Grace Fitzpatrick’s aesthetic education began with her father reading her and her siblings Moby Dick at a much too early age, much too late at night. Or perhaps it was when her mother took her to see the Renoir masterpiece “Luncheon of the Boating Party” when it came to her childhood home of Buffalo, New York. Or maybe it was when she read W. B. Yeats’s collected works on the crystal studded hills behind the family home in Hot Springs, Arkansas. Things really got out of hand when she married her writer-philosopher husband Danny Fitzpatrick, re-read the Odyssey and a great deal of Shakespeare plays, and then happened upon traditional Byzantine iconography.
Like Waugh’s favorite Divine twitch upon the thread, learning how to write icons has transformed a fascination with beautiful things and ideas to a peace-filled vocation to beauty’s Creator. So now, while she endeavors to share as much beauty with her children as was given to her from her earliest days, Grace hopes that God continues to inspire her to write icons and that these holy images bring others closer to Him.
