Here I have a small collection of Christmas Cards made for 2016. Some of them were sold at the on-campus gallery shop where I worked as a student. All of them were 5” by 7” and paired with a butcher paper envelope. All images made with a screen printing process. The ones on colored paper were dyed and the others watercolored post-printing.
I selected elements of Christmas that I’m personally drawn to, and just simply presented them on cards. Without intentionally choosing to do so, I came out with images that were all somewhat forward-looking, drawing from the atmosphere of the season, rather than Christmas Day itself. That really is appropriate for Christmas, I suppose, because the birth of Christ is best celebrated with hope for the future as we look to the cross and the ressurection.
This project was one of those that I felt wouldn’t be that important for me. I took it as a kind of break from my ‘real art’, and so of course it turned out to be a pretty valuable endeavor. My greatest love in art is of words and pictures coming together to imply or carefully lay out a narrative. Illustration and graphic novels are both great examples of this which are both commonly found in book form. Books themselves are attractive to me, the private experiencing of reading, and the humility of a book which sits patiently waiting to be engaged rather than hanging loudly on a wall, are elements I would like my work to carry. Making cards allowed me to create in a handheld size and also has the one-on-one nature that books have but spares me the work of many pages. While I don’t want to shy away from high volumes of work, the last thing I want to do is make a book full of pages, when all I really have worth saying would fit on one card.
I expect to carry on with some more cards in the future, with stronger narrative elements added. I’ll likely do more with the variety of post-printing work, adding maybe paper or stickers etc.
Here are some images from the process of this project.
Gina the Artist 