Christmas Cards

When I first moved to the US from the UK, back in 1988 (the Dukakis election), I got a job at an architect’s office in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I was fascinated by the new buildings I was seeing — postmodernism was in full, if somewhat uneven, force. But that experience drew me to, well, draw.

A train trip to Mystic, Connecticut, to visit my mother’s cousin for Thanksgiving that year had me drawing trees from the train — of necessity bare, spare, and plentiful. By the time the train pulled in to South Station I had dozens of small drawings, done in pen and black ink (pretty sure it was a Rapidograph, temperamental bitches that need to be held upright, not a comfortable way to draw, but hey, I was working in an architect’s office, and they had pen cleaning equipment galore; this was before anyone other than a couple of geeks was doing architectural drawings digitally).

This started me on a yearly Christmas card-making journey. Thirty-seven years later, I’m still making my own cards. (The xmas card list has dwindled significantly; I think I’ve only made 35 this year and I still have about six left.) They have been drawn, silk screened, painted, calligraphed, collaged, gelatin-monoprinted, accordion-folded — whatever I was into that year. So in a way this is a good catalog of my artistic journey over decades.

I figured out early on to keep copies of them. The fact that my mother handed me ones I’d sent to her and dad over the years filled out some of the gaps. This isn’t the full set but close…