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, a convert, 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.
Fresh it may be, but her work is not careless; it is born of hard-won skill. Cassady teaches her students at Trinity School at Greenlawn, 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 …. Read the rest of my latest for Our Sunday Visitor.
She does indeed do marvelous work. For the last two years, she also created the Paschal candle at St. Matthew’s Cathedral parish. All so beautiful!