I read How to Paint Icons and then sat with it for a while, thinking about what you actually built here. This is not a painting manual. It is a workbook and a journal. Seventy-two pages designed to take the iconographer beyond just the painting of an icon. You wrote something that almost nobody in the art instruction category does. You asked the reader to document the process. To archive the work. To let the technique and the discipline and the spiritual growth happen together. And then the line that stopped me. The journey of an iconographer surpasses the feeling of being spiritual and becomes knowledge of God written in stone. That is not a sentence from an art teacher. That is a sentence from someone who has spent thirty years painting in a studio in San Miguel de Allende, combining prayer and sacred art, living a lifestyle that celebrates mystery. What struck me most is that you did not write this for the Orthodox world alone. You wrote it for the twenty-first century. You wrote it for the non-Orthodox seeker. You wrote it for anyone with an interest in the ancient art of icon writing who wants to learn it properly. And you wrote it as a woman who is keeping a sixteen-hundred-year-old tradition alive. You did not just write an art book. You wrote a spiritual practice disguised as a
workbook. How to Paint Icons