Recent Star Wars sketches
Here are some ink and watercolor sketches that I did just before Christmas. Star Wars!
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| Ewok X-Wing Pilot. Just because they don't have advanced technology doesn't mean they couldn't handle it. |
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| Snowtrooper and an AT-AT (Imperial Walker) from THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK |
Friday, December 25, 2015
dvent Calendar Day 25: Baby Jesus
Over the next month, I'll be offering thoughts on the Nativity set model, a large papercraft crèche that you can find and download here:
Thursday, December 24, 2015
Advent Calendar Day 24: La Befana
Over the next month, I'll be offering thoughts on the Nativity set model, a large papercraft crèche that you can find and download here:
https://gumroad.com/l/ThkR
Advent Calendar Day 24: La Befana
Advent Calendar Day 24: La Befana
La Befana is the Italian gift-giver, just like we get Santa Claus, the Spanish get the Three Kings, and the Austrians get Baby Jesus (he doesn’t come down the chimney; I checked). Her original story is heartbreakingly sad, and its traditional alternative is kind of lackluster, so I’m offering a variation that marries the two.
The Three Kings, on their way to see baby Jesus, ask for shelter for the night at a rural house. In it, La Befana (whose name derives from a mispronunciation of “Epiphany” and who probably has OCD) is busy cleaning, as she always does. Learning that they’re taking gifts to a baby, she volunteers to go, too; her kids are grown and she’s itching to get rid of their old toys. Following the kings, she gives Jesus the toys, delighting him, and in thanks he bestows upon her immortality and a magic hamper perpetually full of toys so that she can bring other children as much joy as she did him. She also uses her broom to tidy up the manger for Mary. You could eat off that floor.
La Befana now rides her broom from house to house, leaving toys for youngsters and flying up the chimney.
Wednesday, December 23, 2015
Advent Calendar Day 23: Roman Soldier
Over the next month, I'll be offering thoughts on the Nativity set model, a large papercraft crèche that you can find and download here:
https://gumroad.com/l/ThkR
Advent Calendar Day 23: Roman Soldier
Advent Calendar Day 23: Roman Soldier
There are plenty of traditional nativity characters whose inclusion is meant to foreshadow something in either Jesus’s adult life, including having a burial shroud as his swaddling and an encounter with the thieves with whom he’ll later be crucified. To my knowledge, though, there isn’t a traditional Roman soldier character (though they do often turn up in more sprawling nativity sets with other Bethlehem denizens and are a staple of church walk-through-Bethlehem setups).
The soldier here isn’t, like you see in the walk-throughs, a fancy Roman in the lorica segmentata armor of popular imagination. He’s a rural reserve, stuck in Bethlehem, a deputy constable in a podunk hamlet. So his armor is the minimum a provincial soldier might be issued while still being identifiable as a Roman soldier.
Monday, December 21, 2015
Advent Calendar Day 22: The Tempter
Over the next month, I'll be offering thoughts on the Nativity set model, a large papercraft crèche that you can find and download here:
Advent Calendar Day 22: The Tempter
The Eastern Orthodox Church has its own nativity traditions,
and one of them is depicting an old shepherd dressed in animal skins. Byzantine art pretty much always shows
sad-sack Joseph sitting despondent and pouty off in a corner (just google
search “Byzantine Nativity Art” and take in dozens of Josephs who make Keanu
Reeves look positively jubilant by contrast).
Nature, and with it any semblance of Joseph’s paternal/husbandly
authority, has been vanquished by a sexless conception, and Joseph, his world
upended, doesn’t take it well.
Though there are shepherds, including old hide-wearing ones,
in early nativity icons, one in particular becomes a narrative figure by the
early 1300s: The Tempter, who stands next to Joseph, stoking Joseph’s doubt
about Mary’s virginity. This is either a
man doing the devil’s work (though some early versions treat him instead as a
man doing the Lord’s work, reminding Joseph of ancient words of Isaiah that
Christians would take as prophecy regarding a virgin birth) or the devil
himself in disguise.
By the mid-1300s, you see James, Joseph’s son, interceding,
attempting to ward this tempter (this is also, I believe, the first usage of
James in Nativity art) to save his father from doubt, or maybe to just give the
really, really sad guy a little space.
Advent Calendar Day 21: The Innkeepers
Over the next month, I'll be offering thoughts on the Nativity set
model, a large papercraft crèche that you can find and download here:
Advent Calendar Day 21: The Innkeepers
You’ve probably seen a Christmas pageant or cartoon or book
or something where Joseph, leading Mary atop a donkey, knocks on the door of
the inn (Bethlehem’s population was small enough that just one inn is probable)
and is told by the innkeeper (sometimes sternly, sometimes regretfully) that
there’s no room.
