Michael Galovic is a deeply respected Serbian-Australian painter reared in the traditions of Eastern Orthodox iconography. For Eastern Orthodox Christians, iconography is a sacred liturgical art, the practices of which have been passed down from master to pupil over the centuries. The images of Christ, the Virgin Mary, the saints and angels are governed by inviolable tradition. The use of models or the exercise of the free imagination of the painter in depicting personal features are strictly taboo. The care in preserving tradition, which sometimes seems obsessive to non-Orthodox, is absolutely necessary because unless an image is authenticated by tradition as a true likeness of an individual (whether it derives from an actual portrait or photograph of the living person, or from spiritual discernment) it cannot be venerated.

Orthodox do not worship icons but they are venerated, that is shown reverence or deep respect, by the making of the sign of the Cross and the lighting of candles before them, kissing and incensing them, surrounding them with flowers or draping embroidered cloths over them. In homes as well as churches icons are used to focus attention in prayer and to establish swift and effective communion with the Divine.

According to Orthodox teaching, the reverence shown an authentic icon passes from the painted likeness to the person depicted. As it is often put, icons are windows that open up into Heaven. They never portray their subjects with photographic realism but use a measure of abstraction in order to show the person transfigured, deified, by the power of the Holy Spirit. It is not emotion which is captured but dispassion and spiritual enlightenment.

A great number of icons, however, are not portrait images of an individual but depictions of an event that might encompass many individuals. In particular, a great many are festal icons which depict scenes, most commonly from the Bible, that capture the essence of a festival of the Church, such as Christmas. It is in contemplation of these icons that the observant viewer quickly discovers that there is a lot more to the Orthodox tradition of iconography than the painting of true likenesses.

In an icon, not just people but everything is depicted as transformed, transfigured by the power of the Spirit. This is perhaps most obviously seen in the icon of the Transfiguration, which depicts Christ transfigured by light on Mount Tabor. Not only does light pour forth from Christ’s person but His clothing is intensely white and the very rocks of the mountain are transfigured, suffused with light. Events, even if historically they took place indoors, are set outdoors because the light in an icon is uniform. There are no shadows, the light emanates from the people and settings depicted, it is not directed from the sun or some other physical source. It is the unwaning light of the eternal Kingdom of God.

In a Renaissance painting, three-dimensional depth is conveyed by means of the techniques of linear perspective. With icons if there is consistent perspective it is reverse perspective, perspective which brings the figure(s) forward into the space between the painting’s surface and the viewer, a space known as the “space of the heart”.

What goes for space goes also for time. An icon might depict an historical event, such as the Crucifixion of Christ, but the iconographer, unlike a painter in the Western Renaissance tradition, does not freeze an instant of time. Rather, icons are painted in episodic time; time is internal to the event depicted and generated by it. Thus in an icon the same individual might appear more than once.

The objective is to make the salvific event present in the here and now, not merely recall it to mind as an event in the past. Space and time are centred and the sacred event is brought into the eternal present. By such means, the saving power of the mystery depicted can be accessed by anyone who approaches an icon reverently and with an open heart. Icons have a sacramental power which can transform lives; indeed, some icons are miracle working.

Icons also depict their subject matter on different levels of being. Thus it is very obvious that there are three levels of the Christmas icon. At the lowest level we see midwives washing the infant Jesus and Mary’s husband, Joseph, pondering his uncertainties about the birth. In other words, this is the level of our everyday mundane lives. At the top, by contrast, we have the heavenly domain with amazed angels rejoicing at the mystic birth of Christ. In the central band we have Mary reclining with her child at her side, having just given birth. The celestial bows down to earth and God becomes flesh. The upper and lower worlds become united in the Incarnation. The icon first tells us that besides the every day dimension there is also an underlying, or over-arching, heavenly or spiritual dimension to existence. But then, what has been dissected out into two levels is united into the one reality. The paradox of the transcendence and immanence of the Divine is resolved in the eternal present of the mystery of the Incarnation of the God-man, Jesus Christ, as we experience it through the icon.

But it is not just compositional features which make icons different, the whole process of the production of an authentic icon, from the preparation of the board, pigments and egg tempera to the final brush stroke, is a spiritual undertaking governed by tradition. As Michael Galovic likes to say, creating an icon is like building a church. Everything has to be built up in its correct order and everything has theological meaning.

