Anastassia Cassady doesn’t have one particular style of painting — and that’s kind of her style.
Cassady, 35, who sometimes goes by her childhood nickname of “Tess,” is a painter, iconographer, mother of three young children, part-time high school art teacher, and something of a hurricane of words and ideas.
“I don’t have a personality disorder!” she said. “But I feel like there’s so much going on in my life, that to sit down and be in the same headspace every day would make me feel like a copy machine.”
Instead, she leans into what she calls her “erratic nature of switching styles.”
Her sister, a photographer and co-owner of an art gallery, says she can always spot Cassady’s work, though, because of her trademark color palette.
“The deep colors, the reds, the golds, that would have been in pysanky and in icons” are in all of Cassady’s works.
Cassady grew up in South Bend, Indiana, in a house heavily influenced by her Ukrainian mother.
“We had icons everywhere, in an age when icons weren’t cool,” she said.
She and her five siblings grew up making pysanky, the intricate, jewel-toned traditional wax-resist Ukrainian Easter eggs, every year.
“All Lent, that was our penance on Fridays: water, bread and pysanky,” she said.
Cassady, an Eastern-rite Catholic who is a parishioner at both the local Ukrainian church and the cathedral in South Bend, has worked hard to instill a sense of Ukrainian heritage in her own children — and also to retain a sense of humor about the faith she learned from her parents. She recalled the evening when her father once again tried to corral his kids to say family prayers, waving away their excuses and hollering at them to sit down.
“He played in the NFL; he was a big guy. But he had a soft reading voice, and he would say, ‘And the angel of the Lord declared to Mary –‘”
A sudden burst of flatulence, courtesy of her brother, interrupted the angel’s words. Their father finished the thought: “WOULD YOU SHUT THE H*** UP?”
“He tried so hard to push this piety on us. We ate him alive,” she laughed.
This push and pull between the sacred and the lighthearted seems to be another hallmark of Cassady’s work. A family portrait she painted is something of a puzzle, including dozens of references to various artists. Her watercolor of St. Benedict, one of the illustrations from the 2023 book “Saints: A Family Story,” shows him relatively young, his head mere inches away from the feathers of an incoming raven. Even her icons, which she writes with careful adherence to tradition, have a blithe feel to them.
Skill and technique, but also humility
Fresh it may be, but her work is not careless; it is born of hard-won skill. Cassady teaches her students at Trinity Academy, where every student learns art history and studio art, how to master tools and techniques in a methodical way, and how to put them to use with intention, with a thorough foundation of art history.
“It’s not just about ‘expressing themselves,'” she said. “If you want to express yourself, you have to understand the process, the technicalities.”
Cassady wishes some priests, especially those choosing artwork for their parishes, had taken art history in seminary. They have good intentions, but many have never been formed aesthetically.
“People just kind of streamline one style as beautiful. They just want to go back to neoclassical,” she said. But that just won’t work if the building is more suited to cubist art, or art deco.
She will argue with potential clients if she doesn’t like their ideas, and has turned down some large commissions because experience tells her the project as requested would look awful.
Cassady has high standards for herself, as well. One rule she keeps: As long as she’s working on a piece of secular art, she also has to be working on an icon.
Perhaps counterintuitively, Cassady speaks of icon painting as a process in which the artist’s grip on the reins of control is looser.
When she’s painting with oils and it’s not going well, she can cover it up or start over.
“I can work on it until it’s perfect, and I can be proud of it,” she said. “Whereas with iconography, that’s not the point. You’re working from dark to light, and you have to let things go.”
“Iconography is about the prayers and the process. It’s almost anti-perfection,” she said. “If you make a mistake, you have to go with it. It’s about humility.”
Cassady finds it almost impossible to sit still, but writing icons is where she finds silence.
“If I’m not working on an icon, I’d neglect personal prayer,” she said. To keep herself meditating, she turns to her egg temperas and her gold leaf.
Cassady doesn’t sell prints of her icons on her Etsy store. This is partly because they are made with prayer for one specific person and partly because a print simply doesn’t have the presence of an actual painting.
“It’s not the same,” she said. “You won’t get the ethereal effect of the layers, the egg tempera, the ground pigment.”
The layers of paint absorb the light and the gold leaf reflects it, making a striking juxtaposition as you walk past the icon.
“The real physical thing is so important,” she said.
She sometimes feels arrogant for refusing to sell prints, but she also urges people to hold out for an original, even if it means saving up money over time.
“Don’t buy any prints for two years, and then buy an icon!” she urges.
She also has mixed feelings about artists who produce digital icons. She’s glad when people, especially children, have the chance to spend time with beautiful, meaningful religious images.
“It’s a sacred image, which is great,” she said.
But efficiency is not the point.
“You can also buy microwaved meals, but I enjoy the process of cooking and eating good food,” she said.
Cassady frequently mixes her own paints, and relishes using the same pigments iconographers have been using for generations.
“You can source them from the clay from a particular city, using the same minerals that have been used for hundreds of years. It’s not just art, it’s religion, it’s chemistry, it’s craftsmanship. You never get bored!” she said.
The tension between traditional and rigid
Because of her own mixed religious heritage, Cassady understands why icons have become popular with western Catholics who don’t have a tradition of iconography. As a child, she vastly preferred Byzantine icons over Western sacred art. She recognized the beauty of the rather austere Roman Catholic church, with its bare walls and stained glass, but it was a very different feel from the small Ukrainian church with its ornate chandeliers, stained wood, incense, chant and constant movement. Her own children also responded much more readily to the Divine Liturgy, which she attended with her parents when her kids were all young and her husband, a doctor, spent long hours at medical school and residency.
“All the senses are engaged. You can almost taste the incense. It’s incredible for toddlers. They get lulled into this meditative state. ” she said.
As much as she loves and respects the ancient ways of Eastern iconography, Cassady also understands why artists might want to break away from the sometimes rigid rules of that tradition.
“I go back and forth on that. I like to hold onto it more because I have freedom to express (myself) other ways,” she said. But she would not judge someone who wants to take icons in a new direction, for a good reason.
In Greek iconography, artists have long allowed themselves more artistic license and “rule bending.”
“They treat it like a work they’ve created; they sign (their names) on the front of the icon,” she said — something that would never be done in Byzantine icons.
But she sometimes wishes there was a different designation for icons that depart from traditional structures.
“I wish there was a word for doing it the canonical way, so you could differentiate between the two. Then it would be totally fine,” she said.
At the end of the day, though, she again acknowledges that the real goal isn’t purity, it’s sanctity.
“Icons are like spectacles to help you see, help you meditate more deeply or worship more deeply. If (a nontraditional icon) is an aid to (someone’s) spirituality, I can’t see it hurting,” she said.
But she does insist there’s such a thing as objective beauty, and that approaching art with intention and education can only help us appreciate it more, and more of it.
“When I was in art school, anything not super modern was looked down on. But in the Catholic Church, anything that’s innovative? Absolutely not,” she said.
“It’s a really black-and-white world out there.”
But in her studio, much like throughout the history of her beloved Ukraine, the borders are always shifting.
“In Lviv, you’d go there and see a square baroque building, classical buildings, a conglomeration of all these different architectures. Churches that look like they belong in Rome, and then a super Byzantine style,” she said.
Blame it on the shifting borders, she said. Why limit yourself to just one style?
