RMW Ramblings

  Handel The Messiah  For Unto Us An important part of the Christmas season for me is The Messiah , the oratorio by  George Fredrick Handel [ Georg Friederich Händel].   In the 1950s I was part of the chorus in performances of The Messiah for several years with the Wilmington's Capella Club at Grace Methodist Church in front of their magnificent stained glass window by Louis Comfort Tiffany.    My painting above, For Unto Us, shows Handel, with an organ pipe rank halo, conducting a small chorus and instrumental ensemble,  on a gallery wrapped canvas with a baroque crest  (see this blog August 03, 2021.) I retained my worn and annotated  Schirmer score and paid for a new replacement for the Club.  A few years later I hand rebound my copy with scrounged materials.  The black cloth was scrap from blackout fabric in our Berkeley lab where we were doing research requiring darkroom conditions.  The framed title was assembled from t...

  This Year's Card 2021 Christmas Eve by the Fire Our card this year looks back to the 1970s...   Our card in 2012 also showed Mary by the fire, that year at our cottage...    

  Cards of Christmas Past Our First Christmas In 2011 Mary and I looked back at our first Christmas together, in 1961. I was a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley.    

  Cards of Christmas Past 2010 19th Century Carolers in New Castle Our 2010 card shows the advantage of computer editing and printing to produce a card with more detail and color than our earlier card crafting approaches.  In the fall, at Oak Knoll Books on the top floor of the New Castle Opera House, I noticed the view of the old New Castle Courthouse, and it suggested the theme for this card. I wanted to have a high angle view.  I made this very preliminary sketch... I couldn't fly over the Courthouse, so I took photographs from ground level to work out the building's proportions.  Then I built a maquette, a little model, and photographed it from several viewpoints with a variety of lighting arrangements. I chose this view for the card... ...made a very pale print of the cleaned up photo, carefully preserving the shadows.   Then I constructed the drawing over it... And began adding color in Photoshop...   I drew the carolers, wagon, trees, the other build...

  Cards of Christmas Past Transition to Computer Prints Around the end of the 20th century I wanted to do Christmas cards with more detail and color than were practical with the various techniques we had been using.  Fine line-work and multiple colors were too tedious in block print or screen print for ephemeral Christmas cards, and our mailing list had become longer.  I switched to giclée printing, the artsy word for inkjet printing.  At the same time, we moved from traditional Christmas themes to nostalgic local and family holiday subjects.  The cards were composed as line drawings or paintings, scanned, and then adjusted and modified in Photoshop.  Here's one of the earliest, from 2000, a bird's eye view of our house and its immediate neighborhood circa 1900... And here's the text... The view was drawn in pencil, then scanned.  The line drawing was converted to blue via Photoshop, and I used Photoshop to add the spot colors.

Cards of Christmas Past Foam Sheet Prints  A few times in the 1990s I printed Christmas cards by a technique I devised that is a variation on linoleum block printing. I glued thin sheets (about 1/8 inch) of closed cell polyolefin foam to blocks of wood and cut out the image outline with an Exacto knife, them peeled away the non-printing areas.  This is much easier than cutting a linoleum block.  The block is then inked and pressed on the paper.   Here's  the 1995 card, an angel printed in iridescent ink on parchment paper... And here is a card with a dove, and the printing block...  In 2019 I used the same technique to print sets of cork coasters as Christmas gifts for my brothers.  The Christmas ball ornaments on the deer head were printed with Q-Tips.  The image references a family tradition where my mother decorated a taxidermy deer head in the living room for the holidays, a tradition continued by my brother Anson and wife Marie who inherited...

  Cards of Christmas Past 1987 Three Kings Here is another screen printed card and a collage painting using the same theme.  Three Kings represents the Magi from the Gospel of Matthew who came "from the east" to worship the "king of the Jews" as kings.  This traditional interpretation has its origin from the prophesy of Isaiah, "Nations will come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn."     In Western Christian tradition there were three kings...   In my painting they are guided by the"star," here a confluence of planets that some claim to be the sign identified by the Wise Men.  I fabricated the frame to fit the spirit of the painting.