Joseph Burwell

Grant awarded Spring 2018

Kossak Travel Grant to visit the Painted Monasteries and Churches off Romania
August 2-13, 2018

I was awarded a Kossak Travel Grant in 2018 to visit the Painted Monasteries in Romania. I visited 11 in total, most of them in the Bucovina region. I was very interested in these structures both because of the Orthodox Iconographic style of of painting used and because of the relationship between those images and their architectures.

The stylistic features of Orthodox Icon painting have had a big influence on my work and the 16th, 17th, and 18th Century images in these Romanian structures are some of the most abstractly innovative that I have found. Their dense flatness is punctured by rigid but subliminal architectural depictions to disrupt spatial understanding. The over-stylization of geographical features such as mountains, water, and even fire are fundamental to their symbolic strength.

The Painted Monasteries are completely covered with images on both the inside and the outside of the building and have the effect of suturing the interior to the exterior. The images of the unreal architecture imposed onto the surface of the real architecture leaves the structure feeling eviscerated.

In the end it was a very valuable trip for my work and me. It gave me an enormous cache of reference photos to draw from going forward; images that are not available on the Internet because many of these structures have not been thoroughly documented. And it really fueled the work in my final Thesis semester. I feel very lucky to have experienced these unique image-ridden objects in such an unusual part of the world.

The monasteries and churches I visited are: Sucevita Monastery, Moldovita Monastery, Voronet Monastery, Humor Monastery, Putna Monastery, Probota Monastery, Rasca Monastery, St. John the New Monastery, Exaltation of the Holy Cross church, Cozia Monastery, and Princely Church of St. Nicholas at Curtea de Arges.