the people on Icons look “weird”…
The way people are depicted in icons is, on the one hand, visibly decipherable as being completely human and like us. Yet on the other hand, iconographic, artistic flair portrays these dead-but-not-dead people in an abstracted, stylized way that proclaims in a poem for the eye that these people are in heaven. For an artist to paint a portrait of someone who is dead-but-not-dead presents a formidable challenge. The answer is revealed as being that “weird” look expressed in Orthodox iconography. –
The Beautiful Path 