh worship that could be reflected in architecture and art. We don't see it so much here because we're more uh, you know, we would go for the big building with the internet service and the praise band, and other places might go for the painting on the ceiling. And both ways can reach. I learned that the gospel has been accompanied by illustrations for centuries. So this these are illuminated manuscripts, it has the text as well as an illustration. And if you saw uh let's see if I can no, that didn't work. Go back. That's better for me, not for you. Sorry. That's good. Okay, so I painted that icon of Saint John and Procrus receiving the revelation from God. It's in the other building. And the one on the bottom, and of course, the one on the top is famous, Christ. So typically a book might have an illustration to make the point. That's what Aidan was doing in the St. John's Bible. Stories would be illustrated with something that would make it more memorable for the reader. We didn't have that so much here in the West. I do have a Bible from with Salvador Dolly, did 40 paintings that were tipped in. So you have a full-colored painting by Salvador Dolly of the of the Bible text. And finally, I just wanted to show you you don't have to have millions of dollars in your church to love and decorate your church with icons. This was a church uh we visited in Russia. Everything was wood, they didn't have any marble, they didn't have any gold, they had the best they could produce, and they had embroidery with angels. Uh and all of that is uh charmed me. I just like the fact that you don't have to be rich. Now, then we went to St. Constantine and Helen and we took a full course in orthodoxy from Eve Tibbs, who was teaching at Fuller. She's a seminary professor, but she's Orthodox and she's Greek, and she's speaking tomorrow here. If you can come back, please come. She's brilliant. Uh the thing that I enjoyed is she flawlessly or faultlessly or without hesitation went back and forth from English to Greek to make a point. And we always uh had a, at least in the Presbyterian Church, the preparation that they have in seminary gives them uh skills in Greek. So they could say, ah, koninia means this, and they would use it as a sermon point. But the Greek Orthodox, they don't bother with that, they just go back and forth from one language to the other. Probably the same in Russian churches, too. Um anyway, so what we learned here is we had to have a new way of thinking. In our Presbyterian church, we had a Bethel Bible series that came out at Bethel Seminary in Minnesota when they talked about thinking Greek, which is the way Americans tend to think, where Western Greek logic versus thinking Hebrew. Has anybody taken that Bethel series? Anybody in here? Nope. Kurt, Bob, Brad, Carol? Okay, so you learn. Now they might, we might say, how much? How many dollars? How much is a shekel? How many is how far is a cubit? Or what is what does it all mean? We want the math. And the Hebrews would say, huh, it's a lot. It's far. It's great. Phronema is the Greek way of saying, hmm, we have to think. I mean, the uh the Orthodox way of thinking, we've got to think the way the people did in the early church. So we had to learn words in Greek, Russian, Arabic, get used to one hour on Saturday nights and four hours or five hours on Sunday mornings. Uh it was a mind shift. Um, and I want to give credit. I don't know if any of these people are here, I can't see that far. Uh, Father John, Father Andrew, Cunio, Father Josiah Trenham, Eve Tibbs, Dr. Jeannie. Some of you may have seen her. She's been doing lessons on the internet for 15 years. And um, I just want to show you a little analysis I came up with the multimedia aspect of worship in the Orthodox Church. Visual, historical, olfactory, that means smell. Gustatory, we probably, you know, eating. It's global, similar uh schedule and calendar across the world. Auditory, there's singing, there's chanting, there's bells. Uh we show eternal things, there's illumination, candles, uh lights go up and down, uh, there's incense, smell. All these factors make for an experience where you can't fall asleep. Well, I suppose you could, but most people don't. Um, Presbyterians were known as the frozen chosen. Uh I think that's a disparaging term, but you know, because you don't have to move too far during the service. You might have To stand out. You might have to pass the plate to your neighbor. Maybe they'll bring communion, they'll pass it to you. So Orthodoxy was much more active. These are a few little snippets from our church. There are lots of flowers, there's processions, there's a baptism, there's a funeral. These are the things that we're focused on. Not as much, we do have a uh Feeding the Homeless program, but it's not much social services beyond that. Um, not a lot of overhead and let's just say the bulk of the time is worship. However, there are plenty of people to meet. Some of them uh anybody here on the anybody see yourself up there?
unknown:No.
