Apple Pie Icons and Honey Crosses
St. Sophia with her three daughters Faith, Hope and Love
These wonderfully fresh iconic images are a work of a Serbian artist Biljana Jovanovic.
Biljana was born in Belgrade in 1970, and works in Serbia and Greece. In iconography, as in all the other art forms, there is a “high” and “low” or “naive” style, where “naive” would be represented by the icons written by peasants or people unschooled in the art and the use of materials, self-taught who are religious and have some measure of talent.
There are many of these kinds of icons available today in Serbia and other Orthodox lands, they are brought on the markets and sold for pennies, along with sacks of potato, peppers and eggs... Biljana has adopted that “naive” style of iconography, so she even decorates her icons with craft motifs creating pieces of art with the warmth of childhood memories, while her crosses have an appeal of fragrant heart cookies from the grandma's jars.
Unlike many other representatives of this iconographic style (who simply don't know how to paint), Biljana does a great job with it - her icons are still very spiritual, she doesn't caricaturize the images, but they are also very fresh, warm and moving.
While this kind of work gives the impression of ease and simplicity, it is actually not easy to paint in this manner and achieve the same effect without making the images completely ridiculous and unrecognizable.