![]() A few go to extremes: In one shop, tiny chunks of hematite and quartz - the kind children buy in science museums for $2 - are selling for $26.50, and a small string of malachite beads is marked at $500. Different stores offer similar goods at radically different prices - whatever the market will bear. The buses stop and disgorge their cargo of visitors for half an hour of commerce there is virtually no walk-in business, and no comparison shopping. Even the lowest quality likeness can be priced at $70 or more - though that can vary wildly. ![]() Others are just cheap prints pasted on chipboard, sheathed in silver or gold or electroplated tin. Some are printed on canvas and mounted on wood, with highlights in gold paint. In shop after shop, the shelves are lined with mass-produced images of religious figures. Alongside these sit equally massive souvenir shops, selling figures carved of olive wood, jewelry and rosaries, postcards and baseball caps and other souvenirs &mash and, of course, icons. The main street is dominated by cavernous restaurants, designed to serve large tour groups at carefully scheduled intervals. Its geography is defined on the one hand by Israel’s separation wall, which almost entirely encircles the town, and on the other by the movements of the huge tour buses that support the town’s main industry. ![]() Two forces shape modern Bethlehem: occupation and tourism. It’s a service to the city of Bethlehem.” “Many young people here, they have no work,” he says, “and many people, they love the icons very much. And it may also mitigate one of the area’s other problems - a lack of jobs. The school, he says, will help remedy a lack of trained icon writers in one of Christianity’s holiest places. “I would like, if I were younger, to be a student,” says the archbishop. The school’s patron is Melkite Greek Catholic Archbishop Joseph-Jules Zerey. The project has already drawn significant support from the community - a temporary classroom has been provided by Bethlehem University in the basement of its Brother Vincent Malham Center, just off Manger Square. The first students are an ecumenical bunch their number includes two Coptic Orthodox nuns, four students from the Greek Orthodox Church, two from the Syriac Orthodox Church and two Latin Catholics. ![]() Timothy Lowe, a priest of the Orthodox Church in America and the rector of the Tantur Ecumenical Institute, which is a partner of the center, along with Mr. “Empowering local Christians, finding a way for them to rediscover their artistic, religious tradition in a very specific way - that’s exciting,” says the Rev. But by helping students reach a high level of craftsmanship, the center’s founders hope to create something lasting and profound: not just the seed of a local craft industry, but an expression of the Holy Land’s ancient Christian culture and its role in the development of Christian art. The classes are small and the curriculum, highly specific. It is a project at once modest and ambitious. It is October 2012, and this is the first class of the Bethlehem Icon Center, an initiative to train students from Palestine in the ancient art of iconography. Slowly, in a few places, the holy countenance begins to come to life on paper. “What you need as you paint Christ is to be with him, to experience him.” “The purpose of the icon is prayer,” he says. It is this, as much as brushwork and technique, that he is attempting to pass along to his students. Though hewing fast to traditional styles and techniques, his pieces can feel strikingly modern, alive with spiritual purpose. As an artist, he creates extraordinary, vivid images. The teacher is Ian Knowles, a British iconographer who has been working in churches and convents in the Holy Land since 2008. “Work to your strengths, and know your weaknesses - which is a good spiritual principle! Because what you’re doing is learning spiritual life, really - in a very practical way.” “Move the paper so it’s easier to draw,” he explains. The instructor is patient, demonstrating the basics again and again - how to draw a line with a brush, how to mix the paint, how to find a face in a sheet of white. They work through mistakes and false starts, scowling and sighing in frustration. Some of the students are established artists, others have little or no artistic training, but this new craft is a challenge for all of them. The bearded face of Christ takes shape in burnt sienna on a dozen sheets of white paper: a dozen variations with a dozen irregular sets of features. In a cave-like basement a short walk from Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity, nine students huddle over Formica tables, patiently practicing their brushwork. Knowles demonstrates the steps involved in painting an icon of the face of Christ, also known as the Mandylion. In the Bethlehem Icon Center’s temporary classroom at Bethlehem University, students watch as Mr.
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