WHEN Ukrainian-born Irina Bradley was diagnosed with an aggressive cancer, she desperately wanted to have something spiritual to leave her children, who were then only six and two. “I got a blessing from a priest to start painting icons,” she recalls, and her British husband got a posting to Russia, where she joined an icon-painting school.
Throughout her first year, “I was praying to our Lord, asking to look after my children if I don’t make it,” she recalls. “My mother recommended that I visit a certain monastery, because there is an icon called Pantachranta, the “Queen of all Queens”, which is supposed to help oncology patients. I was praying in front of this icon, and suddenly it was like a column of warmth from the icon ran right through me, and I somehow felt I would be fine.”
She underwent chemotherapy, radiotherapy, and Herceptin treatment, and, she says, after six months, was cancer-free. On her return to the UK, she completed a doctorate at the Prince’s (now King’s) Foundation School of Traditional Arts, in Shoreditch, east London. At her graduation in 2015, she met and discussed icons with the future King. “He loves icons, and he’s a very spiritual man,” she says.
Three years later, he displayed three of Dr Bradley’s icons at Buckingham Palace, as part of an exhibition to mark his 70th birthday. He also owns three, including icons of the Archangels Michael and Gabriel, which are in his private chapel at Highgrove. He even rearranged his diary to attend her exhibition at a Roman Catholic church in Mayfair, in 2018, on her birthday, she says, and presented her with a gift — a miniature reproduction of one of his own paintings of a Scottish landscape.
The King is not alone in his interest in Orthodox icons and iconography, although he is probably the first British monarch to commission an “iconographic” Anointing Screen, which Aidan Hart, a leading British iconographer, designed according to iconographic principles and traditions. Westminster Abbey, and St Paul’s, Winchester, and Lichfield cathedrals all display icons prominently.
Sr Benedict Brown OSBThe Resurrection, by Sister Esther Pollak OSB
Mr Hart and Dr Bradley are among established UK-based iconographers who report a growing demand for their art in Anglican churches and cathedrals, as well as Catholic and Orthodox places of worship.
In addition, they have plenty of students wanting to understand and replicate this distinctive, ancient style. Although students and practitioners vary in age, Lancaster University has found that more women than men are creating icons, and, in March 2025, the university launched the first digital archive of women’s iconography.
The art form is providing a bridge between faith traditions, and, for some artists and viewers, a path into faith. While the Italian Catholic iconography of, say, Fra Angelico, looks at home in a Western church, icons in the Russian or Greek style are offering a new way to understand familiar scenes or characters.
CREATING Orthodox icons follows strict rules, and, like a code, conveys meaning through symbols, which is why some people refer to writing rather than painting icons. The invisible, such as God the Father, or the Holy Spirit, may be made visible.
A saint’s enlarged eyes indicate the fire within them, and, Mr Hart explains, the “organs of reception” — eyes, ears, nose — are enlarged because the saint listens to God before they speak, while the “organs of expression” — lips and hand gestures — are lower-key because when he or she occasionally speaks, it has a profound impact.
Irina BradleyAnastasis (Resurrection), by Irina Bradley
There are approved images which icon painters learn to reproduce, and works are generally unsigned (because the painter does not want to draw attention to her or himself), and may be created by more than one person. Dr Bradley adds that the distinctive inverse perspective, whereby items in the background appear larger and those in the foreground smaller, signifies that the viewer “is part of the icon”, and this “prompts people to pray”. To pray before an icon is not to worship an object, iconographers say, but to gaze through a window on to another world to encounter and venerate the person depicted.
While Dr Bradley’s experience may be uncommon, other female iconographers reported profound moments of clarity or encounter. Sister Esther Pollak, a Benedictine nun at Turvey Abbey, in Essex, and now a leading iconographer, recalls that, when she encountered icons in a Byzantine Catholic chapel in Belgium in the 1960s, “I just felt something in my hands told me, ‘This is for you.’” It would be another 15 years before her prioress let her take up icon-painting, worried that she become Orthodox.
Others talk of a sense of finally finding a blend of spirituality and creativity that they have been searching for. Sister Esther recalls a Buddhist nun who, at the end of one of her courses, told her, “Now I know how God became man.” She adds: “I thought, ‘Gosh, I haven’t even heard that from a Christian yet!’”
THE appeal of icons reaches beyond ecumenical boundaries. Finnish-born Hanna Ward, who studied with Mr Hart for four years, has reconciled her love of icons and Orthodoxy with the sparse simplicity of the Lutheran Church that she grew up in. “Icons have been accepted by the Ecumenical Council [in 787]: they are just mediators to connect to our own God,” explains Ms Ward, now an Anglican.
