Q&A with Byzantine Icon Painter Peter Murphy

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What do you paint?

I paint traditional Byzantine, Anglo and Italo Byzantine icons for Cathedrals, Churches and individuals all over the World. I normally paint to commission these days but also paint a few simple traditional Byzantine icons each year and take photographs of each stage of the painting process in order to use them as teaching materials for my one week specialist courses and workshops.

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Where do you paint?

I have a studio at the bottom of my garden in Broadstairs, Kent. It is glazed on three sides and has one solid wall for hanging work in progress or finished work on. I have a very large studio easel too which I do most of my work on, except for the really small miniatures and massive pieces like six-foot apse crosses that I am asked to do from time to time. The light on this part of the Kent coast is normally pretty good for most of the year round which is essential for true colour when working in egg tempera.

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When do you paint?

I paint all year round, normally I try to keep to office hours but may finish a little later in the summer, or earlier in the winter. Of course there are days when I have to do office work and admin, things like updating my website, or sorting out course and workshop bookings.

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How do you paint?

I paint using very traditional techniques and materials, 24-carat gold leaf for haloes and backgrounds and egg tempera paint, that I make each day from mineral pigments and eggs yolks. I try and use a traditional late Byzantine/ Cretan painting technique called Proplasmos, or, 'First Skin', which combines dramatic, almost abstract modelling on clothes, buildings etc. with soft, diffused, more naturalistic modelling of the flesh tones. I think it is this combination that makes for a great icon and gets most out of the materials employed. It is certainly the technique that all of the great icons that I have seen face-to-face are painted in. The iconographer works form dark to light laying down the dark and neutral tones first and literally pulls the light out of them with layers of superimposed highlighting, it's a technique that is almost counter-intuitive for many artists who work in oils and acrylics.

This technique relates directly to the Theological aspect of iconography. Icons don't seek to represent the natural World as we see it on a daily basis but, rather, a World transformed and penetrated by the light of the Transfiguration.

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Talk about your influences.

My major influences are a group of medieval Northern Greek and Cretan icon painters, Manuel Panselinos, Angelos Aketantos, Theophanes Strelitzas, Michael Damaskinos and Andreas Ritzos.

I first saw their work in Monasteries in Greece in the 1980s and have spent the last forty odd years endeavouring to obtain a tiny bit of the profundity they achieved in my own work. I also love many of the masters of pre-Renaissance Italy: Duccio, Simone Martini, Lorenzo Monaco; right up to and including the sublime masterpieces of Fra Angelico.