St Andrew's of Lexington, KY

In reading through my Google Reader this morning, the post that really caught my eye was on HEXAEMERON, a blog about iconography. They were reporting on the work being done to capture images, stories and the meaning of the icons of St Andrew Antiochian Orthodox Church in Lexington, Kentucky.
I lived about 20-25 minutes from this parish while attending a nearby seminary. In fact, my first visit to St Andrew's was for my "Sacraments in History" course. At the time, I had recently begun visiting the parish I would later be baptized in, St Athanasius OCA, and had met some of St Andrew's parishioners there. Our class listened to Fr. Tom talk about the sacraments of the Orthodox Church and there was a Q & A session. The iconography and its beauty was nearly overwhelming. I didn't know who all of the Saints were, or what all of the images were depicting but I did recognize one thing - I was somewhere sacred.

From HEXAEMERON -

“The Beauty of Thy House”: A guide to the icons of St. Andrew Orthodox Church

The text is mostly written, even without a contract with a publisher. The book will be expensive to produce because its whole purpose is to be a guide
to the masterpiece icons of St. Andrew Orthodox Christian Church in Lexington, Kentucky, and therefore will contain more than 50 color images besides nearly 100 pages of text. The initial concept for a brochure-size publication was just a passing notion. There is too much to fit into a handout to adequately describe this monumental work created by Master iconographer Ksenia Pokrovsky and her daughter Anna Gouriev between the years 1992 and 2006.

The text for this guide grew out of the need to educate not only visitors to St. Andrew with little or no acquaintance with Orthodoxy, but also, and perhaps primarily, St. Andrew’s own parishioners who want a clear explanation for the placement and subject matter of the icons and how they relate to each other liturgically and theologically .

A period of several months, September 2011 through January 2012, marked a serious effort to photograph these icons. Many people for many years, awestruck by their beauty and content, have attempted without success to capture and reproduce decent images of the icons. The major obstacle is light, not the lack of, but the presence of too much. First, the reflective light created by the large amount of gold covering the surfaces of the icons is extremely difficult to render without “hotspots” in the image and/or blackness. Added to this is natural sunlight coming from the six man-sized windows, three on the North wall and three on the South wall of the nave. Because St. Andrew temple faces East, as do all Orthodox churches, sunlight floods the nave from rising to setting sun, making it impossible to manage consistence of perspective. (full article here)

For more images of the icons, you can visit the iconographer's website here.