www.byzcath.org Forums Mysteries: The Life of Worship Icons & Iconography Monastery Icons

Slava Isusu Khrestu

Good Morning.

Forgive me but I posted this in the wrong section and am reposting.

With everything that has been said about Monastery Icons site I

am always amazed where they appear. I have been told not to

purchase them and then I see Catholic sites using them.


I may be wrong but I seem to be looking at some of their work!

Are these not Monastery Icons from their collection?

Check the web site http://saintbasils.org/html/seminary.asp


and there for all to see are 4 of their icons ( I use the word

carefully).

Please tell me that I am wrong

Unworthy
Nycholaij

Yep, those are Monastery icons. They are everywhere; as I said it is a rare Byzantine Catholic or Orthodox parish that doesn't have some lurking somewhere.

And Neil- Now THAT photo does look like Burke. But we may never know. What is odd is that indmovement.org doesn't have anything at all on them...

Monestary Icons was sold to a publishing house a few years ago, today it is not associated with that heretical group. The publishing house useses computers to reproduce the icons, the more ornamental ones are imported from iconographers in the East. I learned this from my priest after asking him about the group.

Didymus- If you read all the posts in this thread you will see that Neil documents that the mailing address for Sacred Arts is the same as for the Swami's ashram. They are apparently the same folks, no longer posing as a Christian monastery, just cashing in on the gullible.

And I see that Indmovement.org is in serious need of updating; most of the links they supply are dead. Guess I hadn't checked them for a long while...

I remember having read somewhere that George Burke spent a brief period of time at Holy Transfiguration Monastery in Brookline MA before starting his own monastery and embarking on his later "endeavors".
He seems to have also borrowed Holy Tranfiguration Monastery's Great Feast icons and highly colorized them to produce Monastery Icons Great Feast icons.

Example:

Holy Transfiguration Monastery Resurrection (Descent into Hades) icon:

http://www.thehtm.org/catalog/popup_image.php?pID=137&osCsid=1be2f1294e9f708fdaa052f48ad78b19


Monastery Icons Resurrection (Descent into Hades) icon:
http://www.monasteryicons.com/cgi-b...mp;item=453&template=popup_temp.html

Most all the Great Feast icons from Monastery Icons follow suit.

In regard to my post above.
I know it is a credit to a great iconographer to have others emulate his work but these examples seem to smack of plagiarism, for lack of a better term, to me.

I also see that Neil mentioned George Burke having been at HTM earlier in this thread.

Dan,

I've noticed that as well. The dead links don't surprise me too much; as you and I both know, much of the vagante world keeps moving, rather than standing still and possibly being subject to scrutiny.

Plus, if you want to keep moving up the hierarchical ladder and your patriarch, primate, metropolitan, or archbishop - pick one - doesn't have the grace to resign or you just feel the need to have your own church, the next best thing is to move on to your own website. Plus, the ready availability of U-Haul and other such companies makes it much simpler to get the Laz-y-Boy cathedra out of the garage and transfer it to your new cathedral than back when you had to tie it to the roof of the 1967 patriarch-mobile or move the gun-rack to fit it in the hierarchical pickup.

Many years,

Neil

I have just had a wonderful mental picture

E-mail Abbott George, Anhelyna, he'll make it into an icon!

Many years,

Neil

Perhaps the title "Balmy Swami" might be useful here?

Fr. Serge

rc- Use of patterns in iconography is not "plagiarism"; iconography is pretty standard for the great feasts and other subjects. There is nothing wrong with tracing another's icons for one's own use, and any iconographer who tells you otherwise has missed the point. Iconography is a work of the Church, and no one owns it.
Monastery Icons has enough problems without being accused of doing anything wrong in this regard...

As an aside, the festal icon set from HTM is not their work. The icons are by Lepouras, I believe.

Dave

While "Monastery Icons" is made up of odd people with a strange mix of Gnosticism/Hinduism/makeItUpAsYouGoAlongism, this begs the question: What is the limit to purchasing, commissioning, etc Ecclesial art, vestments, decorations, etc to non-Christians?

In India, local Hindus are often commissioned to build things for churches, and often work with Christian expert tailors for vestments and other Church items.

Michael, my brother,

Interesting question. Personally, I don't see an issue in those instances where a person is employed to use his God-given talents for such purposes.

One can be very sure that there are non-Christians working in places such as commercial printing plants that produce religious texts, factories that produce medals for Latin Catholics, factories that mass produce vesture and clerical garb (because, let's face it, such isn't all the individualized work of expert tailors), those printing houses which mass produce printed icons for those who cannot afford traditional, hand painted ones, and statuary factories also.

I think the distinction as regards icons that are individually produced is the inherent theology with which perceive them to be imbued - and which presupposes a belief by the iconographer in the spirituality that the icon will convey to those who venerate it.

Does that make any sense? Or does it sound as though I'm trying to make a distinction that isn't real to justify regarding MI as a place to be avoided?

Many years,

Neil

As the process of painting an icon is sacramental in nature, does it not presuppose "right intention" on the part of the iconographer, just as it presupposes right intention on the part of the minister of any sacrament? What if you learned that your priest believes that the Eucharist is merely the symbol of our inherent divinity? If that would bother you, why would you intentionally purchase an icon painted by someone who believes -as the Kali link suggests- that the Mother of God and the Goddess of Death are one? Or the Christ was merely an advanced guru, or one avatar of many?