Art Letter 8: Tradition Tickling
Greetings elves and tinseltoes!
It’s the holiday season. I know, I know, don’t beat the dead reindeer. But it is, and I’d like to make it more interesting for all of us*. The season gets swallowed in two big gulps by the shopping monster & the traveling ogre, and we all end up wondering where the magic went. Looking at our cell phones after eating too many cookies is not a tradition, so let’s make some new ones.
For many years in NYC I couldn’t fly home for the holidays. About 10 years ago I lived in a big unheated loft that used to be a feather factory. My only company was Pickle Pie, a friend’s dog. I strung up a big gold curtain near the Christmas tree and made a nest of blankets beneath. Pickle Pie and I fell asleep shivering, listening to the Nutcracker in the very first Christmas Eve fort. No matter where I am the fort is constructed, sometimes a mere tablecloth over the bed, sometimes ten bedsheets with complex rigging, lights and ornaments. The tradition gets more crowded every year - me, my brother, sister, C, Sunny and now Cosimo!
And now, velvety bright giclée prints! It seems like having prints made would be the simplest task in the world, but in actuality it involves selling an organ, sweet-talking an Eeyore, climbing the Space Needle with a chipmunk in your teeth, and running backwards while singing Ukranian folk songs. But it’s done! I cut the circular paper mat myself, and tuck them into a classy little black frame for a portal to run into when you need an imagination station.
All of the first batch of National Parks paintings are available as giclée prints, as well as some of my other moody favorites, like the ol’ Ladder to the Moon, inspired by this live story.
In other eyes, I stumbled upon these skin-crawlingly creepy Victorian Christmas cards. It’s been around the internet block, but this was the first I’d seen of them. When I searched why dead birds were featured on these romantic rectangles, a stack of hypothesis popped up. The most historically backed seemed to be an old good luck ritual that involved killing a wren or robin in December. Therefore, sending an image of a wee feathered corpse meant good fortune for the New Year. These little birdies flying o’er are intended to remind us just how fleeing our lives do flit.
*When I write ‘all of us’, I do really mean all of us. I was raised in a waspy-baby-jesus-angel-on-the-christmas-tree household, so I write about that. I would love to include Chanukah, Kwanzaa, Ramadan, et alia, but I would be speaking like a buffoon to appropriate cultures which I only know of superficially. Please feel free to enlighten me! And if your not in the headspace to write, then maybe you’d like to read this lovely prose about unchopping a tree by one of my favorites, W.S. Merwin.
May your solstice be high with hope and all your cookies have real butter.
xo, Khara