Iconography, Day 5: "Ozivki"

I don’t think a person can possibly extract as much intimacy with an image they’ve stared at daily as from one they’ve spent a week in creating through their own hand by brush, eye, intent, and contemplation . . . that is the magic of iconography.

I’ve intimately witnessed this image emerge from a blank board.  At one point, deep in contemplation about the curve of a fingernail, I thought of the old tradition given to women to wash the deceased’s body – to handle and cleanse, to understand and know, and to dress and groom the body of one no longer able to speak.  These women must have learned more about that life when it was gone than they had ever known about it in waking – an intimacy beyond words.  I thought of this while washing and brushing my image – witnessing its ‘life.’

When all this was done and the image was as complete as I thought I could make it, that’s when our instructor told us about ozivki – the Russian word for “life giving lines.”  Ozivki are those two or three wispy streaks of nearly translucent white paint that emit from the outer and inner corners of each eye, the corners of the mouth, the tip of the nose, the tips of the ears, the top of the head, and even the fingernails – an internal light so brilliant and alive that it can hardly be contained and must somehow find its way out.  Ozivki can be observed on virtually all icon figures if looked at closely enough.  It’s a Divine light that emits spontaneously from the inside and cannot be boarded up.

This was the tiniest stroke of paint that wasn’t even difficult to do – and my image seemed to take on a life of its own – “just the thing it needed,” I said to myself.  My image was suddenly alive!

As I made those sacred lines I thought about the Pinocchio story in which a puppet made of wood and string and cloth is suddenly given the spark of life to become “real.”   A real little boy, he is called henceforth.  What is it that makes life? It’s a spark, something beyond us.