RMW Ramblings

  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...

  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.  

  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...

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.    

  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 ...

  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...

  Choir of Angels Traditionally, paintings and sculpture have depicted angels with bird-like wings emerging from their shoulder blades, lacking the torsral musculature that would be necessary for actual flight.  This representation is symbolic, not realistic. Many of my Christmas paintings and Christmas cards have depicted angels.  I have used a range of angelic representations, frequently departing from the traditional and moving on in symbolism. A traditional representation is Gabriel in this painting Virgin Annunciate .  The Holy Spirit is represented by a dove hovering between Gabriel's wings.     Also in a traditional representation, is the angel from my painting Annuciato ut Pastores dominating the scene.       In my painting For Unto Us celebrating George Frideric Handel's oratorio, Messiah, s mall heavenly  angels join the terrestrial musicians to frame the composer/conductor.    The wings on this angel from a...

  Christmas 2024 Looking Back to a '50s Christmas Here's our 64th home designed Christmas card: And here is our seasonal display in our library of framed 8 x 10 prints of most of the card images from the last few decades:

  A Christmas "Tree" My library ladder is seeing temporary duty substituting for a Christmas tree. A color changing Christmas tree light tops a grouping of books on the top. The glass hanging ornaments are mostly salvaged light fixture pendalogues.  On the top step is a small retablo style creche, possibly from Mexico