Introducing Nestor Topchy, Creator of HGO’s 2025-26 Season Artwork
Tucked away in the Houston Heights, bordered by concrete parking lots and cookie-cutter condos, is an acre-sized patch of green planted with trees and bamboo. In one corner of the lot, a friendly dog wanders down a gravel path past a koi pond. At the water’s edge stands a corrugated-steel chapel topped by an onion dome.
This strange little utopia, which resembles some kind of scrap-metal monastery, is the compound of Nestor Topchy. A painter and sculptor, Topchy deals in a variety of mediums—everything from tiny dyed eggs to massive welded orbs. One might argue that his greatest creation is the property itself, which comprises a complex of whimsical buildings he constructed with his own hands out of recycled materials.
But Topchy is best known for his gilded portraits, which draw on traditions of Eastern Orthodox iconography. Houston Grand Opera has commissioned a series of original paintings by Topchy in this style to be featured as poster artwork for the company’s 2025-26 season. The images will be revealed at the season-launch event at Lynn Wyatt Square, held on March 19, 2025, at 2 p.m.
Topchy doesn’t consider his paintings to be icons. While some of them do depict religious figures, most of them are representations of average, everyday people. But because they’re created using the same methods and materials as Orthodox icons, he refers to them as “iconic portraits.”
HGO General Director and CEO Khori Dastoor and Artistic and Music Director Patrick Summers first encountered Topchy’s work in 2024. That year, the Menil Collection hosted an exhibition titled The Iconic Portrait Strand, which featured 124 of the artist’s portraits. “Patrick and I both had the same thought after visiting Nestor’s solo show,” recalls Dastoor. “We knew we wanted him to create a body of work that captures the spirit and emotion of the incredible operas we’ll be staging for our city.”
In the 1970s through the ’90s, HGO actively sought artists and illustrators to create promotional imagery and program covers. Most famously, Maurice Sendak of Where the Wild Things Are fame produced a set of posters for the 1997-98 season. However, it’s been decades since the company commissioned a project of this scale by a single artist like Topchy. “The resulting suite of paintings is stunning,” says Dastoor, “a wonderful reflection of the great art to come on the Wortham stage, made by and for Houstonians.”
Topchy’s art is rooted in his Ukrainian heritage. His father’s family hailed from Korsun, a city southeast of Kyiv. Fleeing the Soviets during World War II, they headed to Germany, where they were imprisoned in a Nazi displaced-persons camp. After the war, Topchy’s father immigrated to Canada, married, and eventually relocated to New Jersey. The couple gave birth to Nestor in 1963 and raised him in the Orthodox faith.
“My father’s best friend, Yurii Kodak, was in the same concentration camp with him. He was the architect for our church in Bound Brook, New Jersey,” says Topchy. It was here where Topchy first saw icons assembled on a wall known as an “iconostasis.”
Icons flourished as an art form in the Byzantine Empire and spread with Christianity to Slavic regions near the end of the first millennium. In both Old Greek and Old Russian, the verb for “to write” was identical to the word for “to paint.” For this reason, even in English, icons are often said to be “written.”
This linguistic oddity also reflects their original function as tools for religious instruction. “In the early days, it was the priests that were literate, and the masses looked at icons and saw a story on the iconostasis,” explains Topchy. “You would ‘write’ an icon because you’re ‘writing’ a divine liturgy.”
In 2004, Topchy studied with master icon artist Vladislav Andrejev, who founded the Prosopon School of Iconology in New York City. Here, he was introduced to the aesthetic, technical, and—most importantly—deep theological symbolism of icon-writing. “The process is probably the same since about 700 A.D., or even longer,” says Topchy.
An icon begins as a wooden board stretched with canvas, to which Topchy applies an animal glue known as “gesso.” Having pre-sketched the portrait on paper, he then carves it into the white, bone-like surface of the hardened gesso. The background surrounding the figure is covered in a reddish-brown clay called “bole,” which serves as a backing for the layer of gold leaf.
“Only after the gold leaf is attached does the painting begin, with at least seven layers of egg tempera”—i.e. paint made from mixing egg whites with powdered pigments. There is a special order Topchy follows, “proceeding from cruder earthen minerals to more refined ones, such as lapis lazuli and pure, colorful pigments.”
The figures themselves, as in traditional Orthodox icons, are represented in a rather flat, stylized, and even geometrical manner. There’s no attempt at simulating three-dimensionality through linear perspective. Rather, Topchy’s portraits exhibit what he calls “hierarchical perspective”: “What’s important is larger, but if something is of secondary importance, we make it a little bit smaller.”
To make the works his own, Topchy deviates slightly from convention by incorporating aspects of other religious iconography, especially Buddhist imagery. He possesses an intense curiosity for East Asian art and philosophy. No mere dabbler, Topchy immerses himself fully in a myriad of traditions: Daoism, Zen, Chinese calligraphy and painting, and Japanese martial arts, including Kyūdō archery.
In exploring these diverse cultures, Topchy often seeks out what Swiss psychologist Carl Jung dubbed “archetypes”—basic symbols and stories that can be found in every human society and unite us as a species across time and space. These archetypes served as a starting point for Topchy’s poster artwork for HGO.
Each of the seven paintings portrays characters from the season repertoire, most modelled after the singers who will play the roles. These figures Topchy surrounded with symbols from the operas themselves, as well as design elements from the specific productions HGO will stage. The artist carefully selected objects and emblems with universal meanings, as well as symbols that intersect with those found in Orthodox icons.
For Topchy, the stories of the operas—which resemble ancient myths—also stand as archetypes. “Operas, just like fairy tales, are personifications of archetypal wisdom which could help us learn from the lives of others through tragic stories,” he observes. As in Orthodox icons that illustrate biblical episodes, his artworks have narrative dimension.
“It isn’t just a portrait, but it’s also a portrait of phenomena that tell a story—putting a visual reality in just one moment, because I can't make a film about it. It’s not a moving image, so everything has to exist at that moment in time.”
Ultimately, what sets Topchy’s artwork apart is his ability to convey the ineffable—to use humble materials and age-old methods to capture the invisible divinity at the core of every person. “I’m not trying to provide a naturalistic depiction,” he says. “I’m looking for an inner light.”