The holy grail is to spend less time making the picture than it takes people to look at it.
- Banksy

As has become tradition, here’s this year’s Christmas card…released online first for your viewing pleasure, we went with the movie poster theme this year. It started out a little more action-packed thriller, but we dialed it back to be more festive. I hope you enjoy it. Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!!

Here’s some past cards too

Step 1: Wonderland

I’ve been working on a photoshop piece for about a year off and on. Whenever I get time, I try to add something about myself to it. It started off with the picture above. I can’t remember where this is from. I wanted to say it was my Prep School…but I’m not sure it is. I couldn’t find the original so this image already has a brown grime filter laid over it…but this is where it started.

The Wonderland T platform is where this began. A long time ago, I used to wait for the subway out in the cold. So, I wanted to do something like a subway platform. Here’s the next step. I stripped out the background and added a mosaic wall. I also sandblasted the columns and added a light point.

Step 2: Wonderland

In the next step, I’ve darkened the platform and added some signage. Red and Green. Port and Starboard. The inbound outbound signs are what I leave in life and where I’m heading in life. I changed the coating on the colums to be smoother. I’ll add some dirt later.

Step 3: Wonderland

It drops tomorrow in most mailboxes.
This year’s design was last minute.

I feel ok about the way it turned out but…there have been better cards in the past.

Happy Holidays!

Louise Nevelson was born Kiev, Russia. Her family moved to the United States in 1905, and in 1920 she moved to New York City and began studying at the Art Students League in 1929. Using old pieces of wood, found objects, she constructed huge walls, enclosed box arrangements of complex and rhythmic abstract shapes. Examples of Nevelson’s work are in 50 museums including the Whitney, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Her first one-woman show was at the Karl Nierendorf Gallery in NYC in 1941. She had solo exhibitions at the Norlyst and Nierendorf Galleries from 1943 to 1944. In later years she studied printmaking and experimented with marble and terra-cotta. Her fame came about from her show Ancient Games and Ancient Places at Grand Central Moderns. This led to a series of wooden assemblages. She is considered one of the most important American sculptors. Louise Nevelson died in 1988 at the age of 88.

One of her pieces:

Untitled, 1950s, Painted wood, 31″ x 12 x 11.5″