28.2.08

Nativity


Greetings!

Here's a recent painting of Mother and Child. Not the right season,
I know, but this was just scanned, so thought I'd share it.


4 comments:

Abigail said...

Wonderful colors, as usual.

There's a lot of interesting things in here; is there symbolism behind the flower choices?

Jef Murray said...

Abigail,

Yes, quite. Marigolds are associated with Christ, and white roses with the Blessed Virgin. The ox is representative of the manger, and Mary's dress is the traditional red symbolizing her being "clothed" in divinity. There's more you can likely tease out as well....

Anonymous said...

Your paintings are always interesting. Do you scan them by laying them right down on your scanner? Do you get good scans?

I like how you've rendered the ox -very solid.

Jef Murray said...

Ben,
Yes, I do direct scans on a regular sized scanner (although I'm hoping to upgrade to a 12"x17" soon). I usually work pretty small so this is possible. This painting is 11"x14", so I had to "stitch" two scans together to get the whole image. But that seems to work better than taking a photo and getting lens distortion and much lower resolution.