![]() ![]() I am working and I am painting and, all of a sudden, she is there and I am touching her face.” ![]() It is like that intimate relationship between a mother and her child. Sometimes I am working on an icon – like, I might be painting the cheek of the virgin – when, all of a sudden, it is like she is tilting her head up and letting me put makeup on her face. “The best part,” she says, “about this vocation within a vocation is the prayer, the adventure with the saints and the experience of their presence that they reveal. Nancy, you quickly realize that she KNOWS these people! You get the feeling that she is surrounded by the communion of saints, and she draws you into the awareness that we are too! Nancy has developed her gift as an iconographer, she has turned primarily, though not exclusively, to writing the icons of founders and foundresses of religious congregations, “telling the untold stories of these saintly giants in whose footsteps we follow.” When you listen to Sr. The Holy Spirit is the Divine Iconographer…”Īs Sr. “It’s another thing to enter into the mystery and to know the deeper spiritual meaning of it all.” In The Art of the Icon: A Theology of Beauty, Paul Evdokimov writes, “An artist knows what a heavenly person looks like through prayer and fasting and grace…under the influence of the Holy Spirit. It IS her prayer! “It’s one thing to know the techniques,” she says. Nancy Lee describes her work of writing icons as “a vocation within her vocation to be a woman religious,” and her call as artist “to make people fascinated with the beauty of God.” For Nancy, writing icons is a contemplative process. That is why artists, the more conscious they are of their gift, are led all the more to see themselves and the whole of creation with eyes able to contemplate and give thanks, and to raise to God a hymn of praise.” The vocation of an artist is to mirror the image of God the Creator…With loving regard, the divine Artist passes on to the human artist a spark of God’s own surpassing wisdom, calling the artist to share in God’s creative power. ![]() Pope John Paul II, in his Letter to Artists, says: Already an accomplished artist and art teacher, Nancy has pursued her interest in writing icons as a student of a variety of teachers, including another Russian Orthodox master iconographer, Vladislav Andrejev. Nancy’s Russian Orthodox master iconographer mentor, Ksenia Pokrovsky in Massachusetts, told her it takes at least fifteen years to become a good iconographer. That is why I am publishing articles, preaching retreats, giving presentations, explaining the symbolism in icons and completing as many commissions as God allows.” Nancy describes her vocation within a vocation: “As an iconographer in the Western Church, cut off from its Eastern ‘lung’ since 1302, I feel a fire in my belly to get the word out, to educate others about icons in every way I can. Nancy is now doing what she calls her “life’s work.” In her ministry as an iconographer she delicately blends art, theology, and spirituality. Just prior to beginning her current ministry as an iconographer, she pastored a priestless parish in Virginia. During her many years of ministry, Nancy served as art teacher, retreat director, pastoral coordinator, campus minister, and hospice chaplain. John Provincial Seminary in Plymouth, Michigan. In addition to degrees in English, Theology and Fine Arts with a major in Sculpture, Nancy’s education includes a Master of Divinity degree from St. By 1954 she knew she wanted to be a religious but ironically, she reveals, it was while praying before an icon as a college student in 1957 that she received her specific vocation to the IHM Sisters in Monroe. Raised in Missouri, the third of ten children, Nancy became a Catholic at the age of eight when her family joined the Church. Nancy Lee Smith (IHM), of the Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, of Monroe, Michigan. The iconographer, or writer of the icon, Jeanne Chézard de Matel, The Vessel of God, is Sr. ![]()
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