Christmas is Coming

 

Now that we are in December, I have to give this Christmas thing some thinking.  That's because just about every year I produce a holiday themed woodcut card, borrowing from a famous color artwork, and though the card is small, it does take time to select my starting artwork and to do the rest.  Not helping is that my vast collection of art related books is in storage still, so I have to rely on my memory for ideas, and then at least I can go to the internet to find any image I need, as long as I can remember it in the first place.  Luckily my memory still seems pretty good, but if it wasn't, I wouldn't know it anyway.

In any case, I did choose a work, a painting I haven't done before, by an artist I do know well, and in fact I have shown this work to classes before, but that story I will save for another time.  I cut a piece of birch of a fitting size, and decided to do it after I finished the 3rd Robert Johnson block.  Then I ran into a little problem called Covid.  I was coughing and sneezing up a storm, but to me it seemed like a mid-winter cold, yet at my mother's insistence, I took a home test, and it said I was positive.  Took another test, same result. Okay, get it checked out.  Went out to a doctor's office/urgent care center, took another test, and still positive.  I don't think this means I have the disease, because this just means I have been exposed to the virus, and considering how much is going around, it would be a miracle if I wasn't.  I have never had a fever, or any of the other main symptoms, and obviously I am not in a hospital, since I have computer access right now.  I do know I have a cold, and that seems to be getting better.  But I do have to spend a few days at home relatively isolated until I see where this goes.  

However this is a good time to do so, as this is a small block to work on, one that fits my table space better, and my choice of music for this is only available on my home computers. When working on this annual project, I like to listen to Christmas music, which may be because I don't listen to it the rest of the year.  For that reason, I didn't make copies of that music to bring to the Studio, so like my art books, they are also in storage.  Luckily, almost any music I can name can be found on the internet, so if I can remember it, I can find it.  However I don't have internet access in the Studio, so being home for now isn't a bad thing.  For example, one of the things I listen to while working on my card is a compilation of Christmas themed blues songs, which it seems a lot of artists have done over the years.  I don't have access to that disc at the moment.  But I can pull up a themed playlist of videos on YouTube, and so I can listen to Charles Brown, Sonny Boy Williamson, John Lee Hooker, B.B. King, Lowell Fulson, and many others, sing about Santa and others.  That's what I listened to tonight as I drew with pencil on a piece of wood.

As far as the card itself, tradition is that I don't show it here until Christmas Day, and that still goes.  All I will say for now is that it is based on a famous painting from 1901, and I will be turning it into a woodcut colored with watercolor.    As far as who is helping with this image, you'll have to wait a few weeks for that.