Lit From Within

There is a certain mystical quality to a particular kind of painting rooted in the vast land that stretches from the Balkans to Asia Minor, and from the Middle East to Russia to southern India. To the casual observer, it is both ancient and familiar, incandescent and curiously two-dimensional. But in the hands of an expert artist, icons, or ”image writings,” take on a depth that can literally inspire viewers to look beyond the brush strokes to a larger worldview.

Glynis Mary McManamon became fascinated with Russian and Eastern European art nearly fifty years ago as a small child living in Cleveland. “I remember my grandmother’s father’s funeral and getting a tiny card with an icon of Our Lady of Perpetual Help,” says the owner of Shepherding Images on Bardstown Road. “I just loved looking at it – the gold in the print.” She parlayed her fascination with the Biblical Mary to a deeper self-examination, eventually joining the apostolic order of the Sisters of the Good Shepherd, for whom her gallery and studio is named. While the early exposure to iconography was etched in McManamon’s mind, it took many years for it to bear fruit through her hand.

“My dad wanted to be a syndicated cartoonist, so art was always around me,” says McManamon, who enjoyed drawing, but wasn’t exactly a favored junior high art student. “It was the late ‘60s, very avant-garde. One of my classmates was making a chess set out of lead, and I just wanted to draw the actors on ‘Star Trek.’” But once she joined the convent, McManamon kept coming back to art. “All the other sisters knew I was an artist, but I didn’t see it. I’d avoided doing it because I was afraid.”

McManamon’s conversion came about fifteen years ago, when she stumbled upon a book on how to paint religious icons. “It was a very slow process – I couldn’t draw to my satisfaction. But it was a come-hither attraction. It just spoke to me,” she says.

Beside her religious paintings – which are legion – McManamon also addresses secular and social themes, often with startling results. One painting memorializes assassinated Russian-American human rights activist Anna Politkovskaya, while another depicts a starving woman nursing her child under the name “Our Lady of Somalia.”

“There are two themes for me in religious art and art in general: women, and people of color – any ‘invisible’ ethnic group. There are lots of saints who aren’t Italian or French or American ... or men.” This strikes her as decidedly odd: “I read about the patriarchs in the Bible, and I think, ‘Where are the matriarchs?’ Sarah wasn’t Abraham’s property! Rebekah wasn’t anybody’s property. We just don’t think about that a lot.’”

And McManamon doesn’t shy away from the 21st Century icon interpretive style in her latest show, “Shining Like Stars: Women of Courage, Women of Grace.” The holiday exhibition takes a cross-cultural look at various religious and social themes, illustrated by images of notable women representing the seven virtues of Kwanzaa, nine women from the Hebrew Testament (“We think of the solstice and the darkening of the year, and these are the women who would be holding the menorah,” McManamon says.) and the Christian “Advent wreath,” celebrating four women in Jesus’ genealogy. A single icon of Mary is the only true icon in the show, reflecting the origin of McManamon’s passion and the source of the medium itself.

“We use the word ‘icon’ so much – computer ‘icon,’ Madonna is a pop culture ‘icon’ – but in the Byzantine Catholic, Orthodox and Eastern tradition it’s something very specific,” McManamon says. “I play pretty close to the line,” she says. “I have my own style. It’s like coloring in the lines, but sometimes you want to scribble all over the paper!” She continues, almost reverentially. “I’m not a true iconographer. I love them, but the Spirit didn’t call me in that direction.”

The bulk of McManamon’s work comes through commissions (a painting of St. Clare hangs beside the altar at St. Francis of Assisi Catholic Church nearby), and she currently is at work on a long-term project, inspired by life right outside her door. “I want to do a kind of a book of hours from the Renaissance, but for the Highlands,” she says. “It’s a place of all kinds of belief – or questioning – systems.”

And there is the essence of Sister Glynis Mary: The old becomes new through the eyes of an artist. “You come here to this part of the city and you see that every piece of sidewalk has its own personality,” she says, looking up from the canvas on her drafting table and out the window. “There’s no rhyme or reason to it, and it’s wonderful.”

---