A door to eternity: iconographer Sue Orchison on creating a new icon for St Pat’s

Iconographer Sue Orchison has her works displayed in many churches, schools and institutions but is still pinching herself over her most recent project: creating an icon of St Patrick, the patron saint of the Melbourne Archdiocese and of the Cathedral bearing his name.

The 1 x 0.7–metre icon will be unveiled this week in St Patrick’s Cathedral, where it will be displayed on a pillar to the right of the altar, forming a pair with the icon of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour on the left.

Sue says she has never written an icon of this significance before and was excited, if overwhelmed, when she was approached by the Archbishop’s Office to take on the unique project.

The planning involved consultations with Archbishop Peter A Comensoli to decide on how the image of St Patrick would look.

Sue says she was asked to make the icon in a way that complemented the icon of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, which is a copy of the 13th-century original and was written by iconographer Andrew Molcyzyk in 2002.

‘So it is an image of similar size to Our Lady of Perpetual Help, and hopefully it doesn’t overtake her,’ Sue says.

‘The gold is made so that it is a similar gloss to the other one. The halo on mine is 24 karat gold leaf—I varnished it, which dulls it down so that will match the one on the other side.’

The commissioning process involved several meetings between the artist and the Archbishop.

‘It took us a little while to decide what Patrick was going to hold, because he could’ve held the Scripture, seeing as how he shared the Word; he could’ve held a scroll with the words from the Breastplate of St Patrick that he wrote.’

Ultimately, they decided St Patrick would hold the Cathedral itself, ‘in a stance of protection and care for the Church and its people’.

All the Irish Christian symbolism normally associated with St Patrick features in the icon: a Celtic knot, a symbol of the Trinity, on his sleeve; Celtic crosses on his stole; the shamrock, the three-leafed clover St Patrick used to explain the mystery of the Trinity.

Sue says his bishop’s crosier is shaped like a shepherd’s crook with a shamrock, a dual reference to his time as an enslaved shepherd in Ireland and to his role as ‘a shepherd of the flock of God’.

His robes are green, Sue says, even though it was likely he wore blue, because green is the colour of the Emerald Isle and indicates Patrick’s new life in Ireland when he returned in the decades after escaping slavery to convert the Irish to Christianity.

The level of detail in the icon is astonishing. Sue has painted St Patrick with ‘his mouth closed and ears open [to] signify he is listening to the Father’s voice’.

His hand is in a gesture of blessing. ‘Jesus Christ can also be identified in the shape of the fingers (IX IC),’ she says. ‘In the ancient world this gesture also meant speaker, [and] Patrick preached the Gospel of Christ.’

The frame for the icon is a work of art in itself, created by Melbourne artist couple Charley-Lois Davis and Reuben Rich, who make bespoke frames for places of worship and curated spaces.

Charley-Lois says making frames if this type is an arduous process, requiring a specialised skill set and a commitment to the artform.

‘We worked with Sue and the Archbishop to refine the frame’s details,’ she says. ‘The primary goal was to ensure the frame complemented the new icon while closely harmonising with the existing frame surrounding the gilded icon of Mary in the Cathedral.’

She says they worked to achieve harmony with the icon by using the same gold leaf that Sue Orchison used for gilding the inner edge of the frame. The frame features a decorative cross at the top, inspired by a carved Celtic stone cross, and green painted marble, drawing from the iconic Connemara marble of Ireland.

‘Projects like this play an important role in supporting rare and endangered trades and artistry, including gilding, iconography and traditional frame making,’ Charley-Lois says.

Sue used egg tempera as her paint medium, a technique with historical significance and known for its durability. Sue points, for instance, to the Fayum mummy portraits from around the first century BC, which still look much as they did when they were painted because the egg tempera does not deteriorate.

‘The way you make it is you get the egg yolk, and I use a little bit of white wine in it—it’s quite spiritually founded—and you mix in pigment,’ she says. ‘It sticks like glue, and then by 12 months, it has cured to what eggshell is like. It becomes that sort of matte, hard shell. We put on a shellac varnish, which breathes, to protect it while it is curing.’

Icons are a distinct and instantly recognisable category of art. They differ from painting in that icons follow strict rules and symbolism specific to the religious figures depicted. They are not made on the whim of the artist, but according to a canon that has been in place since the early years of the Church.

For Sue Orchison, iconography—or icon writing, as it’s called­—‘is theology in colour.’

She explains that icons are widely used in Eastern Christian churches, but there has only been a relatively recent resurgence in the Roman Catholic tradition after the favouring of Renaissance-style paintings for several centuries.

The legends around iconography are fascinating, Sue says, and stretch as far back as Jesus’ crucifixion.

‘There’s an icon called the Mandylion, and that’s the cloth, the veil, that on the way of the cross Veronica gave Jesus to wipe his face. The image of his face came on the cloth—that’s our Latin tradition.’

Sue also recounts iconography’s connection to the Apostle Luke, who was not only a physician and a writer but apparently an artist too.

‘There are three or four icons said to have been painted by Luke the Evangelist,’ she says. She is particularly taken by the story that the Black Madonna of Częstochowa was painted by St Luke in Our Lady’s kitchen, saying, ‘Isn’t that gorgeous?’

Sue believes her perspective as a female iconographer adds a gentleness to an art form that has traditionally been quite severe.

She wants her figures to be accessible. ‘Christ is judge and saviour, but he needs to be approachable, and Mary needs to be, too,’ she says. And I think I bring the softness to it, which is what I like, and then people can say, “Yes, I can relate to that, and I can sit with that icon.”’

She says iconographers are a rare breed in general, and that she knows of few female icon writers in Australia.

That could change in the future. A world-first women’s iconography archive has opened this month in the United Kingdom, and its curator says women now outnumber men as practitioners of the ancient Christian artform.

Sue says gazing at an icon can be a profound experience, noting that iconographers often call them a ‘window to heaven’. For her, though, they are ‘a door to eternity’.

‘If you sit before an icon, it takes you into the eternal; it takes you into the presence of Jesus.

‘Ever since I started painting them, I’ve been—I won’t say obsessed—but I love it,’ she says. ‘I never tire of painting icons.’