Nestled in a studio behind a historic apartment building in South Yarra, 80 year old hands don’t tremble- they paint. Only Gregorian chants ever form a wordless accompaniment to these deft brushstrokes of unseen purpose. Norma and Rob Gallacher’s immerse themselves in a quietude, their grizzled hands defying frailty to produce painted immortality. They reproduce Byzantine religious icons, the painting of which follows a spiritual practice that has provided the couple solace for decades. Iconography has an epochal resilience, defiantly surviving through the continual upheaval of civilisation due to people like the Gallachers’ who themselves have seen several generations rise and fall.

 

Rob first encountered icon painting at the Bossey Ecumenical Institute in Switzerland in 1969 when a rather enigmatic Greek lecturer spoke about it upon request. Rob had been weaned on renaissance painters in university, yet this lecturer wasn’t so enamoured.

 

“He thumped the desk and said ‘renaissance painters were heretics!’ That made me blink,” Rob laughs.

 

The painting of icons didn’t come to define Rob’s life until many years later, living in Geelong married to Norma.

 

“It was a very stressful period. I saw an icon painting class starting up in Melbourne at St Peters...I thought, I’m going to go and do that just as a hobby. I was amazed. Initially, it calmed me with the therapy of getting out the paints, concentrating on something and painting away. Then I started to reflect on what each particular icon has been through over thousands of years… the little storm in a teacup I was trying to deal with shrunk down into something I could cope with,” Rob says.

 

Norma doesn’t wish elaborate much on her own spiritual epiphany, yet the quality of her work is indistinguishable from Rob’s.

 

“You end up like those you live with. Rob liked it and I learned to like it, and that’s not a very good story,” Norma muses.

 

A small sign hidden by the window lists “Rules for the Icon Painter”. Rob admits they’re hardly a list of commandments, yet admires its warning against jealousy; icon painting is sacred work, and never competitive he says. If hypothetically, it were to be a competition, it’s hard to say the couple wouldn’t win - since the late 1980s Rob and Norma have been painting near constantly. He estimates the number of his icons in circulation to be close to 200, dispersed across Australia and the globe. Rob also started three schools around Melbourne teaching the myriad skills of icon painting, all exist today.

 

For the last ten years, the painting couple have resided in a deceptively historic apartment building in the leafy confines of South Yarra, “Yarralumla”. The couple are allowed to paint in the small art studio opposite the laundry room in exchange for tending to the internal gardens. The room was and is still used by the building owners, Victoria Body Corporate (VBC), to host meetings on a sporadic basis. Norma says prior to their use as a painting studio, it was musky and decrepit. She laughs imagining what VBC think of its shrine-like appearance now yet somehow, one imagines that regardless of their christening, they’d admire it.