Sailing Back to Byzantium, a brilliant new hardback volume featuring the work of Michael Galovic, a leading exponent of traditional icons and religious art in Australia.

Several authors, including the artist himself, have their articles and essays accompanying different works and illuminating them with a light that will help the reader to understand both the artworks and the artist.

Michael Galovic’s traditional icons and religious artworks are just one small element in the world of art, a tradition thousands of years in the making. Used to decorate magnificent cathedrals and modest churches alike, they are the visual representation of belief and spiritual worlds that bind people and communities together. With his experience of over 50 years of icon-making, Michael employs his deep and sincere
understanding of, and admiration for, traditional religious art, but also brings to it subjects and ideas very much of our own time. It is the road less travelled which he walks with genuine belief and a single minded determination to translate those ideas into powerful and engaging visual images.

This publication showcases the work of someone who still stubbornly uses egg tempera on traditionally gessoed hard surfaces with up to 12 layers, whether the artwork is a traditional icon or a contemporary rendition of an ancient theme. All this single-mindedness combined with the relentless grit of hardly missing a day’s work results in a prodigious output. Michael’s works are in well over 100 churches and
institutions and numerous private collections in Australia and beyond.

There are other traditional iconographers but very seldom those who also endlessly and boldly experiment with one foot in the past and the other in the future. Michael is never content to rest on the success of his masterful icons, constantly taking his art to new places and forms of expression. His works reflect significant philosophical, cultural and artistic concepts; the results of an unceasing curiosity with the ways of our world and have long been embedded in the tapestry of cultural life in this country.

This brilliantly designed volume is a must for a beginner in the practice of iconography as well as the seasoned practitioner and lovers of religious art alike. Its 260 pages give us a kaleidoscopic spread of one marvel after another as a testament of what can be done if you combine a belief in what you do with a ceaseless questioning of it and a pushing of your own boundaries, irrespective of how contradictory that
may sound. Michael’s background in graduating from the Belgrade Academy of Art shows how one can build from a solid foundation and then give a contemporary guise to an ancient structure, being never afraid of failure.