Our Lady Kazanskaya Painting

My name is Oleg Savelyev, I'm an icon-painter from Uzhgorod, Transcarpathia, Ukraine. I work in a traditional ancient technique - egg tempera and use only mineral, organic, non-artificial pigments in my work, such as lazurite (also known as lapis-lazuli), azurite, malachite, cinnabar (mercurial sulphide), realgar (arsenic red), auripigment (orpiment), hematite, ivory black, etc. My artworks are painted on wooden boards (usually from lime tree with the oak strips on the back), then I use linen canvas and primer, made of high-quality chalk with leather glue. The icons are covered with natural leaf-gold, to finish I use copal varnish. Using this traditional time-honoured technique and exclusively natural precious materials lets these artworks save their colours and beauty for ages. The abundant use of gold, which signified light and is the symbol of deity, imparts the icon serene shimmering, imprints an exalted, unearthy beauty. The gleam of gold blends beautifully with the bright, pure colours which glow like precious stones. Icon painting is connected with the spiritual life of man by many ties. In olden times the sophisticated theological ideas could be understood by only comparatively few learned individuals. Icons opened the rich world of deep dogmatic content of Christian faith for the mass of people. Ancient icon painting is an art which expresses in colour what can be expressed only in language of colour. That is why such works proclaim their power in full strength. Icons show us a transfigurated world. That's why people, objects, forms in an icon are transformed. Colours are bright and pure, of a kind one cannot see anywhere, perhaps, except in the sky at the hour of sunset or in a field thickly overgrown with cornflowers. For this reason whatever is represented always has an inherent quality of something never seen before, a sense of the unusual and unique (even claiming the attention of the man who possesses great visual experience). At the same time this hitherto unseen, unusual, colourful something becomes part of the life of man with the advent of the icon, becomes part of the space in which man lives, lifts man's spirit, and brings about a realisation that he has witnessed some miracle - naturally, the miracle of true art. Early icon-painting expressed man's striving to rise to higher things, to ascend to lofty spheres, best icons are imbued with a profound conviction, a pure faith and dominated by a calm force. Modern icon-painting to a large measure is oriented to that early antique sacral art and its contemporary yet ageless meaning is gaining particular aesthetic and ethic importance in today's unstable world. For today my artwoks are in private collections and churches in Ukraine, Russia, Europe, Great Britain, USA. According to ancient tradition the signature is not to be put on icons, thus my works are not signed, but authorship is confirmed with special official documents.