Eggs and colors, insights into iconography

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What is the point of painting, or better still, writing icons today? What is the sense of a break from work, from everyday occupations, and entering a dimension where the pace is suddenly slowed down, where we are no longer the ones "leading" our actions but we are asked to "follow", to let ourselves be guided, where we produce with our hands an image that does not arise from our imagination, but that we must reproduce and that passing through us will be different from the model?

An image that is a face, which represents an identity, a presence that loves us. A face that is the Face in which we find ours, a presence that while we try to listen to it we realize that it is she who listens to us, to whom we can entrust everything we have in our hearts. Yes, because the icon is born first in the heart and head, then passes through the hands and rests on the table. Here is the strength of this form of sacred art set in a millenary history, generated and elaborated over time as the constant fruit of a "dialogue" between generations that has evolved over the centuries but has never changed direction: the search to communicate Christ and his love through a sober, humble, concise art, imbued with the Gospel and communicating the profound meanings of his message. An art that teaches me patience, that invites me to the delicacy of manners and to silence, to listen to what I am doing and to that face that comes towards me, but also to listen to what I have in my heart, of what that emerges from me and tells me that he wants to be illuminated by that gaze, and by his wisdom.

What will the result be? The finished work? Certainly what you see, and certainly it will depend on the manual skills of those who produce it, but there is a deeper work and it is what happened in me, that exercise that my soul did to keep "up" , the path that he followed with him, in prayer.

Chiara Dal Corso