Posts

Yuletide Saints: Saint Weceslas

Image
  Yuletide    Saints Saint Wenceslas The third of my   Christmas season saints is Saint Wenceslas (alternatively Wenceslaus). While his feast day is in September, he is associated with the feast of Saint Steven, today, December 26 because of the Christmas carol.   St Wenceslas, Svätý Vaclav, Duke of Bohemia (posthumously titled King) has in tradition been celebrated for his generosity and kindnesses to the poor. The patron of the Czech Republic, Wenceslas has long been venerated in Central and Eastern Europe. His tradition in the English-speaking world has been informed by the carol Good King Wenceslas published in 1853 by the Anglican cleric John Mason Neale, who overlooks our scene from his framed photograph. The seven-foot tall saint carries a jug of wine and a basket food for the poor, while his page, Podavin, follows with firewood. Wenceslas’s celebration in many of the Eastern and Western churches is acknowledged by his name encircling in tr...
Post a Comment
Read more

Herald Angel

Image
  Herald Angel   We replace most of the paintings in our living room and dining room with Christmas-themed    art for the holidays.  I noticed that there was a spot that lacked a seasonal update so I just painted  Herald Angel.  
Post a Comment
Read more

Yuletide Saints: Saint Lucy

Image
  Yuletide Saints Saint Lucy The second of my Christmas season saint paintings is St Lucy or Santa Lucia. The feast of St Lucy is December 13.   This painting and my St Nicholas painting share a rectangular metallic-toned border, but different in color, tone, and framing. Saint Lucy, or Santa Lucia, was a Sicilian martyr.   In her hagiographic tradition Lucy was punished for rejecting a pagan bridegroom by defilement in a brothel.   In later   legend her resistance to the betrothal was also met by having her eyes gouged out.   She is shown in medieval art and elsewhere blinded and, as shown in the painting, holding her eyes in a cup, but her vision was miraculously restored.   Her association with vision and light is corollary to the presumed derivation of her name from the Latin lux , light.   The coincidence of her feast day, December 13, with the Christmas season, and its proximity to the winter solstice and its association with Nordic pag...
Post a Comment
Read more

Christmas 1978: A Retro-Deco Christmas Card

Image
Christmas 1978 A  Retro-Deco Christmas Card For our 1978 Christmas card I made Xerox prints of a line drawing, then hand watercolor painted them.  I was apparently inspired by the art deco cards and posters from my youth in the 1940s.    
Post a Comment
Read more

Yuletide Saints: St Nicholas

Image
  Yuletide Saints St Nicholas Today, December 6, is the Feast of St Nicholas, the day for children's gifts in some cultures .  He was the first of three saints associated with the Christmas season that I have painted for holiday season display .       Saint Nicholas, Ἅγιος Νικόλαος, was a 4 th century bishop in Myra, Lycia (now Turkey).   The holy man is revered as a generous benefactor of the poor, with attributed deeds and miracles added to his tradition over the centuries.   The three young boys running from a wet-curing barrel in the painting had been slaughtered and left to cure into hams by an evil butcher, but were resurrected by the saint.   We also see the three poor sisters whom Nicholas anonymously provided with sacks of gold for dowries, saving them from an unwed state that would have doomed them to lives of prostitution.   The wine, pomegranates, grapes, and other provisions for the poor are similarly   representative ...
Post a Comment
Read more

"A Christmas Visit" A Homemade Pop-Up Book

Image
  A Homemade Pop-Up Book   Pop-up books are a Christmas tradition.  We have pop-up versions of  The Night Before Christmas,  Dickens'  A Christmas Carol,  and  The 12 Days of Christmas.  To add to our collection I made our own Christmas pop-up,  A Christmas Visit.   We'll page through it. The front cover ...  Front endpapers...     Title Page...     "The Walsh's house is very near," with Rockford Tower and Mount Salem Church popped up beyond our house...   "And through the transom we can peer," looking through a stained glass bordered transom window you can see the globe ceiling lamp in our library...         And now inside the library, "Peace, Joy, and Love are present here"...     "We must come back again next year"...   Back endpapers...   And back cover...   A detailed presentation of  "The Making of A Christmas Visit" is posted in my Google Drive at...
Post a Comment
Read more

"Obida," A Homemade Memoir

Image
Obida A Homemade Memoir         For Christmas 2011, I wrote and printed a homemade book for my brothers and our family, "Obida." The book is a memoir intertwined with reminiscences of Obida, my grandmother and step-grandfather's isolated ocean front cottage in the 1940s & 50s. No plumbing, no electricity, no telephone, one room with a kitchen and sleeping porch. I illustrated it with sketches and a few old photographs. I made about ten copies in screw-post hard cover bindings. You can browse this book and some of my other homemade books on my Google Drive at https://drive.google.com/.../11rj35wgFYPpZvRrT4...  
Post a Comment
Read more