In 2007, at the last minute, I was asked if I could stand in for the principal speaker, who had been delayed, at the launch of Michael Galovic’s beautiful award winning book, Icons + Art. As I hastily ran my eye over Michael’s icons that were on display, I saw for the first time his painting, Iconic Uluru (2005), of the world-famous rock (formerly known as Ayers Rock) in the “Red Centre” of Australia. My instantaneous reaction was “My Goodness! That is an icon of Uluru”.

Of course, if it is an essential part of one’s definition of what constitutes an Orthodox icon (and perhaps it is of mine) that it must be of, or contain images of, Christ, His mother, the saints or angels then obviously one cannot have an icon of a rock! But to quibble over definitions (even with oneself) is to close the door on any serious appraisal from an Orthodox perspective of what Michael Galovic has achieved over the last decade, and still is achieving, in his ground-breaking studies of Uluru.

Now, Michael Galovic (though he might not forgive me for saying this) is a deeply spiritual person. His painting, whether of icons or not, is executed slowly and with great spiritual sensitivity. His iconography, in the strict sense, always fully conforms to the Eastern Orthodox iconographic tradition. When he turned his attention to Uluru Michael took with him his entire background knowledge and experience of Orthodox iconography.

Why did I react to Iconic Uluru as I did on first seeing it? At first glance, the painting looked like an icon. At my second glance, it was obvious that the work was painted in egg tempera on a gessoed board using traditional iconographic techniques and conventions. Moreover, it was also obvious that the painting was in the style of the Russian Orthodox Novgorod School of iconography. My third glance disclosed the fact that this was no picture postcard Uluru but that the Rock had been spiritualised, transfigured. As, a moment or two later, I launched Michael’s book the symbolic meanings of the painting began to unfold in my mind.

Since the painting of an icon is a spiritual activity strictly governed by tradition, for an Orthodox iconographer to prostitute this sacred art to purely secular objectives would be tantamount to blasphemy. Is Michael open to any such charge for deploying iconographic techniques and their spiritual underpinnings in painting Uluru? Definitely not!

At this point I must turn to Orthodox theology. Except during Eastertide, millions of devout Orthodox begin their morning and evening prayers by addressing the Holy Spirit in the following words: “Heavenly King, Comforter, the Spirit of truth, present everywhere and filling all things, the treasury of good and giver of life … ”.  Orthodox theology holds that the Holy Sprit interpenetrates the whole creation: rocks, plants, animals, everything. This does not mean that Orthodoxy is pantheist; it does not hold that the creation is God, and hence can be worshipped. It is, however, panentheist; it maintains that God is in all things, and hence the earth, being in this sense sacred, can be venerated. The veneration offered the earth passes to the ultimate Creator, God.

The earth itself, though not divine, is sacred and by our rape of the earth we sin against it and against its Creator. Although there are many Christians who would deny the sacredness of the natural world, even in the Orthodox panentheist understanding, there are many non-Orthodox Christians who do recognise it. Thus, the late Pope John Paul II, until he became too infirm to do so, always knelt down and kissed the ground as soon as he alighted from his aircraft in a new land.

Uluru is an enormous flat-topped rock composed of hard red sandstone standing over 340 m above the surrounding sandy plain, with a circumference of 9.4 km. It is sometimes referred to as a giant “pebble” but is in fact continuous with the bedrock, which has here been exposed by erosion of the surrounding rock. Undoubtedly, it is one of the world’s most important and impressive natural wonders and, together with the nearby Kata Tjuta (formerly known as the Olgas), is on UNESCO’s World Heritage list. 

Uluru occupies a special place in the hearts of Australians. For the Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara, its traditional owners, and other Aborigines of Central Australia Uluru is a very sacred place. According to Aboriginal belief, the landscape was fashioned, the plants and animals speciated, human groups formed and law imposed by the totemic Dreamtime powers. The Dreamtime (Tjukurpa) is not an historical time, it is “That time”, the sacred time of creation which can be made present at anytime in ordinary time by telling or recalling the myths, by performing rituals and chanting the sacred song cycles, by creating body, sand or bark paintings. The Dreamtime is the timeless time of the depths of the psyche, of what Carl Jung called the collective unconscious.

Yet it is also the case that the Dreamtime myths are almost invariably proper to a specific place or tract of land. The myths tell of how Dreamtime powers such as the Rainbow Serpent – which often takes the form of an Earth Mother and is found in one form or another across Aboriginal Australia – carved out the hills, valleys, rocks and waterholes as she or he travelled over the earth’s surface. The myths in fact provide Aborigines entitled to a specific dreaming with a map of an actual area of land, and these conceptual maps are frequently painted in stylised form on artefacts. The myths of one tract, belonging to one people, frequently connect up with the Dreamtime myths of an adjacent people, and in this way “song” or “dreaming lines” are created which extend across the country.

