NATIVITY 2002 oil on canvas, 76 x 101 cm (30 x 40 inches)
Most Christmas themed art that I have made over the years is produced with plein air painting and usually features festive street views at night or interior domestic scenes with decorated trees and coloured lighting. A recent painting I made of a small wooden Christmas crib at home, however, got me thinking about a larger and much different Nativity painting that I created back in 2002.
The project was part of a series of attempts to branch out creatively and try some new things. In addition to the creative experimentation the painting also reflected various interests and events in my life at the time.
Rather than simply create a picture in an established traditional style, I wanted to envision the Nativity story in a thoughtful and sacred way without being subversive or reductive. Stylistically, my approach was partly influenced by the visual motifs of artists such Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso (I found inspiration after seeing his allegorical still life works at the Musee Picasso in Paris in February 2002).
The line work was also inspired by the cursive quality of Arabic script and schematic profiles of Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs (I was a casual learner of both these languages at the time) and also simple ASCII computer art (letter characters used as building blocks to create pictures). Dots and curves appear as faces and objects in the scene. The painting was formulated with a handful of small pen drawings and computer generated ‘sketches’ using a mouse. I am naturally left handed but I use the mouse with the right!
Mary and the baby Jesus are placed on a doorstep in the centre of a city scene. I was working at a night shelter with rough sleepers in London at the time, so it seemed instinctive for me to place them in a homeless situation; after all, there was no room at the inn and the Christ child was, in effect, homeless. His tilted face appears to be shouting rather than displaying serenity. This decision was partly due to my intention for the baby Jesus to be associated with the Crucifixion. His body is also placed in cruciform shape.
Another influence that popped up was the Brazilian martial art / dance capoeira. I had taken classes around this time and felt that a group of capoeiristas might represent the lowly shepherds, who are placed on the left. Capoeira originated in Brazil’s African slave population and the people were thus placed at the bottom of the social scale. One of the players is demonstrating a crab handstand (a popular move in capoeira), which resembles a four legged animal like a sheep.
A streetlamp lights the way, like the Star of Bethlehem, and a trail of streamers arching away from the light resembles a shooting star emblem that I recall seeing during a New Year’s visit to Rome back in 1993. Travel and journeys are a major part of the the Christmas story and this is represented with coloured lines on a white background, reminiscent of the London Underground map. The three wise men on the right appear more like fun party revellers in their paper crowns.
The swirling lines of the streamers combined with the steps and vertical lines on the left give a vague outline of a barred spiral galaxy, like the Milky Way, representing Christ as being the centre of cosmological order and that heaven has touched earth through the incarnation.
In a culture where Christmas is so often subjected to commercialism, rebranding, renaming and cancellation, it is uplifting for me to reflect on the beauty and the humble truth contained in the Nativity. Nature and the transcendent are key elements of sacred and edifying art.