Holy Protection Monastery
White Haven Pennsylvania
The Holy Protection monastery is one of the original monasteries founded by Elder Ephraim of Arizona. In this monastery we felt that we were given an opportunity to try to prove our best selves in painting, but also in terms of choice of subjects and mentality of hagiography, since a dream of ours for a long time for traditional hagiography, according to ancient standards, found for the first time place and time of application very convenient.
Our choices for the space were such that they corresponded to what we considered high standards, standards of high aesthetics according to the ancient hagiography and our effort was to render them as high quality as possible in this way.
This mood and effort was especially strengthened by the Abbess of the monastery, the elder Olympiada, but also by the whole fraternity, who had great love and devotion to the traditional way and also due to the fact that at that time the fraternity church had a relatively concise size.
It was an opportunity to operate according to the ancient scales, for example in relatively small sizes, with a mood of complete sanctification and dense in fact, we managed in our opinion to resemble the feeling that traditional monasteries have in Greece and worldwide, which they radiate spirituality and are good places of prayer and contemplation. We tried to complete an aesthetic set and with the help of the old woman, who always strengthens our mood to follow the traditional standards, we managed to have a complete range of themes. Also, in some places, such as on the west front of the central aisle, we were able to give relatively rare depictions, such as that of the Second Coming. The narthex was also given the opportunity to form on the roof issues related to the life of Panagia.
Thus, an ensemble is completed that has to do both with the traditional canonization in a monastic church and with opportunities for originality, which concern recent Saints such as Saint Paisios, Saint Porphyrios and others.
We consider our work in this monastery to be one of the best we have done so far.
The working steps
We follow specific steps for the design, creation, construction and placement of the project