Judith Hedge’s vocation as an artist, serving the Church through iconography and restoring statues for Catholic churches, could be foreshadowed by the saint she was named for.
Hedge, a Catholic artist who lives on a farm north of Mount Vernon, owns St. Jude Icons, a small business in which she creates icons and restores statues for organizations and individuals.
“My patron saint is actually St. Jude,” Hedge said. “My mom named me after St. Jude because she was having trouble with the pregnancy, and he is the patron saint of hopeless cases. … I call my business St. Jude Icons because I needed his help, and I promised him that I would call my studio after him.”
Hedge was first asked to write an icon in Europe in the 1990s.
“They don’t say ‘painting an icon’; they say ‘writing an icon,’ because for one, it tells the story of salvation,” Hedge said. “It’s like a microcosm of our whole salvation story in history painted with an icon, not just in the materials but also in the process and also in the actual image, so it’s very rich.”
In the 1980s, Hedge was an illustrator in the U.S. Army Reserves. She joined the military after completing art school at Notre Dame College in Cleveland. Hedge was commissioned as a lieutenant and was deployed to Germany, where she met her husband, Mark.
They married and moved to England, Mark’s home country, and the priest at their parish asked Hedge to write an icon for the church in 1997. She began studying icons and reading books on techniques. She went to Buckfast Abbey, a Benedictine abbey in southwest England, and took courses on iconography from a nun who wrote icons in the Holy Land.
Hedge has since written several icons from private commissions and for larger organizations, such as churches. Her icons include images of Christ the King, Our Lady of Perpetual Help and the Holy Face of Jesus.
Shortly after moving to their farm in Ohio in 2000, the Hedges joined Danville St. Luke Church and have been active parishioners. Judith homeschooled the couple’s four children for 18 years while continuing to write icons.
She also began restoring statues of saints.
Hedge has restored and repainted various statues including for her parish and for Mount Vernon St. Vincent de Paul Church, Columbus St. Leo Oratory, the Pontifical College Josephinum and churches outside the diocese.
“I am in the Western Church, which uses statues, so that’s where the need is more,” Hedge said. “If I were in an Eastern Rite church, I would probably be asked to be repairing the old icons more or writing more new icons.”
There are notable differences between a saint depicted in an icon and a statue, she said.
“That flatness of (an icon) makes it more like a window, more accessible,” Hedge said. “The statues are kind of like that person is there with us now on this earth, where I look at the icons as like the saints are glorified in heaven.”
The paint used for icons, Hedge said, is made of egg yolk and powdered pigments, which are made of ground plants.
“I love the icon because everything is natural. It’s representative of the creation, so you have the earth, the clay, the dust. It’s all very related to Scripture. And then, the gold is dignified – the heavenly realm or the divine nature.
“So, you have the interplay between the divine nature represented in the gold and then the pigment, the painted areas, represent creation, and so you have this beautiful interplay between them, which is how we are with God. He gives us His grace to come to Him, and we react, and when we come to Him, then we are glorified in Him.
The experience of writing an icon is spiritual because, “with iconography, you do a novena, you pray, you fast before you even begin painting,” Hedge said. She usually asks for the intercession of the saint whom she is painting.
In addition to writing icons, Hedge also paints in the style of icons using acrylic paint. This is easier, she said, than the ancient techniques of writing an icon. Hedge painted an icon-style image of St. Luke that is displayed in the parish’s community center.
While Hedge is passionate about writing icons and painting in the icon style, she said, she recognizes a greater need for restoring statues.
For her parish, Hedge first restored a crucifix that formerly hung over the altar. Her husband had found the crucifix in the bell tower of the church.
“We started to sing in St. Luke’s choir, and we were up in the choir, and we found – back in the closet in the bell tower – this crucifix,” she said. “It was very broken and in really bad shape. My husband … asked Father (Victor) Wesolowski if we could take it and restore it.
“He actually did the big repairs to fix the big broken areas, and then I did the smaller broken areas and finished it by painting it.”
The restored crucifix currently hangs on a wall on the left side of the church.
Shortly after she restored the crucifix, Hedge said, the late Father Wesolowski, who was pastor of St. Luke from 2012-14, created a survey to learn parishioners’ areas of interest and ways they could assist at the parish.
“I had done the crucifix already, and I thought, with my art background and my understanding of sacred art through iconography, and I also used to work with a fellow that fixed up houses, and I thought fixing up a statue is almost like fixing up a house in a way because it’s a lot of plaster work, I could do it.”
