When we turn to any tradition of Iconography we are gazing on centuries of artistic development. Each tradition hands down prototypes and the iconographer, from beginner on, 'copies' and through this copying enters into a training that has no finishing or graduation point.
From the book : "Ethiopian Icons", Stanislaw Chojnacki,
"The themes and forms of religious painting in Ethiopia have been handed down from one generation of painters to another by training and by local tradition. The process of continuous copying has still left room for individual stylistic interpretation. This timeless practice of copying coupled with the simultaneous process of adaptation and transmutation became integral to artistic development."
This icon of " Our Lady Mary with her beloved Son", the title taken from the inscription, is another of my first studies and I have put my own interpretation on to it by reproducing the final piece as a silk screen as this was the class I was attending at the time.
The completed piece was silk screened onto a tinted wood panel.
