Today I’m posting a brief essay from 2017 that relates to my earlier post and the idea that Natalia Gontcharova will take a western religious motif and bring it more into an Eastern context by making a first iteration icon as she conceives it.

Again I am only offering my observations as they happen and have done no deep analysis of the particular phenomena. That is the job of the scholar or the academic. My appreciation is for Gontcharova and her process and I leave the detailed understanding of religious symbology and Orthodox iconography to them. I’m a primitivist.

This is one of the first paintings that got me thinking about her as a satirist, an idea that has only gotten reinforced as I’ve had the chance to see more. So funny and scathing at once. It’s not exactly parody either or anything mean spirited in terms of cutting down the object of the satire. She blends this humor with great religious sensitivity and graphic power. Like I think she believes in the power of the Christian faith and of faith in general and she can’t see why there should ever be any conflict between different systems of belief. So in this painting she smashes the Catholic, Western version of the familiar Mary, John and Jesus image into a more Orthodox, Eastern form.

“Our Lady of Consolation”, as this painting is titled, is one of the earliest Roman Catholic names for the Blessed Virgin Mary, a fact that Goncharova would clearly have known. Her writing out the name in Old Church Slavonic is also no accident and helps to establish this mashing together of symbols. I just think it’s phenomenal and beyond my abilities to really write too much more about it. I respond to her work with an immediate, gut sense of comprehension and I honestly don’t like to go much deeper than that. I get it right off the bat. I hope you do too.