About Conestoga Icons
The icons painted at the Conestoga Iconographic Studio offer a simplicity and stillness in their vision of Jesus Christ and his saints. Each is created by master iconographer Symeon van Donkelaar, and created from a unique set of skills and of months of hard work. Through the wonder-filled gravitas of his style, Symeon’s work brings the presence of Jesus Christ and his saints—those men and women fully alive in the Spirit—into the lives of those seeking to commune with them. Today, the studio’s icons can be found in homes, chapels, and churches across the US and Canada, and with printed icons blessing countless homes around the whole world.
To learn more about commissioning an icon for your own church or home, please contact the studio using the Commission Request Form on this website.
Latest Posts
-
The Nativity Icon: The Cave
At the centre of the Nativity icon—and, in fact, an image of Christmas complete in itself—is the stable cave. Within its dark outline, the wonder of the incarnate Christ dwells, along with his mother and a pair of animals. I think it’s fair to say the Nativity icon is especially beautiful within the iconographic canon, …
-
The Nativity Icon: An Introduction
For the past five or six years, I’ve been working on the icon of Christ’s Nativity. Unlike a portrait icon of a saint—which I can usually design and sketch with a week spent learning, praying, and sketching—a festival icon is far more complicated in both its composition and theology, so the time spent designing any …
-
Saints Zenaida and Philonella
Sts. Zenaida and PhilonellaThe Charitable Physicians— October 11th — The story of Zenaida and Philonella is not well known in the Catholic Church, but it really should be. These two early Christian saints were bright, intelligent women who are the first canonized medical doctors for their work as physicians in the church. Through them we …
-
The Soldiers and The Fiery Furnace
With the angel and the youths depicted in The Fiery Furnace, all that was left was the rendering of the soldiers in the bottom third of the icon. And, it was here that I think the vision inspired by St. Basil’s commentary on the nature of fire in consumption and illumination really took form. The …
Recent Announcements
-
Apologies
This Friday past I received a phone call from a friend and supporter informing me he was trying to order a couple of prints from the studio’s website and the site wasn’t accepting his payment information. It turns out, for reasons I can’t explain, the plugin responsible for processing this information on the studio’s website …
-
Pondering The Nativity of Christ
Place: Mount Carmel Spirituality Centre, 1225 Township Rd 535, Parkland Village, AB (West of Edmonton and north of Stony Plain)/ Time: 11 am Talk (following the community’s 10 am Mass) In preparation for the celebration of the Christmas Feast in 2024, the friars of the Mt. Carmel Spirituality Centre and Symeon van Donkelaar invite you …
-
Moving to Edmonton
In August, my family and I once again found ourselves on the move. The opportunities that led us out west in the first place presented themselves in new and exciting ways in the Albertan capital city of Edmonton. We had thought of the home we had found outside Red Deer as a place where we …
Kind Words
His Icons lead one into a renewed Spirit of reverence and celebration.
It is my honor and my privilege to offer this testimonial of Symeon van Donkelaar’s Iconography. His style is elegant and simple and leads one to an experience of effulgence. His use of natural coloring is lustrous and gratifying. Following the traditional cannons of Iconography, he is true to the ancient traditions while offering new and notable interpretations. His Icons lead one into a renewed Spirit of reverence and celebration.
Symeon’s artwork calls us to a more profound regard for our fragile world.
The Incarnation calls us to a deep regard for all creatures, the beauty of flora and fauna, indeed, the earth under our feet. The earth we walk on is a reliquary and the minerals and colours of each particular place a sacred treasure. Symeon’s artwork, drawing as it does on the local palette of the land, calls each of us to a more profound regard for our fragile world, and deeper attention to the Holy Spirit who “is everywhere present and fillest all things”.
His icons are distinctive and beautiful …
Symeon’s philosophy, his insistence on local color, speaks to the incarnation: as God took on a specific body in a specific place, Symeon’s work is rooted in its particular location. His icons are distinctive and beautiful, at once otherworldly and folksy, both transcendent and intensely human. Grounded in time and place, these beautiful icons testify to God’s presence in our world, here and now.
I find his work fascinating …
I find his [Symeon’s] work fascinating as it is an exploration of the flatter and more stylized threads of iconography. Lines are bold and highly calligraphic. Color is frank and contrasted like a puzzle. Clothing is abstracted towards simple geometry. Rather than aiming at post-modern angst and the sense of teetering one gets from the work of Todor Mitrovic or the more illustrative tendency of Nicholas Saric, Symeon’s icons embrace a simple buoyancy.
