The Russian Icon

When you think of this huge enormous god as having to squish down into this tiny human form. Into a tiny bitty thing as flesh. These distortions presented in an Icon are based on that idea.

We have two dimensions, you have to think as the Iconist as peering in a looking glass. He is just a monk, a conduit, not an artist. 

To the western eye the Icon is not beautiful, we don’t have the rosy cheek Madonna, seduced by the smell of the church. You don’t have the strange distorted figures that are in the Icon. Some times you have the history of a whole person is on one peace of wood. It is an opening of a world of perception. You can see what they mean, the presence of God, you do not see, and you do not look.