c. 2007 Religion News Service

HUDSON, Ohio _ Chris Rigby can take her simmering ardor and painstakingly arrange it on wood until a painting emerges. But she’s not an artist. Her teacher said so.

“An artist creates work of self-expression,” teacher Dennis Bell said, “but an iconographer feels there’s nothing in his petty little life worth expressing.”

The pale blond Rigby has no trouble with the teacher’s words.

“I’m as common and ordinary as dirt,” she said. But, like her, her icons of Eastern Orthodox Christian biblical figures glow from within. She drapes them in sumptuously colored robes, and encircles the heads of the holy with luminescent gold halos.

Self-expression never entered into Rigby’s decision to learn to paint “windows to the divine,” as she sees icons. Although she is Roman Catholic, icons inspired her to better understand the Christian faith.

“I write the icon, and the icon writes me. It teaches me. It changes me,” she said.

Following iconography tradition, she prays while she paints, “humanly prayers, full of worries and the human experience. … Something in the prayer will come through in the icon.” She hopes they help those who see them connect with God.

Rigby, 53, also hopes icons inspire greater reverence for the Earth because they’re made from the Earth itself _ the wood, the linen fiber, the clay that affixes the gold, and the minerals she mixes with vinegar and egg yolks to make the traditional egg tempera paint. The sacred emerges through the materials.

“We desperately need to connect with the spiritual. The whole planet needs it,” she said.

Since she learned the art 20 years ago, Rigby has painted between 100 and 200 icons, and none are signed, following iconography tradition. The Shrine of Our Lady of Mariapoch in Burton displays one, and countless others are in private homes, including her own. A good many are stacked in her hall closet, awaiting homes.

And 13 icons representing Catholic feast days hang on the white walls of the chapel of St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Hudson, her parish. The feast days are important events, such as the baptism of Christ and the raising of Lazarus.

The Rev. Steve Brunovsky recalled the day Rigby diffidently asked if the church might want them.

“She opened her trunk, pulled the blanket off and there it was, an icon of Jesus’ crucifixion. I was in awe,” said Brunovsky, now at St. Francis Xavier Catholic Church in Medina.

Before the icons were hung, the chapel was plain white with one crucifix. Rigby’s icons, he said, “made it a chapel. Before that, it was a room for a Mass.”

Rigby sold two icons before deciding she couldn’t accept money for her work. “It would be like selling plenary indulgences,” she said. Besides, she’s never needed the money. She is a fervent soul living the American dream _ a well-appointed home in Hudson, a loyal husband, and two grown sons who are doing nicely.

Each piece can take three to six months to complete because she does copious research before she begins work, “trying to understand these icons, what they are telling us about the human journey,” she said. “There’s no insignificant detail to me.

“Why is Mary in that color dress? What is the symbolic language of the color and geometry? Why are there three Marys at the foot of the cross?”

Rigby had no previous art training when she focused her whole being on learning iconography. She was moved by the hope that they’d lead her through the crisis in faith that shuddered through her, body and soul.

She’d awakened one morning, in her early 30s, with the realization that she no longer believed in Christianity or could take its faith stories literally. It was a strange turn in the life of a woman who’d been spiritual since childhood. “I just wasn’t getting it anymore,” she said.

While in search of the metaphysical, hoping to regain her faith, she came across a picture of an icon, just a page in a book. She studied it “and felt a sense of stillness. What came to me: Here is my answer,” she said.

“If I can understand the 13 feast day icons,” she recalled thinking, “I’d understand what this religion is all about.” To understand fully, she felt she had to make the icons.

With the help of an Eastern Orthodox priest, she found Bell _ who teaches at his Image and Likeness Studio in Mentor _ and stepped with trepidation into a field dominated by Eastern Orthodox men. It was 1992.

“Her mentality is very Orthodox,” Bell said in a phone interview, “She asked the right questions and she was very receptive to my answers.”

She learned to apply linen to wood, smooth it with gesso _ a coating of marble dust and glue _ and polish it until it glowed white. Bell taught her how to inscribe the picture, and use the paints, how to shade and highlight.

“He imprinted in me that you follow a prototype, you don’t invent, you stay true to the form and keep your ego out of it. He really taught me humility,” she said. Later, a friend taught her how to carve a recess into wood where the painting will be done.

Rigby flipped through a notebook and extracted her first practice painting, an unnamed saint in a green robe, his proportion slightly askew in icon tradition. “Pretty sad,” she said.

In a little less than a year, she completed the course of study, as well as her first icon. Her diligence delighted Bell. “A lot have come, stayed a few weeks and given up,” he said. “Chris was the first who stuck with it. “

To learn more, Rigby found a Russian teacher in New York City and studied with him two weeks a year from 1993 to 1999.

“He opened up the symbolic language of colors, composition and the underlying geometry _ the stillness, balance and harmony _ behind the icon,” she said. And she learned to make egg tempera. But he made her feel she’d never be good enough.

Another Russian-born teacher in Boston, with whom she studied a week a year from 1995 to 1998, helped her find confidence in her work. And by living with the teacher and her family during visits, Rigby learned to be an iconographer as well as a better homemaker, mother and wife.

“I painted 24-7,” she said, “until Jack got sick. Then I didn’t paint for about three years.”

In 1996, her husband, Jack, a retired dentist, was diagnosed with a progressive liver disease. When his liver function is critically low, he will be placed on the national transplant list. Although he isn’t on that list yet, the couple said God will give him a liver when it’s time. That was the answer they divined on the eighth day of a nine-day novena, or prayers said with great fervor, asking for help with a problem.

He said he has always been his wife’s “selfless promoter.”

“She’s on an admirable journey, and it’s my job to assist her,” Jack Rigby said.

“I always thought she had a higher calling than me,” he said. “Nothing I did (as a dentist) is going to outlive the people I did things for.

“Who knows where her icons will end up?”

(Fran Henry writes for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland.)

KRE/CM/LF END HENRY

Editors: To obtain photos of Rigby and the icons, go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search by subject or slug.