I am Natalja Smirnova from Riga, Latvia. For the past thirteen years I have lived in Ireland.

I specialise in the Byzantine Russian painting tradition. After studying at the Russian Icon Painting School in Samara, Russia, I received my certificate as a master icon painter. My teacher, Elena Aleksandrovna Stazhuk, is also a master icon painter with more than twenty years' experience. She founded the School, which hosts students from across the world. A requirement of the course is that we study iconology (the theory of iconography) with lecturers from the Samara Theological Seminary.

My art practice extends to calligraphy. While studying at the Russian Historical School of Calligraphy, Gorlitsa, I studied gothic writing, Glagolitic scripts and ligatures, and I mastered the Church Slavonic alphabet. My expertise in calligraphy is incorporated into my iconography. All my icons are signed on the reverse side; this is because the icon belongs to God and the divine tradition from which it originates.

I came to icon-painting after the devastating loss of my child a few years ago. Since I started studying iconography it has been a bright time in my life; that's when I come to God.

It takes me several months to paint an icon, and I do it with great love. When I work, I am in a sort of double dimension where time and space are transcended. For me, the sacred image, and its content, change reality.

All my icons are in my own private collection. At the moment, I am working on Icon of Jesus Christ, "Not Made by Hand," which I will gift to my town church.

In my works, I always use just the best quality materials, such as 23 carat gold, 24 carat gold leaf and the finest natural earth and mineral pigments. Some of my materials are ordered from the Russian Icon Painting School. I make others myself from stones, which my sons help me to find when we travel. The paint is prepared using egg yolk that I collect from my friends' chickens. The techniques that I use are traditional and have been handed down over hundreds of years. My icons are finished with linseed oil, which makes the colour brighter and the crystal pigments  shine from within. In my icons I adhere to the iconographic canons, passed down by famous icon painters like Andrey Rublev and Dionysius.

Creating icons has been a healing experience, especially as I dreamed of being an iconographer as a child.