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Christmas Card 2014

12/25/2014

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This has been a hard year, but through it all, there were so many people who were amazingly kind and helpful to me and to my family. I couldn't draw all of them in here, but I hope they know what a difference they've made. This holiday season is all the happier for me, because of you. Thanks everyone and happy holidays to all of you!
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Happy New Year!

1/2/2013

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Making a Christmas card just wasn't in the cards for me this year. So I made a New Year's card instead. Happy 2013 to all!
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And last but not least (for now) - a Christmas card from 2014!
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Flight Attendant/Bob Dylan/Christmas comics!

12/25/2012

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I'm out of Christmas cards. After 2005 I started sending photographs. But I found this. It isn't exactly a Christmas card, but a comics story (written about ten years ago) that ends with a Christmas wish. Merry Christmas to flight attendants everywhere... and to the rest of you, too.
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And now a giant leap to the next Christmassy card in 2013.
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Christmas cards: 2004 & 2005

12/24/2012

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Here are two cards: one in my good old mosaic-sky style...
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... and this one's a spin-off from my 2005 painting show "The Brothers: Portraits of the Rock Central Family Band."
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Last one is coming up tomorrow... and it's not what you'd expect!
Follow along to the next post, which isn't exactly a Christmas card, but more of a Christmas comic strip.
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Christmas card: 2003

12/23/2012

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From a photo of my brother in about 1978. When I painted this, I thought: "At last, a painting with broad appeal. Any Canadian parent would be able to relate to this image... hopefully I'll be able to SELL IT!" Then I showed it to my mom and she liked it so much that I had to give it to her. Ah well, it's better to be a starving artist with a happy mother... right? Anyway, at least I was able to use it for a Christmas card.
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And now we have Christmas cards from 2004 and 2005 coming up next.
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Christmas card: 2002

12/22/2012

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The above excerpt from a mini-comic called "The Floor" tells the story of how my family house was sold. 2002 was spent packing up thirty years of stuff. For my Christmas card, I thought I'd paint a picture of the house. It had been a gathering spot for friends, relatives and all sorts of local folks, for many years. It was a place people remembered.

I remember coming home from a year away, aged seventeen, and discovering that the whole house (previously a greyish-brownish kinda colour) had been painted emerald green. That was startling, but I got used to it.

After it was sold, it was hard to get used to not having it there. I remember one time diverting a drive with a friend who had to make a bathroom stop, saying, "we can just stop at the house." We were almost there before I remembered we didn't live there anymore.

Anyway, in the Christmas of 2002, I had a photograph of the house that had been taken in the daytime, but I thought it would look more wintery and Christmas-y to paint it at night. So I made the sky and the house dark. Then I made a whole bunch of Christmas cards and gave them to all sorts of people. At last I gave a card to a friend of mine on a visit to London. She was an objective observer who looked at it with the critical eye of a friend and an artist. And right away she pronounced that it was the saddest painting she'd seen for a long time.

As soon as she said it I knew it was true. There I had been trying to commemorate the happy home of my youth, but what I'd painted was a cold, dark, empty building. It didn't look welcoming... it looked deserted. But maybe that portrait showed the real situation more accurately than what I'd had in mind.

Ten years later, my three-year-old son refers to this house of legend as "the frog house" because it was green. That's the legacy... for now!
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Contine on to the next Christmas card from 2003...
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Christmas card: 2001

12/21/2012

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What I like about this Christmas card are all the background images of pictures that were on the walls of my apartment. These include: a picture of my long-haired brother John; my tennis-playing ex-boyfriend executing a wicked serve; my mysterious Hanseatic ship; toque-wearing current boyfriend's pic; painting of a wooden Swiss cow; map of the prairie provinces illustrating the route of an arctic voyage; a model ship acquired in Paris; Bob Dylan show poster; painting of my brother Matt; and a big poster of a Feininger painting. (When I lived in that apartment, a visitor told me my place was "media-hot" - a term I'd never heard before. Yes, I guess that was the case.)
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And now for the Christmas card from 2002.
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Christmas card: 2000

12/20/2012

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2000's Christmas card was an image from an oil painting I'd painted earlier that year. It's my dad, Christmas carolling a long time before. You can't go wrong with a hat like that.
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2001's Christmas card is coming up next - keep going!
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Christmas card: 1999

12/19/2012

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Well, this one's kind of a weird one, but here's the story. While I was at art school, I was given the following assignment: take some kind of artwork/logo/image and put it in a new context so it has a new meaning. To make a long story short, I found this image (think it was a medieval woodcut) of the meeting of Mary & Elizabeth. (From the Bible. You know, when they told each other the good news that Jesus & John the Baptist were on the way.) So these happy cousins embraced (I think they were cousins, am I right?). I put those dark archways over them (reminds me of Richard Thompson's "At the dark end of the street" - song about some illicit lovers) and hoped it would now look like a picture of two medieval lady lovers hiding in the shadows.

I can't remember how the assignment turned out (although I do remember doing the artwork while working on the midnight shift at the Trinity College Library - which is exactly why I liked working those mostly-dead shifts), but what happened later was that I made a bunch of copies of the image on different coloured papers and used them for this year's Christmas card. The other reason I made copies of the image was to use it for a gift for my mom. At that time, we were both trying to wean ourselves off coffee (good luck... 14 years later!!!!!). So I thought of concocting a half-&-half coffee mix using regular coffee and decaffeinated beans. I put these mixtures into bags and labelled them with these pictures, dubbing it the "Mary & Elizabeth blend" (my mom & I each have another name... hers is Mary & mine is Elizabeth). It wasn't long before the bags were empty we were both back to the buzz of the real stuff.

Follow along to see the 2000 Christmas card - one of my favourites!
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Christmas card: 1997

12/18/2012

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This year's Christmas card was inspired by a woodcut by Lyonel Feininger. So, a word about him.

When I was about seventeen, I saw a slide of a Feininger painting in an art class, and for some reason it completely knocked my socks off. This was the painting:
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Well, then, for the next ten years or so, I became obsessed with Feininger's architecturally-inspired landscape paintings. One of my own earliest paintings was an attempt to copy his work.
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I even wrote about Feininger in my comics. Here is a page from The Drawing Book that talks about people who changed their names (a subject much on my mind in about 2000).
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And here is a bit from 2003's "Planet Waves", published in Adhouse Books' amazing "Project: Telstar".
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But now here's the funny part. In 2006 there was a big art show called "Masters of American Comics" which included Feininger as one of the, well, masters of American comics. I should mention that he drew comics, like these ones about the "Kin-der-Kids." But I didn't really think they were a big deal, or that anyone else much cared. (I'd never met anyone in Canada who'd even heard of Feininger, all those times I raved about his paintings.) Well, so it turns out he's a famous comics guy, too. Who knew! Meanwhile, those North Sea landscapes are still the paintings I like better than any others. Merry Christmas.
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The next Christmas card is from 1999... keep on going!
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    sam hester

    I am a graphic recorder based in Calgary. I like local stories. I write comics when I have free time. And I leave eraser shavings everywhere I go.

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    my website

    www.the23rdstory.com started as a blog and now includes some information about my graphic recording practice as well.

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