After only thirteen days this establishment ended with tens of thousands casualties and losses. Elijah’s Day” is the English translation of the Macedonian Republic Day Ilinden, on which the Ilinden Uprising took place in 1903 and established the Kruševo Republic, the first republic in the Balkans. The embossment is taken from an icon triptych frame from local Catholic school that was demolished over 40 years ago. If you look at the print from an angle, you might see the shape of an eye in the centre. This imagery, as well as my connection to Orthodox art practices, led me to create an drypoint etching of an abstracted angel.
I grew up with a strong connection to the Orthodox church since my father is an iconographer and I work with him often, I once painted the eyes on a Throne angel. In the last lines of “By Belle Isle on Day Break,” he describes a child asking a priest about the eyes of God in Orthodox iconography, certain angels of the highest order (Seraphim, Cherubim, and Throne) are depicted with many eyes. It was an indirect but intimate interaction with my grandmother that I did not expect from this project. My brother unknowingly made a reference to her floral cross-patterned crochet work with the first line of his poem, “By upturned graves of flower crosses.” I found the embossing process difficult, and spent hours contemplating her work while pressing the paper down with my fingers. She lived in Canada for a short time before I was born, leaving the mountains and vineyards that inspired my intaglio print. The poem “Baba Mica” is about my grandmother, Milica, who died when I was a child. I chose three of Jovan’s poems and focused on certain lines that stood out to me to create imagery from.
This hand bound book was my first attempt to consider their poems as prints, and became my preliminary work. Poetry Prints Recently my brother, Jovan Stefanov, and Nick Hildenbrand gave me the task to illustrate their in-progress book of poetry.
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