ABOUT

Ikranrin (IJ) Makan is a Catholic iconographer based in Ottawa, Canada. He paints in oil on canvas and wood-panel for private devotion and religious communities.

Makan holds a Master's degree in Philosophy and a Bachelor's degree in Philosophy, Biblical Studies, and Theology. A convert to the Catholic faith, he was drawn to the Church in large part by icons themselves. He saw in them something rare: philosophy, theology, and art working together as one. He began painting icons in 2024, and continues alongside it to reading and writing philosophy & theology, treating the three disciplines as a single vocation. 

Before iconography, Makan spent over five years leading product and brand design for technology startups. Eventually, the work left him unsettled. Everything he created existed only on screens. Nothing occupied the same physical space as the hands and mind that made it. He wanted work where mind, craft, and object existed together in the same reality. The icon was exactly that.

Makan is mainly self-taught. He learned iconography by immersing himself in the tradition: its history, theology, and techniques from the early Church to the present. He works within the tradition that gives icons their power: The hieratic gestures and the symbolic structures. These are ways of depicting a reality that goes beyond what words can say.

His icons are steeped in the reality that the Logos took on flesh, and the truth that man is the icon of God. For him, icons are the threshold between the visible and the invisible.

• MA. in Philosophy (SMU). Awarded 'Marshall Award for Excellence in a Master’s Philosophy Dissertation'.

• BA. in Philosophy, Biblical Studies & Theology