The aim was always to train my eye to see things in relationship, and to express them as proportions. We spent time looking at the works of masters and discussing our work in this context. Throughout every task I was in dialogue with my teachers they corrected and guided me, and I watched their ways of approaching our subjects. We worked long hours painting and drawing portraits, still lifes, and landscapes, and I had various drawing exercises to do on my own. I chose this apprenticeship over college because it promised a more intensive classical education, but also because I had come to love and admire my teachers and their families, and I was enchanted by their way of life.Īs an apprentice, I lived at my teachers’ side, usually in Sighnaghi with John, but sometimes for a season with Ilya in a log cabin in a remote Russian village. My teachers saw that I was eager to learn, and they invited me to return as their apprentice after high school. I had never seen such a rich and adventurous culture. We put in long hours painting and drawing from life, but the summer was also saturated with amazing characters, Georgian song, dance, feasting, and spiritual activity. Sighnaghi is a mountaintop village overlooking the fertile Alazani valley where wine has been made for thousands of years, which stretches out towards the snow-capped Caucus Mountains. None of us anticipated the wondrous land that awaited us in Georgia.
#Iconographers usa professional
I was the youngest in the group the other four were professional artists.
He invited me to join a group of five painters from America for a summer painting practicum in Georgia led by him and his classmate, Ilya Yatsenko. He studied in the studio of the master Vyacheslav Nikolaievich Zabelin, becoming the first American to complete the institute, and then moved to the village of Sighnaghi in Georgia where he married Ketevan Mindorashvili, the leader of a Georgian sacred/folk ensemble. He had gone from MICA in Baltimore to the Surikov Institute in Moscow seeking the most intensive classical art education he could find. In my eleventh grade year, I met a man named John Wurdeman, from my hometown of Richmond Virginia, who lived as an artist in the Republic of Georgia. My work at that time was experimental, postmodern, and often quite dark. In my teenage years, art became the central way I related to life and explored who I was. Growing up, my three brothers and I were all inspired to identify with visual art, and we are all still pursuing it in various ways. From his childhood, my father had a talent and zeal for drawing, which he followed through study at Parsons School of Design, at Cooper Union in New York City, and into his career in marketing. O’Keefe: My desire to be an artist was inspired first of all by my dad.
How did you wind up so far from home, and what was that experience like? You studied painting in the Republic of Georgia.
Gould: Seraphim, tell us about your background as an artist.
It is clear from the quality of this painting that Seraphim is one of the most talented up-and-coming iconographers in the USA.Ī. Cyprian Orthodox Church in Midlothian, Virginia. We are pleased to feature his very interesting life story here, as well as images of his most recent major project – wall paintings at St. Editor’s Note: Seraphim O’Keefe is a promising young iconographer who has already done some remarkable work.
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