ABOUT ME

My name is Roy Walter Weggenmann, I am 25 years old, a converted Orthodox Christian, and an icon painter from Eastern Switzerland.

I have been drawing since childhood and took part in painting and drawing classes from an early age. Later, I completed a preparatory course at an art school and worked in various roles as a graphic designer. In 2019, I took a new path and – at that time still a non-denominational Christian – began studying theology at a free evangelical faculty.

On July 1st, 2023, I was baptized into the Christian Orthodox Church – a step through which I discovered my deep fascination for icons. In iconography, I have found a way to unite my love for theology with my artistic gifts.

In November 2024, with the blessing of Metropolitan Seraphim of the Romanian Orthodox Metropolis in Nuremberg, I completed a course in iconography under the guidance of Sister Marina. There, I learned the fundamentals of icon painting in the traditional Byzantine style.

With the blessing of my priest, Father Ionel Nemeș, from the Romanian Orthodox parish “Entsendung des Heiligen Geistes” in Konstanz, I now paint and sell high-quality icons – as the first professional Orthodox iconographer in Switzerland.

MY MOTIVATION

The visual hallmark of Orthodox churches is undoubtedly the colorful images – the icons. There are countless icons of the famous Christian saints of the East, whose names are usually inscribed in Greek or Slavic languages, while icons of Western saints are less commonly found. Believers from the West, who are not familiar with the Eastern Church languages, can only guess the names of the people depicted in the icons, while missing the representations of the influential saints from their own homelands.

As a converted Orthodox Christian who cherishes the love for the Western tradition of the Church, I am personally affected by this. With Swiss Icons, I aim to address this gap and give a face to the formative Christian figures of Switzerland, Germany, Austria, and all of Western Europe, in order to build a bridge between Eastern and Western cultures within the Orthodox Church.