“The knot of Eve’s disobedience was loosed by Mary’s obedience.  The bonds fastened by the virgin Eve through disbelief were untied by the virgin Mary through faith”.

St. Ireneaus of Lyons
from Against the Heresies

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“Christ our Lord, Thou Who dost provide the rains and fruitful seasons, and hearest the prayers of those who humbly seek Thee, do Thou accept also our requests about our needs and concerns and deliver us from worry, danger and sin. Thy mercies are as abundant as Thy works. Bless all our activities, direct our steps by Thy Holy Spirit, and forgive our shortcomings. O Lord, bless the year with Thy goodness and make it a year of grace for all of us.  Amen.”

Taken from the Matins Service for Church New Year (September 1st / 14th), but still applicable for today!

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“When you see the incorporeal become flesh for your sake, then depict the likeness of Him who has appeared. When He Who, by virtue of the superiority of His nature, lacks body and form, quantity and quality, and dimension, Who, being in the form of God, took upon Himself the form of a servant (Phil 2:6-7), and in so doing became limited both quantitatively and qualitatively and assumed human form, then sketch on panels and display for the contemplation of Him who did so desire to reveal Himself.”

St. John of Damascus

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“In times past, God, without body and form, could in no way be represented. But now, since God has appeared in the flesh and lived among men, I can depict that which is visible of God….[for Christ is "the image of the invisible God. (Col. 1:15.)] I do not venerate the matter but I venerate the Creator of matter, Who became matter for me, Who condescended to live in matter, and Who, through matter accomplished my salvation; I do not cease to respect the matter through which my salvation is accomplished.”

St. John of Damascus
From The First Homily in Defense of the Holy Icons

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To all those celebrating Christmas according to the Gregorian Calendar, we wish you a Blessed Nativity!  May the wonderful feast of Christ’s Birth bring you great joy, peace and gladness and may the Incarnate God draw you ever closer to Himself in the coming year!

Christ is Born! Glorify Him!

Fr Jonah and the staff of Damascene Gallery

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We are very happy to unveil a beautiful pen and ink illustration of St. John of Damascus, our heavenly patron, recently completed for Damascene Gallery by our partner iconographer Dcn. Paul Drozdowski.  We are very happy with this illustration which we are already beginning to use in various places, such as on our new tri-fold brochure.

Thank you, Fr. Paul, for this beautiful illustration!

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We never even thought about this when we launched our business and began writing articles about our products, but, indeed, someone has plagiarized our article entitled “Why Antique Icons?” all over the internet.

Here is our original article published first on our blog and later on the ezines site: Ezines Article published September 11, 2010.

We are hesitant to link to the plagiarized versions by a certain writer named “George Carlton”, who is using the article to drive traffic to a different Church Goods site, which we also don’t want to link to. Unfortunately, he also significantly changed the wording of the article such that it now reads extremely awkwardly, almost as though it was auto-translated using a service such as Google Translate to translate it into a foreign language and then auto-translated it back to English.

One can easily find the plagiarized versions of our article by searching for “Why Antique Icons” on Google. The plagiarized versions begin on the second page of results and, by our count, the plagiarizer submitted the article to at least 14 different ezines sites with backlinks to the aforementioned Church Goods site.

We have contacted the company that is benefitting from the plagiarism asking them to remove the articles but, as yet, we have received no response. We were successful in getting one of the ezines sites to remove the article, but now are wondering if we should really spend the time to contact all 13 other sites hosting the article to get it removed.  We have read that there are effective actions, which can be taken, up to and including having the linked site banned from Google or even removed from the web by their ISP, but we would, of course, prefer not to take such actions.

Any thoughts about how we should deal with this would be very much appreciated.

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We recently completed our new Damascene Gallery brochure outlining our products and services.  Many of you will be receiving it by mail, but we wanted to give everyone an opportunity to see a first-glance at it online.

