Winter Solstice Edition, 2007

“Seeking Winter’s Heart”

This piece of artwork evolved in an appropriately tapestry-like manner, beginning with an idle evening’s online exploration of Symbolist painting,

leading to a discovery of fantastic Latina Surrealist Remedios Varo, whose work spun a thread back to Gothic and early Renaissance painting.  Those threads wandered into a book I had been reading describing Pisanello’s 15th century painting of a knight named Placidus and his woodland meeting with a great stag.

Somewhere in my pursuit of that wandering thread, an image began to form in my mind of the dark forest all around us here, bare and cold with winter’s drawing in, contrasted with the magic forest in Pisanello’s painting, and with the more familiar magical forests of so many holiday greeting cards, with their peaceful animal gatherings and brilliant candle-lit evergreen trees.  This last thread led back, of course, to Winter Solstice and the returning of the sun’s light into winter’s deepest darkness--to the birth of the divine boy-child from the Mother, embodying the light’s return out of darkness, birth out of seeming death, life renewing itself, hope eternally born anew from the deep womb of winter.

“Seeking Winter’s Heart” is a revising of a Western mythos, taking its many tiny composite parts from the paintings of a time when the Sacred Masculine in the West wore the face of the Christ above all others, while still clinging to remnants of the interwoven wisdom of the Earth and her cycles.  Within the dark cavern womb surrounded by its gate of bare branches the shadowed depths hold many deaths; but the dawning light of midwinter Solstice promises bright new birth.

The process used here I call “digital collage,” in which I take hundreds of partial images from photographs and paintings--sometimes distorting them, sometimes not--combining them in complex layers to create new imagery.  With very few exceptions, the imagery is taken from artworks of the Gothic and early Renaissance periods.  Where photos or later paintings intrude, it is only because I could find no period pieces that served the vision’s need. 

For anyone fond of art trivia, try identifying the works of the artists present here!  Giovanni Bellini, Brueghal the Elder, Domenico de Bartolomeo, Robert Campin, Petrus Christus, Piero di Cosimo, Cranach the Elder, Dosso Dossi, Albrecht Durer, Fra Angelico, Taddeo Gaddi, Giotto di Bondone, Benezzo Gozzoli, Hans Baldung Grien, Limbourg Brothers, Bartolo di Fredi, Filippo Lippi, Jan Leivens, Andrea Mantegna, El Bello Martin, Antonio Pisanello, Domenico Veneziano, Marco Zoppo.   -- Carol Francisco

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