The little Nativity book is available on Amazon

In spite of the sign that says, "Click to look inside," the image to the left is not a link.  Here is the link to the site on Amazon.
Thanks to the hard work and persistence of my friend Dana Chisholm, the words I put together to tell the Christmas story, along with the pictures I painted, are all  gathered together into a book.  It is amazing and wonderful, and I am looking forward to holding the book in my hands.

I have much more to learn about both writing and illustrating.  Having something actually in print makes me eager to learn all I can, and do more. 

St. Andrew's Abbey

Seth's grave (the one on the right)

Benedictine monks order their lives around prayer and work, in an undulating rhythm throughout the day.    The times of prayer are the main event, and work is inserted between them, in the hope that all work becomes infused with prayer, and becomes part of it.  St. Andrew's Abbey is a Benedictine monastery.

I spent four lovely days there, praying with the monks, and doing my work, which in this case was landscape painting.  It was a landscape painting retreat.  This is a genre that I have very little experience with, and no great love for, but I believe that an illustrator needs to be able to put landscapes into illustrations from time to time, and not be afraid of them.  I signed up for this retreat for several reasons: because I love the abbey, to visit Seth's grave, and in order to spend time painting landscape, the desert with its rocks, hills, and grey-green, often prickly foliage.  

This little painting is 8" x 8".  I sat there at the same time on each of two mornings, for an hour & a half or so each time.  Not long, but even so, the shadow from the cross moved quite a lot while I was there.  Plein air painting is tricky.

The curmudgeonly and usually right on target Stapleton Kearns said once (maybe more than once) that landscapes ought to have some mystery in them.  Maybe there's a little mystery here, but in any case I heartily enjoyed painting it.  The rocks and the foreground in particular made me happy; and being near Seth's gravesite always makes me remember the Life that he put into his life, the mindfulness with which he approached every moment of the day.  It's all actually very Benedictine, though at the time neither of us knew it.  

a modern Nativity

 Bob and I have been reading about life in the slums of Calcutta c. 1970, in a beautiful book called CITY OF JOY by Dominique Lapierre.  There was a movie some years back, taken from a section of the book (a movie I never saw, with Patrick Swayze), which covered only a small portion of this gripping nonfiction story.

As I read the book, I realized that Jesus came to be among the poor, not the comfortable.  When he was born, Bethlehem was full of travelers, and Mary and Joseph were just two more strangers in a crowded town.  The place they were offered for the birth of the child was only available because nobody else wanted it.  They would have empathized with migrant workers, with slum dwellers, with all the unwelcome and uncared-about of the world.

So when I was thinking about Christmas images, I looked for pictures of migrant workers, of poor people in various parts of the world for my references.  Mary and Joseph have a spot in a run down and junk-strewn part of town, but they are glad to have someplace, and in God's love, it is turned into a place of light.  

Abraham greets his heavenly visitors

Sometimes I draw the same story over and over.  This is the fourth version of this one, from Genesis chapter 18. 

Three men come to visit Abraham, who is a semi-nomadic shepherd, living with his wife and his servants in tents. The travelers who come his way are few, and those who arrive are treated with the respect and hospitality we might assume would be accorded kings.  Like the bedouins of the Arabian peninsula, for Abraham the law of hospitality is absolute.  When these men come, he bows before them, asks them to stay to refresh themselves, and has a feast prepared for them. 
It is not clear whether or not he recognizes at first that they are heavenly visitors.  Perhaps this is the welcome he gives to all visitors.  But indeed soon he finds that it is God himself along with two angels he has been entertaining, and they have great news for Abraham and his wife Sarah: next year Sarah will have a son.  Abraham and Sarah have been waiting 25 years for this son, since the first time God gave the promise to Abraham, and now it is finally the right time. 

Postcard from under the sea

Spanish Shawl

The sea is full of mysteries.  I walk on the beach almost every morning, when the sky is grey, and what we see of the sea is grey as well.  Now, during the summer, the shorebirds that inhabit the shoreline have gone somewhere else, and only seagulls and pelicans are consistently around.

But underneath the surface are wonders that are utterly hidden from us.  Occasionally you can see the dorsal fins of dolphins just beyond the waves, as they surface and dive.  But even that is mysterious.
The people who know what is there are the divers who have discovered a way to stay underneath, explore, and even photograph the suboceanic topography and life. 

Some years ago I discovered the glorious underwater photographs of Kawika Chetron .  This is a guy who loved the world of cold water.  He was happiest when he was under the sea, exploring, photographing, finding Life among the creatures that live there, especially along the coast of California.  Recently I found that Kawika, like Seth, had died as he was stretching the boundaries of what he could do, in his continuing effort to be truly alive.  He was a little younger than Seth, and died about a year later, in March of 2007.

This postcard of a little man riding the gorgeously colorful Spanish Shawl nudibranch was inspired by Kawika's photographs and Seth's delight in all things.     

Happy Eighth Birthday Tofu!

Moses and the Burning Bush

I suppose there are a lot of ways of depicting fire in a line drawing.  I looked at many photographs of fire, and of course not only is it evanescent, but it is ever-changing, and has a different appearance depending on the wind, on what is burning, and on circumstances that it would take someone more knowledgeable in physics than I to explain.  My aim was for the fire to be beautiful and flowing.  I looked for some inspiration to Aubrey Beardsley's gorgeous forms in black and white, those Art Nouveau shapes wherein Reality takes a back seat to pure line, but in the end Mood predominates.  I didn't want to make a moody image, but I did want the fire to have that elegance of line that is so much a part of Art Nouveau.