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Icon of the Saviour. 19th c. Russian

It’s hard to believe that Damascene Gallery was just launched last August, slightly less than four months ago.  When we launched last August, we were not sure what the response would be but we hoped that God would bless our humble endeavor and we set down several “guiding principles” for operation to ensure that our focus would always be on inspiring the faithful to turn their gaze heavenward instead of getting caught up in the pursuit of profits.  Some of those guiding principles include the following:

• Offer the highest quality products possible at affordable prices.
• Offer a Customer Service experience that is unrivalled.
• Never forget that, “Unless the Lord builds the house, in vain do they labor that build it” Ps. 127:1.

Suffice it to say, our first four months have absolutely flown by, and interest in our products is at an all-time-high.  We are grateful to the Saviour for His mercy and to our customers for making this possible and we wish to renew our pledge to never be content with the way things are: we will always press forward to achieve even higher quality and a superior customer experience.  In that context, we are very happy to announce the following updates that will be going into effect in the coming weeks:

Storefront / Website

• A major website overhaul will be completed on both the homepage and the storefront to make the integration more seamless and the flow of our site more elegant
• Many new features will be added including: (a) the ability to request custom quotations for large format icons (b) the ability to make “offers” on our antique/painted icons (c) full pages detailing the biographies and work of our partner iconographers, and much more

High Quality Mounted Icons

• >200 additional high resolution images will be added to our database within the next week
• Many icons from our partner iconographers, including Priest Paul Akmolin and Dcn. Paul Drozdowski, will be added as well
• We are launching our “Church-Size” icon business featuring most of our images in sizes up to 5 feet in the vertical dimension
• Several full iconostasis sets will be offered in the coming weeks, including multiple full festal icon sets, first-tier icon sets, Apostle’s Row sets along with many other “iconostasis” images and ornaments
• We have acquired our own large format printer to further reduce lead times and errors
• Scanning continues and our collection is growing by leaps and bounds

Gold Leafing and Kiots

• We are already offering the ability to add gold leafing to many of our canvas icons via customized quotation and this feature is coming to the storefront as a configurable option
• We are working with our partners and will be providing beautiful handmade kiots for any of our icons with quotations provided before work begins

Mounting Hardware

• BY POPULAR DEMAND – We will be adding the option to add wall-mounting hardware to any of our icons to facilitate hanging

Full Iconostases

• In early 2011, we will be launching our “full iconostasis” project, which will be a full-service iconostasis solution tailored to your Church
• Our large format icons can be customized to your desired layout

Antique  and New Hand-Painted Icons

• Up to 80 antique and newly hand-painted icons will be available in our online inventory by the end of the first week of January
• We are now accepting “offers” on antique and new hand-painted icons, which can still be purchased through our secure website

Brass and Metalwork Icons

• Numerous beautiful brass and metalwork pieces including enameled crosses will be added to our online inventory in early January

Wholesale Pricing for Resellers

• We have now worked out all of the details as regards wholesale pricing for resellers and are pleased to offer this pricing advantage to parish bookstores and other resellers

We are very excited about the upcoming changes and ask you to continue to support us as we endeavor to provide beautiful Orthodox Icons to the faithful.

Thank you for your support!

Priest Jonah Campbell
Co-founder, Damascene Gallery

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The main website of the Antiochian Orthodox Archdiocese of North America recently featured a front page news article about the launch of Damascene Gallery.

The article consisted of the same press-release content as the Eastern American Diocese press-release with the following addition:

“Explains Fr. Jonah Campbell, Co-founder of the Damascene Gallery, “In addition to the main website, we also host an Iconography Forum, a Blog and an exciting Public Domain Icon Gallery designed to be a collaborative project which, in time, will host thousands of searchable icons. The gallery has been designed with search fields specific to Orthodox Iconography such as Nationality, School (of Icon Painting), Age and Iconographer. All icons are being ‘tagged’ with the saints depicted on them, so that they are readily searchable. Anyone can join the gallery and upload their own icons or add additional information to icons already uploaded.”

Click here to see the article on Antiochian.org

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