At Uluru several of these dreaming lines intersect and almost every feature of the Rock and its immediate surroundings has mythological meaning. The myths are many but amongst the more important are those of Mala (the Rufous Hare Wallaby), Lungkarta (the Blue Tongued Lizard) and Kuniya (the Woma Python). These myths tell of the creative acts of the totemic powers. Aborigines see themselves as being owned by the land to which they are bound by the Dreaming, rather than that they themselves own land, ownership being primarily determined by spiritual filiation with a Dreamtime being.

For non-indigenous Australians, Uluru has a different meaning as the symbolic centre of Australia. In terms of the popular misuse of the word “icon”, Uluru is, indeed, an “icon” for the whole of Australia. However, the concept of “Australia” – in other words of the country as a geopolitical whole – only came into existence with British settlement. But through the significance attached to the Rock by non-indigenous Australians, Uluru becomes a place of meeting for the newly arrived with the original Australians and their deep mythopoeic spirituality centred on the earth.

The unique landscape forms, the extraordinary clarity of the light and the brilliant colours, particularly reds and blues, have long drawn painters to the Red Centre of Australia, and in particular to Uluru. Uluru changes colour under different light conditions from orange to purple, glowing a brilliant red at sunset as if the light were emanating from the Rock itself.

But Michael Galovic is not a painter of the physical, geological Uluru any more than Orthodox iconographers down the centuries have been painters of the actual sacred mountains – Mount Sinai, the Mount of Olives, Mount Tabor etc – that appear in numerous icons. What Michael is seeking to portray is the conceptual, not the physical, Rock. His objective is to convey the spiritual dimension and the symbolic meaning of this unique natural feature which, in its differing ways, has “iconic” status for both Aboriginal and non-indigenous Australians.

This bold, highly innovative approach, rising up from the depths of the Eastern Orthodox iconographic tradition, has proved enormously successful and in years to come will, if I am not greatly mistaken, be recognised as a highly significant contribution to both iconography and Australian art.

In Iconic Uluru, the colours are those of the Aboriginal flag, which comprises an upper band of black and a lower band of red, with a golden yellow circle (for the sun) in its centre. In Iconic Uluru the lower band, signifying the sacred earth, is dark earth brown and the upper band bright red, the background colour of many a Novgorod School icon and the colour of the Rock when fully energised by the setting sun. Uluru itself forms a semicircle rather than a full circle. As in the Christmas icon, the Rock forms a third band or centre which unites the heavenly with the earthly.

The Rock is depicted as transfigured by Divine light. It glows like a golden sun – gold is the iconographic colour of Heaven –and pulsates with intense white light. The splashes of white on the jagged rocks (which are quite unlike the physical Uluru) follows the iconographic tradition for painting the transformation of matter by the Divine energies, as can be seen in the icon of the Transfiguration and many others. The vague forms in the earth bear witness to the tens of thousands of years of Aboriginal prehistory and the great geological age of Australia, with the dark earth brown signifying the Aboriginal peoples themselves, as is the case with the black band of the flag.

Uluru on Easel (2001) is divided horizontally with the band of earth to the viewer’s right and the heavens to the left, while in this early painting it is (exceptionally) the physical Rock that is on the artist’s easel. The Dreaming lies behind what the artist’s eye sees. A mystic sun pours out the creative seeds of life on the Rock and the earth.

The division into bands of being, which arises out of the iconographic tradition, is present also in Michael’s more recent paintings of Uluru.  This is the case with My Precious Sunburnt Country (2007). As I read it (it might not be Michael’s reading), this painting, with its sombre browns and broken frame, indicts a Nation which has horribly misused the earth and its indigenous peoples and continues to fail to face up to global warming and the world ecological crisis. It is also the case with Yesterday … (2010) which presents a more hopeful vision for the land arising out of the Dreaming. Other recent paintings of the series have taken up further aspects of the iconographic tradition. Thus in Sacred (2010) Michael has used the traditional embossed gilding used for haloes in icons to create a glittering golden abstract image of a totally spiritualised Rock.

Where is Michael Galovic going to take us from here in his iconographic studies of Australia’s sacred mount? We will have to wait to see.

Guy Freeland
St Andrew’s Greek Orthodox Theological College, Sydney
2010