SPEAKER_01:No. Uh the Orthodox Church has godparents and uh godchildren, and we have sponsors for different things, and this young couple on the left asked us to be their sponsors when they were married. Uh, I stayed clear of the cake, but I did get a good picture. Um we roasted a lamb for Easter, and those folks on the right are all most all older than me, except for one lady whose name I will not mention. And uh we're wearing those red crosses. Well, it's a society of uh a fundraising deal. So in the Presbyterian Church, I was on the board, and I did a lot of other things, but it was primarily primarily um teaching. So far, in the Orthodox Church, I was trying to keep my head down. And I I kind of got that from a friend, Dave Jones, who dad changed churches, and he said it was really nice. They didn't know that I had this, this, this, this, this, this job at my last church. I would just like to worship. So that's what I was trying to do at the beginning. I had to learn the Orthodox world. And so I focused on what I knew. I knew about icons, I knew about incense, I knew candles because I'd had a candle company back to when I was in college. So I take all the old candle stubs that people light to say prayers for their relatives, and I melt them down and I make beautiful new candles, which we use again for worship.
unknown:Already pre-blessed.
SPEAKER_01:Pre-blessed, pre-prayed over. And I make icons, as you would expect, since that's why we're here. Uh and I have helped to support the iconographers who've decorated our church. Now, in this will be a question for you. Uh Dimitri, who was our head guy, said the key quality for becoming a church iconographer is you have to be comfortable with scaffolds and ladders. Absolutely. Because when you're up, maybe on your back, 40, 50, however many feet in the air, uh, you have to still be still be able to paint and climb up and down the ladder all day. Um these are some of the icons that he's painted for us. And they're those four creatures if you saw them in the other room.
SPEAKER_03:Did you explain what those four creatures are?
SPEAKER_01:I did then. Does anybody want to hear it again? Does anybody want to know? Okay, so these creatures were um an ox, an eagle. Doesn't really look like an eagle, a man, and a lion. And they represent the four evangelists. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. You'll have to come back for the exhibit and I'll tell you more. So, iconic apprentice, uh, that was my next job once I had taken a dozen or so icon workshops, is I got uh promoted to apprentice. So that meant I knew my way around this sharp end of a compass. I could put the paint down in a circle without blotches. And my teacher had a commission to do 15 large icons, and by large I mean well about the size of the top of this podium, so two feet by three feet or so. And to do 15 of those, I don't know how you budget your time, Aiden, on things like that, but she thought a year uh maybe painting part-time because she was still teaching all around the country. So she hustled a dozen of us to be assistants, and we all worked together on these icons. The last picture is uh in location. This is the final, and that's hanging in the church, but that shows the progression. This is a resurrection icon in the Orthodox Church. Meanwhile, I was collecting icons. Um, the first icon is that blue one in the uh on the top. This is it. This is the first one I bought, and it's a Russian icon, selected saints, tempera on wood panels, six images of, and there are their names, but they're not famous saints, they're devout. And I liked it because I could imagine myself being there. I'm a minor saint, you know, I'm a believer. And I think it just appealed to me that somebody cared enough, loved enough these saints to remember them with this icon that they put up in their church, local saints. And that attracted me uh because I already knew who Saint Nicholas was, and obviously, you know, the big the big guys. Uh it was easy to find those pictures, but this one just charmed me. So I bought it. Little did I know. Um as you see here in 2006 I had eight icons. In 2010, there were more. Uh 2020, Father John came to do us a house blessing, and I had a lot more. You can see Aidan's there just behind him, and some of the other ones that you've seen in the room next door. Uh and then a few more years passed, and whoops. Father John said, No more hiding behind the candles and the wicks and the icons, time to get back into serving. And that's when uh I was chosen to be