“Chapel Ikons” (Treaty Oak Publishers, $25.29), a book of photographs and meditations, is a collaboration between Austin-based iconographer, landscape and portrait artist John Patrick Cobb and William Y. Penn Jr., Ph.D.
After a series of personal tragedies in 1977-1978 and in existential despair, Cobb moved to the Gulf Coast island of Port Aransas. He structurally and artistically restored an old seaman’s chapel there — known as The Chapel in the Dunes — that, in spite of several subsequent hurricanes, still stands.
A turning point occurred with his arrival in the early 1980s at Austin’s St. Edwards University and the connections he formed there with the Brothers of the Holy Cross. He discovered a spiritual community and a way of living that continues to shape him to this day.
Cobb first took a course with Dr. Penn, professor of theology and philosophy at St. Edwards, 40 years ago. They’ve been friends ever since.
Around the time he graduated in 1983, he started “writing” ikons. He purposely adopted the “ikon” (as opposed to the usual English “icon”) spelling to emphasize the grounding of his work in classical Greek and Russian traditions.
Meanwhile, Cobb built a house for his mother in Austin and moved into a neighbor’s farm, where for the next 30 years he had a studio in exchange for taking care of the owner’s cows. It was a wonderful time, he says.
An in-depth 2005 article by Ginger Geyer in the journal Image: Art, Mystery and Faith beautifully details Cobb’s influences and techniques:
The ikons are the fruit of a “personal Christianity” that had to do with the people Cobb met in the course of his daily life who seemed “well-founded, solid, important.”
“St. Peter’s Prayer of Repentance,” for example, features Mr. Brown, a well driller and plumber from New Mexico.
“Elder Dressed in White & Wearing a Golden Crown” depicts Rev. Hartness, a Presbyterian minister.
“Ms. Rose: An Ikon of Christ” (1984) celebrates a woman who worked as a janitor at the Department of Public Safety on North Lamar in Austin for more than 20 years. She cleaned bathrooms; Cobb, who worked alongside her for five years, did the floors.
In fact, Cobb often worked along with the people he depicts: clearing out thorn-spiked mesquite undergrowth, forking hay for cattle.
His baptismal triptych — “John the Baptist,” “Baptism by Water,” and “Baptism by Fire” — takes place at Hippie Hollow, a well-known swimming hole on central Texas’ Lake Travis.
Penn’s commentary is especially masterful here, demonstrating how the ikon reflects upon the Fall, good and evil, and the whole sweep of Old and New Testament salvation history.
Today, Cobb lives on a three-acre plot on Austin’s east side, near the Colorado River, with his wife, Tina, and Tina’s brother, Jesse Serrano, who suffered spinal meningitis at six months and has been unable to speak, walk, feed, or care for himself since.
Tina and John do that. And Jesse, of course, has his own ikon.
Over time the ikons came to number 27 total, including side panels. When not on display, they lie wrapped in Cobb’s cluttered studio. Transporting means loading them onto a battered pickup, strapping them down, and hitting the road.
Cobb has set up the chapel, among other places, at the HEB Laity Lodge in Texas hill country, a Presbyterian church in Dallas, and at Antelope Community College in Lancaster, California.
This last he found particularly rewarding. “Most of those students had never set foot in a church in their lives and they asked the best questions! These are the people I’m trying to reach. I loved those college kids who had something to ask of me.”
On a 2016 trip to Europe, he was captivated by the care that was taken with mounting, installing, and displaying great art. He dreamed for a time of similar treatment for his ikons — something in the Eastern Orthodox tradition with tin alcoves, say, and a multitiered iconostasis.
Then he realized he was trying to “elevate the thing out of its realm.” Nobody was prepared to take that kind of care or shoulder the expense. The makeshift wooden walls were fine. The portable chapel was just right.
The ikons, together with Penn’s meditations, merit hours of reflection. But their glory comprises more than the sheer excellence of thought, craft, and art; more than the hours spent polishing with cheesecloth, the painstakingly delicate application of gold leaf, the wrapping and unwrapping, the setting up and breaking down.
The ikons are the distillation of a whole life, based on love of neighbor, landscape, family, and community.
As if to underscore the point, they comprise a series that Cobb refuses to sell separately — or in fact to sell at all.
“They have no price. I offered them for free for years and had no takers!”
Recently, though, Birdwell Library at SMU expressed interest. Talks are ongoing.
One of my favorites, “Our Lady of Guadalupe” (2011), is modeled on Gabriela, a delicate, quiet girl you wouldn’t much notice.
But Cobb noticed her — when she was administering the Eucharist at Austin’s Our Lady of Guadalupe Church.
“It was in the quick glimpse of the eyes when she gave the host that one was able to recognize and apprehend this solemn moment — to see and be seen.”
Isn’t that what we all long for?
And there’s a tiny, delightful detail easily missed. This time Our Lady isn’t crushing the serpent’s head. Rather, Gabriela stands on a plastic globe pedestal inhabited by Little Joe, “the sno-cone guy from on the corner”: a sly smile on his face, arms triumphantly raised.