The Gospel of Luke states that there was “no room in the
inn,” and from this line we’ve extrapolated an innkeeper to convey that bit of
exposition.
I don’t know when the innkeeper first appeared, but I’d
expect it was in the middle ages, once crèche scenes led to
dramatizations. Sometimes the innkeeper
is depicted as a married pair, with the wife a hard-hearted harpy impatient at
yet another traveler, or even a cutthroat capitalist granting the limited rooms
at a premium beyond the financial means of the Holy Family, with the husband
secretly offering them room in the stable out of pity over the notion of a
pregnant woman without a roof. There’s a
definite message in this, the old “if you let your wife have the power in your
marriage then you’ll be dragged along in decisions to which you have a moral
objection and become complicit” warning, which is why I suspect we don’t see a
gender reversal of this interpretation; there isn’t really a cautionary
narrative tradition associated with the husband taking the reins with business
decisions.
It’s not unusual for characters to spring up to fill in the
missing pieces in stories about important moments in religious stories (as
we’ve seen with previous entries), but what’s unusual about the innkeeper(s) is
that, despite being textually absent from the gospels, they’re yoked with
mainstream theological interpretation, which is surprising to me.
The standard reflection on them is this: the innkeepers, who
are either awash in the prosperity of their business or so frazzled by the
bustle as to be indifferent DO permit the Holy Family lodging (this operates on
an assumption, likely born of that first narrative inclusion, that the
innkeeper has proprietorship of the stable), but in the little space that is
left, not that which would inconvenience them.
This is used as a metaphor for religious folks who profess sincerity of
faith but who only give their time/attention to God when all other earthly
matters have been attended. God, in this
metaphor, is relegated to the stable of the person’s life.
There’s a current school of thought that the “inn” isn’t an
inn at all, but a mistranslation of guest room, suggesting that it was Joseph’s
relatives that turned them away, itself an interpretation rife with meaning
(Joseph’s relatives, judging Mary to be an unwed mother, refused her entry, can
be easily read as a refutation of those whom would deem to judge others based
on their own assumptions of legality or morality). I think this is unlikely, though, as there’s
no context in the verse to suggest anything other than that which is stated:
there was no room. The relative idea
puts a lot of emphasis on “for them”, and in doing so likely misses the point.
If the guest room translation is valid, it probably refers to one that functioned much as an inn would have: a community guest room in lieu of an inn, in which case the innkeepers remain its administrators even if their title is no longer the same.
I don’t like any of these interpretations, partially because
I like to think the best of people, and partially because of personal
experience. When Liz and I were first
married, we managed a hotel in Mississippi, on the river across from
Louisiana. When Katrina hit, we were,
thankfully, spared all but the most minor cosmetic damage, but (as many of you
will remember) our neighbors across the river weren’t so lucky. With more people needing a place to stay than
there were places for them, we ended up housing much more than our commercial
capacity, with guests bringing families and extended families, packing into
every corner of the building.
Liz did her best to accommodate as many as we could, and I
like to think that the innkeepers in the story (which I’ve depicted as a
married pair, absent those aforementioned associations with which the wife is
sometimes saddled) made no less of an effort, and that the stable was a
creative way to extend their hospitality well beyond their means.
Sunday, December 20, 2015
Advent Calendar Day 20: The Caganer
Over the next month, I'll be offering thoughts on the Nativity set
model, a large papercraft crèche that you can find and download here:
Advent Calendar Day 20: The Caganer
The caganer is a staple of Catalonian Nativity scenes, which,
traditionally, have a lot of specific characters, including a weaver spinning
thread and a woman washing clothes. The
caganer, however, isn’t undertaking a professional task like the others; he’s
hidden off to the side, pooping.
The figure, which likely began appearing in Nativity scenes
in the late 1600s, seems to me a commentary on the pastoral motif that had become
very popular during the baroque period.
City folks, artists, and the nobility were enamored with the idea of a
simple country life, but their romantic depictions rarely reflected its
struggling, dirty reality. The caganer
could easily be seen as a representation of the “real” within the idealized,
tethering the first Christmas to reality in a way that the contrived and
emotionally manipulative Nativity arrangements were failing to do.
There is a wonderful modern narrative that not only sweetens
(Christmasises?) the idea of the caganer but which ties him to another poop-centric
Catalonian Christmas tradition, the Tio’ de Nadal, a smiling log that poops
candy on Christmas morning. As there is
no earthly way to improve upon this juxtaposition of these two regionally and
thematically linked characters, I’ll simply link to it. It’s a short, brilliant read.