uh subdeacon at the church. It's uh ordained, minor ordained position in the Orthodox Church. So we help with worship. And as one bishop told me, you're a mobile coat rack. Uh you assist the bishop whenever he comes to visit. But we do lots of other things, and last year a parish council secretary was added to my portfolio. I also do the church directory with all people's names and addresses and take pictures. And last year, this year, that's how my room looked before I picked out the winners to come to tonight's uh icon show. I I have mostly stopped buying new icons. I have not stopped painting. Uh I think I've done about 50 myself, but I also manufacture duplicate copies for people, and I've done about 275 of those by my receipts from the printer. Um, questions? Drawers are full of icons. Icons and old Bible study notes. Uh how do churches decide to sell them? Usually they let them go when the church is moving or they're they run out of money. Like the church we're in now was uh St. Elizabeth Episcopal Church in Linda Vista, and they dwindled down to nothing, and the Episcopal Church sold it off. We bought it and redecorated it. I didn't really put pictures in of the church too much, but um I I think what happened to me was to sum up the icons captured me in a way that was more than intellectual, more than Bible teaching. Um I'm not a lovey, hubby, huggy kind of person, really. But uh I I had a conversation with a pastor of the church we used to attend, Paul Pulliam, uh, who was there many years. He went to Berkeley uh seminary. He was a great Presbyterian minister, and he had been in the mission field in India or Pakistan for many years. And Paul said, I was so busy with polity and uh theology and with missiology that I never really got a deep spiritual uh uh depth to my Christian life. I just didn't know how to go there. And I wanted more in that direction, and the icons awakened that hunger for me. I have nothing bad to say about the churches I grew up in or where I studied or the theology or the Bible studies that I uh attended and I taught, but something inside me said, this is where I need to be. I wanted to paint them. I wanted to look in the eyes of the saints, I wanted to see in Jesus' eyes how he felt about me when he looked at me. And that's a tough thing to do. I guess if you know enough painting technique, you can mimic it or you can reproduce it. But uh Dick Temple, the dealer in London, Aiden's friend and mine, said, Mike, when you buy an icon, look in the eyes of the saint. Look in their eyes and see if you see the love of God looking at you. Because if you do, it means the iconographer knew that love. And he put it in there with the help of the Holy Spirit so that God could look at you and say, I love you, I want you. And and that's the deep kind of emotional connection that happens with icons. Now, on a different level, uh, I'm sure many of you are familiar with the Narnia series of C. S. Lewis's books, there's a story in the voyage of the Don Treader where the children are hiding in a house, it's during the Second World War, and they see a picture on the wall of a ship. It's the Don Treader, which is uh the name of the boat in the book. And as they're sitting in the room, they begin to hear creaking noises. And then they begin to smell salt air. And one of the kids says, I think it's coming from that picture. So they all go over to the picture and they hear the noise louder and they smell the salt more, and one of them leans over to look in and falls in to Narnia. They didn't use a wardrobe that time, they fell in the picture. And Aiden's title of his talk earlier was about the windows into heaven. Um that's how the icons attract uh people of all spiritual levels. I've had atheists, Jews, Christians, any number of people in our house. In fact, I got a note from my sister-in-law the other day that said, I don't know about the icons. She's Protestant. She said, But I feel so much peace when I'm in your living room. When the icons are there, I feel a presence. I can't even put my finger on it, but it's in that room. Lori and I don't have quarrels in the living room. You know, we might have them in another room, but we certainly don't do it with the icons looking at us. Um they're not only a window into heaven, but they're heaven looking into us. And that's the power and the beauty of icons, and that's how they pulled me to where I am today. Yes.
SPEAKER_03:I might have missed this in the first 10 minutes, but did you paint at all before you took that first icon class?
