Christmas Morning

The conclusion of Advent is Christmas - of course. After the four Sundays of Advent, with more and more light coming into the world and my paintings I just had to paint Christmas as well. Because I had used my mothers old missal as the source of information for the Gospel readings of Advent, I turned to that book again. I found that sixty years ago there were Gospel readings for Christmas night, dawn and day. The readings for night and dawn follow each other, but the Gospel for Christmas day is very different from the stories we have been reading before and is not easy to translate to a landscape painting. 

I chose to paint a landscape inspired by the Gospel reading of Christmas dawn. 
Luke 2, 15 -16; "And it came to pass, as the angels were gone away from them into heaven, the shepherds said one to another, Let us now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass, which the Lord hath made known unto us. And they came with haste, and found Mary, and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger." (source of the English text is www.kingjamesbibleonline.org)

As this scene is at dawn, there is much more light. The Star is supposed to be in the sky until Epiphany and shines brightly now. On the right side of the road are fields like those where the shepherds spent the night. They have left for Bethlehem, but the remains of their fires can still be found. On the left side of the road is a town like Bethlehem could have been and some fields that might be used for agriculture. Of course this landscape is imaginary, like the ones I painted for the four Sundays of Advent.
The sky still has some of the colour of the night, so I used indigo again, but the landscape is well lit and has much more colour.

This project was really nice to work on. Indigo is a great colour to work with as it is usable for all tonalities in a landscape painting. Adding more and more colour was also coming naturally as I have painted all five paintings in order within a few weeks time.

More information about my Advent project can be found at my website www.jannekesatelier.webs.com