RMW Ramblings

  This Year's Christmas Card A 1930s Christmas Gala   For 2022, Christmas card, our 62nd home-crafted Christmas card...    

  Saint Lucy Today, December 13, is the Feast of Saint Lucy, another saint who has become associated with the Christmas season.  Here Lucy is the subject of one of my Christmas themed paintings. 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 pagan solar rebirth festivities has led to Lucy’s seasonal celebration in the Scandi...

  The Christmas Mouse The mouse has emerged from his den under our mantel.  He is at home here.  Can you spot the details?  A list below, but don't peek yet!                              Door mat with  W initial        Porcelain doorknobs like our house     Gift package     Christmas tree     Door window with stained glass matching our library windows              Santa hat     Tail about to be caught in the door     And who's that portrait on his wall?

  Rockford Tower Christmas The Real Rockford Tower This year the real Rockford Tower has Christmas lights.  Here's from my walk this morning.

  Rockford Tower Christmas 1900 For Christmas 2000 I did this Christmas card with a view of our house and neighborhood visualized as in 1900 based on several old photographs.  As printed and mailed, Rockford Tower was not in the picture on the card.  A neighbor wanted a print of the picture but with the tower.  Rockford Tower was still under construction in 1900, so I extended the image slightly on the left and added the tower with a rooftop crane.  I made up this detail without searching for actual construction photos from that time. 

  Rockford Tower Christmas Highlands Christmas Between the Wars This Christmas card image is referenced from part of a 1930s aerial photograph I found researching at the Hagley Museum Library.  The tower and Mount Salem Church dominate the scene, but our house and the large structure next to it, torn down in the 1940s to just the lower level that is now our garage, are the white structures in the lower left.  Watercolor with some digital manipulation.

  Saint Nicholas December 6 was the feast of Saint Nicholas.  Nicholas was the historic source of the Santa Claus tradition and is strongly associated with the Christmas season.  He is one of three Yuletide Saints that I have painted, heavy with symbolism. 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   ...