SPEAKER_01:I painted my Volkswagen with a spray can and I painted my bedroom once with a roller. I never took an art class. Uh I'm a scholarly kind of guy. I wanted to get good grades. I didn't trust my hands or my athletic ability, so I didn't take art classes. Uh PE class I took was modern dance. Met my wife, you know, it worked. So, but I avoided those, yes.
SPEAKER_03:Um, so how does the whole process of like uh making copies of the icons like go? Or like how does that work?
SPEAKER_01:Oh, how do I make a copy of an icon? Okay, so uh because I was in the publishing business for most of my career, I was familiar with printers around the city. Uh Keybert, uh Z Print, the one out in Lakeside that we used for our math books. And there's one downtown called Chrome Digital, which is mostly a Photoshop, uh photo film developing and art prints, and Advanced Reprographics, which is over on Hancock Street, and they're the ones I use most. So I take a high-quality uh photo of the original piece. If it's not something I painted, um, then I get permission from the artist. I've done one or two of yours for people with your permission. Um, and then I I prepare the board in the traditional way. So normally I get a wooden board, I coat it with gesso. If it's larger than 8 by 10, I put a cloth on it, cover it with gesso, sand it till it's flat and white, and I take that to the printer. They print the image on the front, then I print, I paint the sides and the back and varnish the front. Anything else that the customer would like to have. So uh, for example, you might have seen the uh icons, the two top one, two center top ones on the west wall that were new. Uh uh Mary and Martha and uh what's his name? Jason and Suspinter. So those were printed are painted by Aidan's apprentice Mark Fisher a year ago. And they were for a wedding, so there was a little uh element of timeliness they had to get done in time. And so temper paint takes a long time to cure, dry. How long do you figure, Aiden? Six months. Six to twelve months. So after six or eight months, ten months, I put a coat of uh a fixative, it's like a varnish on the front, but it can be adjusted or repaired, and I put a coat of paint on the back to match the sides. So that part I do on all the icons. I don't like greasy fingerprints on the back, or sometimes they get wet. Uh so I prefer to finish all the way around front and back. Yes.
SPEAKER_03:What is the gold that's used? Is it gold paint or gold leaf? Is it 24 karat gold leaf?
SPEAKER_04:Or I mean is that the same gold that's used on an icon on a wood uh surface that's used on the in the church?
SPEAKER_01:Yes, it's it's 24 karat gold leaf. Uh I've used silver as well. They make silver leaf. It comes in squares in a book, you can buy it. Um, and you normally you put it on some kind of uh let me see if I can back up here. You would normally put it on a surface that's prepared specifically. You see the area that's red is where the gold is going to go on that top row. And the reason for the red underneath on a tempera icon, you can use a clay bowl. It's called, it's like a clay surface that goes over the gesso. On an acrylic icon, we put the red paint and then a sias, which is like a wallpaper adhesive, and the gold goes onto that. There are multiple ways to do it, but it is gold leaf.
SPEAKER_04:And it's the same on the walls of the church, the gold leaf?
SPEAKER_01:I'm not sure. Which church are you?
SPEAKER_04:I don't know. You're like your church?
SPEAKER_01:Yes, it's the same gold that's on the icons. Do you use any other kind, Aiden?
SPEAKER_02:Um water girls often use gold things when you burn this bit. Uh use transparent if you want to put the uh uh fell gold, which is basically water colour, but it's very good for fine gold. Right. It can use that for fine line for six lines.
SPEAKER_01:Right.
SPEAKER_04:What did he say? I was hard to understand.
SPEAKER_01:Okay, well, you can you can buy gold as a liquid, it's powdered gold, and you can use it for very fine lines. You can apply it with a paintbrush. But the main surfaces are gold leaf. Yeah, and it can be applied in a couple of different ways. Yeah, Kirk.
SPEAKER_02:What's your hope and which is for your collection?
