Significant Yuletidings, Y’all!
Celebrate the Season with some Relevant Reading
Welcome to your December edition of Signified 🎄
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Announcing the December exhibition at : six : shot : gallery
Simon Goss on ‘Six Conkers’:
My first paintings of conkers began in the Autumn of 2022, prompted by my regular walk to work from my house (I work from home, but go out of the front door, walk a mile around the block, and go in to my office door around the side of the house — I’ve been doing it for two years now). There’s something appealing about the size and finish of a conker that has me picking them up almost involuntarily, and it occurred to me…
continue reading and see the art at : six : shot : gallery
🎄 Signifier’s Suitably Seasonal Stories 🎄
Mother & Child in Devotional Art
Some early depictions of the Madonna and Child were directly modelled on the established and familiar icons of Isis with Horus. Even the tendency in medieval devotional art to show the Christ child as a miniature adult can be traced back to representations of the infant Horus as, proportionally, mature. This seems to become a more obvious affectation as Christian art became ostensibly more sophisticated and sought to present the Holy Family as different to average church-goers…
More Than a Christmas Card
The Virgin Eleousa of Vladimir was painted in the early 1100s and it’s one of the most famous, and most copied, Christian icons depicting the subject of the Holy Mother and Child. It originated in Constantinople, then the capital of the Byzantine Empire. In the 1130s it was gifted by the Church to Yuri Dolgorukiy, a Grand Prince of Russia. It was displayed in the city of Vladimir from 1155 until 1395 when it was moved to Moscow...
A Double Virgin of the Rocks!
Leonardo da Vinci, renaissance genius, scientist, artist, l’huomo universale — the universal man, who was interested in everything about the natural world, completed very few paintings in his lifetime. The Virgin of the Rocks is one — in fact, he made two versions of this painting. The Louvre owns the earlier version, the National Gallery London owns the latter…
Yuletide Greetings Across the Centuries
Hunters in the Snow is an icon of Winter in the Northern Hemisphere, and rightly so. Skillful in its composition and use of colour, it seems a bridge between the medieval ‘book-of-hours’ and our modern ‘graphic-novel’ sensibilities. It’s considered the first large winter landscape of European art, often reproduced as a popular print — especially at this time of year, as a Christmas card…
What Does this Brueghel Painting Really Mean?
Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s Fight between Carnival and Lent is considered by many art historians to be a genre scene representing the symbolic clash between the profane and the religious. This interpretation is based not only on the two figures on makeshift chariots in the foreground, but also on a certain Flemish pictorial tradition. The other elements of the painting are all-too-often dismissed as merely decorative, intended to place the event... ‘
Seasonal Sentimentality
Several online searches for the “most popular Christmas image” come up with different selections, depending on which engine and what criteria are being employed to zone in. Repeat exactly the same search terms and get different results. Clearly, this is unresolved and up for debate. Do we mean the image most often printed on Christmas-related tat such as biscuit tins and cracker boxes? The most often reproduced on Christmas cards?
Deep in the Wood — Trees as Art
Many cultures around the world have adopted natural trees as shrines. The tradition of tying coloured ribbons to their branches dates back to pagan times, but persists in many religions today. The Bodhi prayer trees represent the sacred fig that the Buddha was sitting beneath when he achieved enlightenment. Some of the indigenous peoples of the Americas tie ritually prepared cloths to trees in their sacred places…
NOTICE
From New Year 2025 we’ll be reverting to a quarterly schedule with Signified going out to you around the equinoxes and solstices. So expect our Vernal Equinox issue around mid-to-late-March 2025.
Here at Signifier, we’re rethinking our newsletter format and we’d love to hear some of your feedback about the Signified newsletter. What content are you enjoying, what bits do you simply skip-over, are there any sections from our older newsletters you’d love to see return, what would you like to see more or less of? Please leave your suggestions in the comments section under this edition.
“All the very best to you and yours for the Festive Season and wishing you Health and Happiness for the New Year!”
— The Signifer Team
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