Ian Knowles, M.A.(Oxon.), DIp.Past.Theol.

iconographer, teacher

ian@eliasicons.co.uk

Who Am I?

I am a Catholic icon painter, born in England in 1962. I spent more than a decade among the Christians of the Holy Land where I founded the Bethlehem Icon School (2010) at the Emmanuel Greek Catholic Monastery in Bethlehem. I also founded and ran the Bethlehem Icon Centre between 2011-2019.

I now live in the Italian Alps where I have my studio and teach, mostly online.

I fell in love with icons when I was 18 and on a trip to Greece. I did my initial study under Fr Egon Sendler SJ, and some years later did an apprenticeship with Aidan Hart. I have been a professional iconographer since 2007.

I graduated in theology from Oxford University and have a Diploma in Pastoral Theology from Heythrop College, London.

Learn more about my time in Bethlehem

Why icons..?

Icons have given me a way of exploring, expressing and sharing my faith in Christ that is both profound and immediate. They have come to shape my faith beyond intellectual concepts, and to root my relationship with Him in a dynamic engagement with the Tradition that flows back to the Apostles, and through them to Christ Himself.

God was born as the Christ Child in a stable in Bethlehem, and at that moment God looked at us through human eyes, and Mary His Mother gazed on the Face of God and lived. Thus began the revolutionary Christian way of praying with our eyes and encountering God through our senses. God was as intimate to us as our own breath. Icons extend this into our own time as objects of the sacred Liturgy which lies at the heart of the Christian way of life.

“The images leave us with an impression of darkness and brightness, incense and candles, deep voices chanting, and icons. The pictures are not there just to be looked at as though the worshippers were in an art museum: They are designed to be doors between this world and another world, between people and the Incarnate God, his Mother, or his friends, the saints.”

Lynette Martin, "Sacred Doorways"

“Sometimes icons are described as ‘windows into eternity’. But the analogy of the door or gate is more powerful and more appropriate. Through a window we gaze upon the landscape from a distance; but, passing through a door, we no longer gaze from a distance but ourselves become part of the landscape. And that exactly is the essential point about the icon: it brings about participation, encounter, communion.”

Metropolitan Kalistos Ware