SPEAKER_01:Is there a doctor in the house? Yes. It's a tough question. I ask I ask myself that regularly. Uh I've I've thought of two different things. I mean, one is typically people just auction, you know, split it up and send it out. They do that if some emergency occurred or they need the money. Uh I've talked with the church about uh we have some small pieces of land that could possibly hold a building, that could be a museum. Uh that's that's one possibility. I don't have a full answer for it yet. Um you can apply if you have a solution. Um send me a send me an email. Yeah, we'll pray about it. Um I think I've stopped, I pretty much stopped collecting. If I'm getting new ones, I swap some out. I've stopped adding to the because I've run out of space.
unknown:So what's the number?
SPEAKER_01:Uh depends on how you count. 200 if you count the ones I painted. Around that. Yeah. So say 150 old. And probably 15 or 20 that are new commissions. And uh the rest I've done. The oldest one is about uh 16th century, so 1500 something. He's not moving very quickly, so I didn't bring him uh tonight. Okay, in the back.
SPEAKER_02:Um when you're painting an icon, are you basing your painting off of previous paintings, like content from that, or you might put it in your own identification and how does that how's that process go through here?
SPEAKER_01:Well, the the composition might uh vary somewhat depending on the size of the board or the space that the person has. The actual event that's being commemorated typically is based on previous versions. So icons are not really a novelty activity, it's a traditional handing down uh what's been done before without deviating theologically, introducing new stuff. Now, I've had people say, okay, I'm gonna paint uh Saint Francis of Assisi and I'm gonna put my dog in. Okay, fine. Your dog. Uh if I if you said, I want my grandmother in, I would say, okay, she can be in the margin uh looking at the painting. If you want your grandmother to be Mary, no dice, uh, you're in the wrong room. So uh generally speaking, iconographers do what's been done again for a different context. And if you're doing a whole series for a church, then naturally you'd want them to look like they all were meant to be together. So borders, size, things like that. And do you have any other uh now you do but like modern saints, as you were saying earlier, it's hard to do a modern saint without it looking like a picture.
SPEAKER_02:Uh there's uh style.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:You are inspired in this situation.
SPEAKER_01:Right.
SPEAKER_02:Very interesting.
SPEAKER_01:It's a it's a a burning question, I think, in the field where people say, well, I can't be creative if I just copy things or I'm not expressing myself. And others say uh there's plenty of room for expression uh without uh changing the theology of the icon. Okay. Is there any more? Oh. Okay, quick.
SPEAKER_03:I'll take your oldest icon from the 16th century, I think you said where is that from? Or where did you get your uh the oldest icon from the 15th century?
SPEAKER_01:Where did I get it? It came from Russia from a dealer in Estonia. And the age is determined uh a lot by the wood, the painting technique, how the board was shaped, the tools, and so on. Do you have one last one? I noticed there's an icon with a metal cover. Yes.
unknown:Down below, revealing that the painting is fully done.
SPEAKER_01:Right.
unknown:I was wondering like, what's the symbolism?
SPEAKER_01:And what was the usage of putting the metal hiding authority of the painting and letting others' parts be through? Well, the faces and the hands always show through. The uh intention was to honor the icon or the subject of the icon, which in that case was Mary. And so uh typically it's done with gold or brass or some kind of metal that's polished, maybe with jewels, maybe with halos. In that case, there were some halos raised. And that's uh often done after the fact by another donor who says, This is beautiful, but I want it to be better. Other kinds of ways of doing that would be people would bring a necklace or a cross or a piece of jewelry and and hang it over the icon or give it as a gift to the church, and the church would would put it next to the icon. Um it's it's not primarily for protection, it's adornment, a fancy dress. Uh love for the subject. Okay.
SPEAKER_00:Because uh I know personally, Lori knows how much time has gone into um putting that exhibit together. And I'm just so glad that the transfiguration of creation icon could be unveiled in that setting, in that context. So thank you. I also want to thank um Professor David Carlson and other members of the art and design um department for all the work that they did as well in preparing and setting up all of all of that um in the exhibit.