Similarly, Joanna Tulloch, an Oxford-based Methodist local preacher, says that her congregations have got used to seeing and hearing about them in her sermons. “After about five or ten years, I started introducing icons as a picture on the front of an order of service . . . giving some people something visual to look at,” she explains.
Ms Tulloch sees parallels between icons and stained-glass windows, in that they are didactic — but adds that icons also tell the “deep theological meaning” of what they depict. The congregation at Wesley’s Chapel, in the City of London, commissioned an icon of its founder, John Wesley. Mounted on the east wall near the communion tabe, it depicts Wesley against a background of gold, and the congregation reportedly regard it purely as a commemorative work of art.
Another UK-based iconographer, Sharon Seagar, believes that England has a particular need for religious art because of the rapid changes brought in during the Reformation. “We suffered the excision of visual beauty in our environment . . . we’re definitely hungry for it, and icons are very satisfying,” she says.
Sr Benedict Brown OSBSt Mary Magdalene, by Sister Esther Pollak OSB
Ms Seagar says that she is “an intensely visual person”, and was quickly hooked on icon-painting when she first tried it, although image-making is not part of the Judaism she grew up with. She describes her excitement whenever a medieval church is renovated and images are revealed on the walls. But she wonders: “If this little church in the middle of nowhere had these paintings on it, what was the rest that we’ve lost?”
More and more places of worship are displaying icons or hosting iconography exhibitions. The growing British Association of Iconographers (BAI), which so far has just over 200 members, is exhibiting in the cloisters at Westminster Abbey in September 2025. Ms Ward has exhibited in Southwark and Rochester Cathedrals, and was part of the team that created a large icon of the crucifixion for Lichfield Cathedral, in 2018. That icon, and two others, were the work of students from the Bethlehem Icon School and the British RC iconographer Ian Knowles, who founded the school in 2010 to revive Palestinian iconography and stimulate the local economy there.
Just as Orthodox practices have been shared with artists here, those artists are also sharing them with artists from other countries and traditions. Sister Esther pioneered icon-painting classes in Hong Kong, initially going there at the invitation of a student from the island who had attended her classes at Turvey. “I just absolutely loved it,” she smiles, “and they often said to me, ‘Thank you for bringing icons to Hong Kong.’”
Turvey has become a centre of icon-painting; meanwhile, Ms Ward runs courses in Greece, and Mr Knowles, having set up the school in Bethlehem, now teaches in Italy.
One of Sister Esther’s students from Hong Kong, but whom she met at Turvey, is Ka-yee Chan, a Catholic who found in icon-painting a resonance with the Confucianism and Taoism she grew up with. Painting icons, she says, “is all about going deep into finding ourselves”.
“We have this inner core to connect with our deepest — of course, in Catholicism we call [it] God; it’s the deepest, the truth, the purest loving-kindness within, which is what Lao Tzu, the founder of Taoism, talked about, as well as Confucius. . . In Buddhism, it’s called life wisdom. . . When I paint an icon, it gives me this total surrender . . . each stroke is my prayer.”
Ms Chan, who has a studio at Turvey, found solace in painting the Archangel Michael when she worried about her son leaving to go to university.
Historically, it was men who both created icons and were depicted in them, but today more women than men are involved in the art form, according to researchers at Lancaster University, who launched, in March 2025, a digital archive of women’s iconography and iconography-inspired art, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
Dr Azelina Flint, an associate researcher, perceives a shift in attitude in the past 30 years. “Women across the world, and across denominations, are practising iconography. I’m really interested in why . . . how it shapes their faith — do they feel they have to challenge the patriarchal structures of the Church, or are they traditional women expressing their faith in a traditional way? — and the way in which they are developing what is the most ancient tradition of sacred art in the 21st century.”
In some instances, it has led practitioners to faith, or to a different faith tradition. Ms Seagar, and Mr Hart, a former Anglican, have been received into the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, and Sister Esther has joined a Byzantine Greek Catholic Melkite parish. Whether the popularity of iconography is answering a yearning a few years old, or righting a wrong that goes back centuries, increasing numbers of — mainly — women are finding in iconography an outlet for prayer and a source of spiritual nourishment.
Mr Hart believes that many people come to God through beauty, and that icons can be part of that. In our visual and ecumenically open age, this suggests a shift in how prayer is engaged in, away from words extemporised or set, and towards the silent gaze of a face that is at once familiar and unfamiliar. This has an impact not only on the iconographers, but — aided by a little explanation — on all those who, intrigued, stop to look.
Details of the British Association of Iconographers’ September exhibition can be found at:
bai.org.uk/exhibition-2025