In this country he has painted icons for Winchester cathedral’s retro-choir and a crucifixion for Rochester

In this country, he has painted icons for Winchester cathedral’s retro-choir and a crucifixion for Rochester cathedral; two of his icons hang in Westminster Abbey Why?He explains: “Painting icons is like using a language. Every language has its own words, its own grammatical rules, but that does not mean that everybody can use the language to express themselves as deeply as they might wish. He is softly spoken and courteous.Even Western eyes cannot fail to be transfixed by Fyodorov’s disciplined harmonies of proportion and colour, but what makes one copier of archaic forms better than the rest?Fyodorov has had commissions from all over Russia. They abjure the fleshy naturalism of Giotto or Raphael, adhering instead to the pure forms of Byzantine painting zealously guarded by the Eastern Orthodox Church since its split with the Western (Roman Catholic) Church, back in 1054.In his studio, Fyodorov tips a spoonful of Russian balsam into my tea – “in case you go to sleep”. He now works in a studio in a sandstone country mansion near Bath.
Fyodorov’s stylised paintings of the Holy Family and saints are resplendent in gold leaf and pigments that he grinds himself from lapis lazuli, malachite and amber.Iconographers are not Renaissance men.

PAINTING ICONS is part of

a tradition older than Christianity. Sergei Fyodorov, 39, whose solo selling exhibition opens in London on Thursday, was apprenticed to his father Zinon, the finest icon-painter in the former Soviet Union. This is the show’s elusive but illuminating spirit: to show the human need to make order out of chaos and, as Wentworth says, “to come back to the idea that everyone is an artist”.`Thinking Aloud’, Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge (01233 352124, to 3 Jan); Cornerhouse, Manchester (from 9 Jan), and Camden Arts Centre, London (9 Apr) A national touring exhibition from the Hayward Gallery. “I did think: `Oh my God, it’s a boy’s show’,” says Wentworth, holding wooden sticks of mock dynamite found by the artist Cornelia Parker.

Prosthetic hands show how artificial limb technology has developed and how Army officers got fingers and thumbs, while labourers made do with a hook.The lender, Charing Cross Hospital, feared they were to be shown for “ghoulish” effect, but Wentworth says he was completely against surrealist nightmare imagery. In fact, Cornelia’s the only one who has actually blown anything up.” (Parker exploded a shed, as seen in last year’s Turner Prize exhibition.) Visitors can make their own, more gentle mark, such as words on a Scrabble board. “But I realised that there were lots of women artists in the show. “It’s to put back into the mind what incredible things hands are.” He’s emphatic the show is not an old curiosity shop, soggy with sentimental values.There is an eccentric zeal to Thinking Aloud. It was to have been called First Thoughts, and several of the exhibits are of sketches and models – Wentworth calls them “conceptualisations”, with a wince – leading towards the conclusions that life is an unresolved process; and human resourcefulness and political resonances are found everywhere. Jasper Britton is a glintingly baleful presence as Solyony, superbly projecting the dangerous perversity of a man compelled to destroy the things he holds dear before they are taken away from him.

If I need a night off, I tell her a week in advance,” Ian says of the manageress, “and she’s really good about it.”Ian’s dad is disabled and his mum is unemployed, so Ian can’t afford to miss a shift. She plays word against image, image against image etc.I think it’s these slight, continual, varying incongruities that let Salomon achieve such a good relationship with her past self. She stages significant visual repetitions (the shape of grandmother’s defenestrated body echoes that of mother’s) She drops visual references She juxtaposes dramatically She plays with points of view and mind’s eye visions. From the start, Salomon is in command of her richly hybrid genre.She flexes tempos: sometimes bags of story are packed into a single busy sheet, sometimes a single encounter will be paced out for pages She adapts style to character and mood. But these comparisons only point us to the range of tricks a long pictorial narrative might deploy, and it seems extremely wide We’re not disappointed, either.