The first sunbeams of Juneau’s rainy May illuminated an icon of St. Nicholas through the window of the makeshift art studio adjacent to St. Nicholas’s Church. The golden paint on the half-finished masterpiece reflected the sun like a dulled brass mirror. By the door, a man in sacerdotal robes stood in a field of golden light. Not quite life-size, he stood about 4 feet tall, his right hand raised in a blessing and his left, obscured by a long sleeve, held a gospel book. Staring straight ahead, he looked directly into the eyes of the viewer through the window of the canvas. Behind him was no background, except for the shining golden field in which the figure seemed to float. When that rare Juneau sunlight hit the canvas, St. Nicholas came to life, and swam in it.
The restoration of this painting and its five companions is being undertaken by Tatiana McWethy, a professional iconographer who has worked with this style of religious art for decades, and began her work with Juneau’s iconostasis in September of 2024. All six paintings, which form a screen delineating the church’s sanctuary called an iconostasis in Greek, were installed in Juneau’s oldest church in 1894, just 14 years after Joe Juneau made his camp at Gold Creek.
McWethy spends 10 to 12 hours each day with the icons, working in Juneau for two to three weeks at a time. She approaches the paintings as prayerfully as she does the saints whom they depict.
“Everything becomes prayer,” McWethy said. “Pictures are talking to our mind and imagination, but an icon talks deeply to our heart.”
McWethy was born in Berdychiv, Ukrainian SSR in 1967. She graduated from Zheleznogorsk Art College before moving to St. Petersburg to pursue advanced studies under the guidance of S. A. Kiselyev, a leading restorer at the Hermitage Museum. Today, she lives in northern California and works as a professional artist and restorer of historic art.
“I’ve spent a lot of time working with masterpieces in museums, so I understand the quality of this kind of art,” McWethy said. “These are masterpieces of their style, and you should be very proud that they’re in Juneau.”
McWethy has left a corner of the golden field unrestored, to demonstrate what it looked like before her work. In this corner, the gold is nearly black, and the sunlight struggles its way through a century of soot. For many years, St. Nicholas’s Church was heated with a wood or kerosene stove. Black particulate settled on the canvas and gradually obscured its golden field.
With a brush as thin as a single hair and a plastic pole to stabilize it, McWethy demonstrated her process. She dabbed the dark canvas with a turpentine solution, carefully removing the layers of black and allowing the trapped sunlight to escape. In ourselves, as in the painting, an indelible light exists beneath the dirt and soot of sin, which our own Restorer lovingly chips away.
“He cleanses us of our accumulated mire, he purifies us, stretches us, and restores the beauty of the image in which we have been made,” wrote Fr. Maxim Gibson, pastor of St. Nicholas.
Although stylistically consistent with their 19th century Russian origins, one subtle detail plants the iconostasis firmly in Southeast Alaska. The deacon doors, two swinging panels through which deacons pass in and out of the sanctum, are adorned with images of the holy translators, Cyril and Methodius. In a typical Orthodox church, the doors, representing the gates of paradise, are fitted with icons of the angels who “guard the way to the tree of life.” In Juneau, however, linguists stand guard instead.
“This might be the only church in the world where Cyril and Methodius are on the deacon doors,” Fr. Gibson said.
Cyril and Methodius were the Greek linguists whose translation of Christian texts into the Slavic language inspired Fr. John Veniaminov, later St. Innocent of Alaska, to establish Alaska’s first bilingual schools, which put the Aleut, Aluutiq, and Tlingit languages into writing for the first time.
Of the six icons, McWethy has now restored the four depicting Jesus, Mary, St. Nicholas, and St. Innocent of Irkutsk. She will return later in the year to restore the icons of Cyril and Methodius.
Charles Whittlesey is a parishioner at St. Nicholas Orthodox Church in Juneau.
Tatiana McWethy points to the unrestored corner of the icon of St. Nicholas. (Photo by Charles Whittlesey)
