Arcane art of iconography brings painter life of meaning
AGGreen
Thursday, January 05, 2006
By Rebekah Scott, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
In a sunny studio on a mountaintop in Westmoreland County, the sleepy,
silent eyes of a hundred saints watch Philip Zimmerman work at his calling.
Beneath his paintbrush, two women meet and embrace. Fingers and faces are
long and dark; folds of their garments are stiff and stylized, following
guidelines laid down by painters a thousand years ago.
Their image is ancient and ethnic. In the artist's hands, they glow with
life.
Philip Zimmerman is an Orthodox Christian iconographer, a painter of holy
images. Within his faith, which is celebrating Christmas on Saturday, he's
considered clergy, a man called by God. To the outside world, he's a painter
of international renown, a master of his genre and a teacher who transcends
barriers of geography, language and doctrine.
About 20,000 people of Russian, Serbian and Ukrainian descent in the
Pittsburgh area will celebrate Christmas on Saturday. Orthodox Christmas is
13 days after the Dec. 25 celebration because many Eastern Orthodox churches
still hold to the old Julian calendar, named after Julius Caesar.
Mr. Zimmerman was born to a Calvinist German family in Stoystown, Somerset
County. He was always an artist, he said, and it was the glorious,
over-the-top liturgical artwork of the region's ethnic Orthodox which won
him over to the ancient Eastern European form of Christianity.
He was 12 years old when a school trip took him to an Orthodox cathedral in
Johnstown.
"It was spectacular. I saw those icons and I was mesmerized," Mr. Zimmerman
said.
"In my family's Calvinist Protestant tradition, there's very little art. The
churches are very plain and severe. But an Orthodox church is nothing but
art and ritual and beauty."
It was the artwork that led him to study at Indiana University of
Pennsylvania, where he knew there was a small, active group of Orthodox
students.
It was there he converted, then met Donna Miller, a Glassport woman he later
married. And there he also met his mentor, the Rev. Richard Osacky, known
these days as Bishop Job of Chicago and the Midwest, of the Orthodox Church
in America.
Father Richard was an icon painter.
"I was in heaven," Mr. Zimmerman said. "I didn't know there were any
American iconographers. I thought they all lived in communist countries
where I could never go. And here I'd found one in Black Lick, Indiana
County. For seven years, I was his assistant. I learned iconography by
watching him."
After college, Mr. Zimmerman spent 14 years teaching art in public schools
in Rockwood, Somerset County. He loved teaching and continued painting icons
on commission for churches and individuals.
In 1989, he offered an icon painting workshop at Antiochian Village, an
Orthodox Christian camp and retreat center north of Ligonier.
"It took off. We just happened to tap into a huge, unmet demand. ... People
came from California and Canada and Texas to study this arcane art form. I
took a sabbatical from Rockwood to teach them and to paint. I never went
back."
He opened a studio at the village and created vibrant, almost cinematic icon
panels for its new chapel. Word got out. Mr. Zimmerman became a tourist
attraction.
"It got so busy up there I was entertaining all the time. Sightseers. Senior
citizen groups. I hate to turn people down. This is supposed to be a
prayerful, contemplative process. So, eventually, I had to find a place of
my own."
Eleven years ago, he found a vacant Kingdom Hall of Jehovah's Witnesses in
New Florence. He converted it to St. John of Damascus School of Sacred Art,
a sunny work space with room for a dozen students. It's named for an
eighth-century iconographer who influences Mr. Zimmerman's work.
Several times each year, students come to him for weeklong painting
workshops and leave at the end with a finished icon of their own.
He also takes his class on the road, offering workshops at churches and
retreat centers from Alabama to Albuquerque.
Not all are Orthodox: Episcopalian, Lutheran and Catholic believers also
love icons, and his saints and virgins inhabit domes, niches, altars and
shrines in all kinds of homes and churches.
He's made icon Christmas tree decorations for a bishop in Johnstown. His
students include Franciscan nuns, Southern Baptists, Jews and all kinds of
backsliding, former believers.
The craft is a solitary, quiet occupation, once the province of monks and
nuns.
When the Soviet Union ruled much of Eastern Europe and Russia, government
persecution almost wiped out the art form on its native soil.
In the years since the Berlin Wall fell, Mr. Zimmerman has traveled annually
to monasteries in Hungary, Slovakia, Poland and Romania to help restore the
craft to a new generation. He figures he's taught icon painting to 1,250
students in six countries.
The Roman Catholic church and Orthodox Christianity parted ways about 1,000
years ago, but modern Catholics are reclaiming the icon as part of their
spiritual heritage.
(Rebekah Scott can be reached at rsc...@post-gazette.com or 724-836-2655.)
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