Christmas Card 2021

The other day my father asked me if it was time for me to start making this year's Christmas card.  I told him I didn't expect to be doing one, and gave him a whole bunch of reasons.  To start, I usually put them on something like card stock, but I don't have any of that now, what I had was in my apartment and almost everything that was there ended up in storage, and no stores are left in the area that sell art papers.  The catalogs I had patronized are also all out of business.  Next, I usually got my ideas for cards by looking through art books, which I had on my shelves.  Once again, all are currently in storage.  Cards always made use of color, and my watercolors were at home, so again, now in storage. (there are catalogs that sell those, but no point in spending the thousands it would take to rebuild that with no idea what I'd be doing) And in recent years, I have produced short editions of the cards, as most of the people who had been on my list for holiday cards are no longer sending them, and I'm not going to make a lot of cards for people who can't bother to even buy them.

But then I thought about it some more.  The heavy weight print paper I have in limited supply would probably make a decent card, and I have enough for the few people who would get one.  I do have a suitable piece of wood ready to go.  I don't have my good tools, but the student tools I have were suitable for a woodcut this year, so a card is something I could carve.  I don't have color, but I do have black ink and ink wash, which means I could adapt work from a printmaker who also worked in black and white, like an etcher or a lithographer, or even a woodcutter.  And I don't have my library of art books, but I do have this computer and access to the internet, so if I have an artist in mind, I can find images.  And at the moment I have no job or time commitments like grading.  So maybe I can do a holiday card.  

Been doing weekly art lessons with my niece the past year, and that may have given me an idea. In her painting, she tends to like outlining every shape with a heavy black line, which reminded me of a famous artist whose name I could not remember.  Couldn't find it through common internet searches either, but I was sure that I had shown examples to my students, mostly because of that heavy black line. All my slide lists are saved as documents on a emails I sent to myself (so I could easily print them out at school) and those I can still access, and so I found the name. Everything is on the internet if you know where to look or what to ask.  And while only two friends have sent me holiday cards in recent years, my brain surgery has resulted in more communication than usual, so if I wanted to send more, I have some names and addresses of people who might have earned a card.  And thanks to years of teaching and grades due in late December, people are used to my cards arriving late.  So maybe I can do something.  I'll think about it.