Art-lover, largely agree with you except one:
Iconography excludes Creativity in its full sense at a time when PAINTING based on creativity and although considered to be part of the iconography of paintings - many of them disagree.
Use of paints and brushes is not an argument for the reunification of icon painting and painting.
Paints and brushes used by painters and many other remesliniki, but it does not give reason to call them artists.
Icon painters do not have freedom within the canon, but rather the responsibility in this framework.
The Icon is the one-way through the same prayer.
Being a sacred object, the icon is devoid of any elements of freedom not only in its content, but also in the language of artistic forms and pictorial technique.
Great importance and Technology, and spiritual expression of icons, and a great responsibility falls on the icon painter, who must rise to the level of a theologian and a custodian of church tradition.
The icon painter - this is not an artist (in a worldly sense of the word), no "I", "my" here originally should not be. There is only to serve God and people. The challenge - to become a spiritual man, learn to write in prayer and harmony, free from such internal problems: "competition", "plagiarism", "borrowing" and so on ...
http://www.ukoha.ru