Hedge said she applied her knowledge from art school and writing icons to restore the statues. A statue of St. Joseph was the first saint statue that Hedge restored for her church.
Beginning a statue restoration can be “like opening up a can of worms,” she said, because the condition of the statue underneath is unknown.
Hedge first assesses any damage.
“I remove any chipped or cracked paint, I sand it smooth, and then I fill it in until it’s a smooth surface.”
The restored St. Nicholas statue is on the high altar at St. Luke Church.
Before painting the statue, Hedge said, she prepares the surface by applying a coat of gesso, or pigment.
“I paint (the statue) in layers, like I would in an icon. An icon is painted in many, many thin layers of paint, so it gets a luminous harmony built into it.”
Hedge said she uses oil paint, or sometimes, acrylic paint, on statues. Oil paint dries very slowly, she said, which gives her time to blend it, whereas acrylic paint dries quickly, so she must work faster.
She also does gold edging on statues, either before or after painting, and she seals the paint with a clear, protective varnish.
When restoring the statue of St. Joseph, Hedge added gold leaf, a thin sheet of gold hammered around the edges of the statue, a technique she learned writing icons.
In 2019, the church had a 200th-year restoration project, she said, and Father Daniel Olvera, then-parochial vicar at St. Luke, asked if Hedge would restore the other saint statues in the church.
“We had a statue of Mary, of St. Anthony and St. Luke, which all needed to be restored,” she said.
Hedge also restored two smaller statues, of St. Francis of Assisi, which Father Olvera found for the church, and St. Nicholas, which is on loan from a priest in Columbus, she said. Both statues are on the high altar.
In 2022, Hedge restored a 23-piece Nativity set for St. Leo Oratory. Last month, she restored a statue of St. Joseph for the Josephinum, which was a prayerful experience for her.
“For the most recent statue that I did, St. Joseph, I started working on it on the feast of St. Joseph the Worker (May 1), and I didn’t realize it.
“It was all gummed up and just a total mess. I just offered it all to St. Joseph, and I asked St. Joseph, as it was his feast day and the worker, and I’m like, ‘Just take all this work.’
“‘You’re the master artist, you make this how you want it to be,’ and so that’s kind of how I get closer to God through offering it to them, and then sometimes I get affirmed.”
Hedge recalled the affirmation she received from God when writing an icon of St. John Fisher for The Catholic Foundation in Columbus. She incorporated colors from the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe into the icon, and she later found a connection between Our Lady and the English saint.
The icon was a gift to Bishop Emeritus Frederick Campbell, Hedge said. The then-Bishop of Columbus identified St. John Fisher, an English Catholic bishop and theologian, as the patron saint of The Catholic Foundation because the foundation manages monetary donations to organizations and churches.
St. John Fisher was chancellor of the University of Cambridge and strategically used endowment funds, or monetary donations, to attract leading scholars to the university and provide students with the best of theology.
St. John Fisher was executed by King Henry VIII during the English Reformation for refusing to recognize the king as the supreme head of the Church of England.
“I was reading this book on Our Lady of Guadalupe, and I was reading at the same time (as writing the icon), and I turn the page, and there’s a picture of King Henry VIII, and I was like, ‘Wow, why is he in here?’ And I was amazed to find out that St. John Fisher was executed by Henry VIII the same time that Our Lady of Guadalupe appeared in Mexico.
“While there were thousands of people leaving the Church in Europe, at the same time, there were millions of people in Mexico coming into the Church through Our Lady of Guadalupe. I felt like that was affirmation to me that I’m on the right track.”
Hedge said she hopes to exhibit her iconography in Columbus one day.
She continues to learn new techniques for writing icons. She has taken courses with David Clayton and Christine Hales, both highly regarded iconographers. Hedge is also a member of the American Association of Iconographers.
“It’s a very ancient, very huge field, and there’s lots of different techniques and styles that can be used under the whole umbrella of iconography,” Hedge said.
And she continues to encounter God in the process.
“It’s actually been a way for me to be deeply converted,” Hedge said of how prayer has been central to her iconography and restoration work and has helped her to hear the voice of God more clearly.
Incorporating prayer into her work has made her more intimately connected to God, and it has made her more convicted of the truth, she said.
“When I do the painting, I totally feel unworthy. … So, writing the icons and studying at the Benedictine abbey got me into saying the Liturgy of the Hours every day, and it’s been a big part of the conversion.”