Holy Icon

"Ivan Karamazov: I Hasten to Give Back My Entrance Ticket", acrylic on canvas, 11x14 inch, Bishop Maxim, 2022

We observe a suit painted with “heavenly” colors that we cannot find in any clothing store. The jacket’s structure is warm, brownish-red, and the collar and shoulders come out of those lines, with a combination of greenish, yellowish, and azure-turquoise brush strokes, from which a miracle jacket is obtained! This miracle jacket allows a thin, noble neck and a face lit by direct light to be shown, with eyes that are “protruding” (ecstatic) because they see something we have not seen, and the character remains ecstatic and voiceless. This ecstatic figure is covered with hair with bluish strands, similar to the mustache and beard. But all this is similar to a decorative frame that frames the bright face of an ecstatic look.

Ivan Karamazov image—intellectual, long-necked elegant aesthete with left eye slightly frightened, peevish, gently imploring, vulnerable, inward and outward and right eye (subject’s left) glaring and one way—outward. Together these very wide eyes suggest a center of gravity in an intellect in the service of protecting feelings that have difficulty supporting an existential commitment of responsibility to an uncertain world. Safer in the idealism of art and philosophy as an alternative. But what does he look like after the murder of his father thinking it is his fault for how he has proclaimed a universe without faith in God?