Central Events of the Iconography Diocese
in England By: Father Jonathan Bannon
A
round early May of this year, I had the incredible blessing of visiting Midland England for a week to study iconography under the instruction of someone who has been called the greatest living iconographer of our time. His name is Aidan Hart and he has a gift for teaching. In the winter of 2021, I had listened to a recorded lecture by Aidan and encountered how he calmly presented the inner life of Orthodoxy as found visually depicted in iconography. I said to myself, ‘This is a person I need to spend some time with.” It was strictly his ability to articulate the icon’s depth in speech and execute it in paint that drew me to visit. Only later would I 2023
learn that he is world renowned, has met 3 canonized saints, his Spiritual Father was the late Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, that his work is in the private chapel of the Pope and once lived as a novice monk for 12 years considering monasticism and even building a small monastic hermitage on the vast hills of this beautiful country. So with the great help and encouragement of my family along with the blessing of our Hierarch, I set off with a bag of brushes, pigments, an icon board, a prayerbook, prayer rope and not much more. Little did I know what Midland England would offer,
Diocesan Yearbook
37
