24/12 The 12 Days of XMAS - Day 11
ON THE 11th DAY OF XMAS –
11 pipers piping, squeezed into a tiny bathroom, the noise is as intolerable as you might expect from men like these and their pipes.
It’s Xmas Eve! The loveliest night of the consumer West’s whole frantic year, when the tension drains out of the forever fray for a few fleeting blessed hours, and we take our places to adore the newborn thing in the post-work manger.
It’s with this creeping impression of sheer joy that we pull back the tab to reveal today’s Xmas novelty item!
In my teens and 20s, I used to make and draw personalized cards for birthdays, Christmases and other anniversaries. Pals got mad surreal collages packed with in-jokes and weird routines, lovers got fashion illustration style drawings of chic young Pop art women about town, my sister got mournful anthropomorphic mice and my parents got Romantic fantasy ink and watercolour sketches of characters from Arthurian legend, The Lord of the Rings or Celtic mythology.
The Celtic stuff was very much inspired by one of my artistic heroes at the time, the Irish illustrator Jim Fitzpatrick. Fitzpatrick was responsible for the famous red and black high contrast Che Guevara head that’s appeared on a million or more T-shirts, but it was his meticulous pen and ink drawings of Hibernian gods, goddesses and heroes I went wild for.
Here are two of these cards to get you in a skyblue Xmas mood. The first, from 1980, depicts a candle bearing ’wise woman’ up to no good in the greenwood with a spirit unicorn.
GALLERY artefact #041
The second, from 1982, is of her sinister sister in sorcery summoning an eagle familiar.
GALLERY artefact #042
Instead of the more obvious edgy cannibal Santas, undead defecating reindeeroids and parasitic aliens springing out of stockings to attack children on Christmas morning kind of response you might get from lesser creators, we prefer to offer a gently mediaeval, even tranquilized image of seasonal peace.
Incrementally, gloriously, the days are getting lighter again!!! The dark is done and Spring she come!