Lori McDonald of Ocean Park is pictured with one of her icons, “Our Lady of Tenderness,” otherwise known as the Theotokos or mother of God. After a career with the Post Office, McDonald took up art and enjoys the spiritual refreshment of creating icons in a distinctive style. Money raised helps a Ukrainian refugee charity.

Art is an expression of faith for Lori McDonald.

The Ocean Park painter occupies a distinctive niche in the Peninsula art community.

She paints religious icons. The saints and images of Mary reflect the Ukrainian Greek Catholic tradition.

She enjoys displaying them publicly, as she did recently at the Peninsula Arts Association annual studio tours. “It’s a prayer practice,” she said, a phrase she repeats when asked to explain her fascination. “You are on some kind of ‘different plane’ when you are painting. “It’s growing and making my faith stronger.”

‘Drawn to them’

McDonald had a career with the U.S. Postal Service, first as a clerk in Portland, later designing and writing training manuals in Washington, D.C. She retired first to Washougal, then moved to the Peninsula in 2021.

Her embrace of iconography dates to 1977 when she saw two half-face images of the archangels Michael and Gabriel, which are displayed at her home. She recalled thinking, “I must have these!”

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‘I am not that important. I want St. Gabriel to shine.’

Lori McDonald, icon artist

“I can’t not see them as icons. I have always been drawn to them,” she explained.

In 2015, while working as a parish assistant at a Vancouver Lutheran church, she received an email advertising an iconography workshop in Lacey. “I had to go and there I started my journey,” she said, recalling meeting a Ukrainian Catholic monk with a “black habit and big white beard.”

As she worked on the face of Mary Magdalene, her instructor encouraged her to trace Mary’s face three times. “I knew there was something special,” she recalled. He told her, “I want Mary to come to you in your dreams tonight.”

“I was just taken away with it.”

‘From dark to light’

Unlike many whose creative side was revealed early, McDonald’s talent emerged later in life. “I could barely do stick figures!” she laughed. “People don’t call us ‘artists,’” she said, alluding to the niche genre, “they call us ‘craft people.’

“I really wanted to do something creative when I retired. This was wonderful, because it was something creative that I could do that advances my faith.”

She paints her images on wooden boards about the size of an 8 x 11-inch sheet of paper, although she also creates smaller versions. The egg tempura technique blends egg yolk with water and pigments; gold haloes are 23-carat.

Though recently produced, the faces and imagery, complete with Greek monograms, hearken to a Byzantine style with their stylized flattened designs. Elements were inspired by paintings on a sarcophagus in Egypt.

“There are ancient patterns that have meaning to them,” McDonald said. “There’s so much symbolism, a hand gesture or way of looking.

“And I paint from dark to light, which is the opposite way from many painters. This is bring out the light of Christ to the world.”

‘I fall in love’

McDonald attends Peace Lutheran Church in Astoria. Three or four times a year she travels to the Redwood Valley to seek inspiration under the onion-shaped domes of the Holy Transfiguration Monastery in Ukiah, California. Leaders there call icons “windows to heaven.”

The monastery channels money raised from her art sales to a Ukrainian refugee charity.

But McDonald said she is richly rewarded by her creations.

“It has helped grow my faith,” she repeated. “I think I fall in love with every single one that I have ever done. I want to see their faces. I just fall in love with them.”

By tradition, they are unsigned by the artist.

“I don’t believe this is mine,” McDonald said. “Someone else did the pattern, but I am not that important. I want St. Gabriel to shine.”