The Lamb Adored

I cannot claim that this picture came from anything I have seen that triggered a response that I felt compelled to record. Rather it arises from the annual challenge of finding something new to use in our Christmas greeting card. Congratulations, you are getting a preview!

Since the 1970s I have done mother and child with Joseph, kings, shepherds, animals around the crib, in various combinations, a mother with a new born swaddled baby, kings on camels crossing the desert and even non -religious, very complicated Christmas trees that recipients had to fold into a pyramid. Where to go?

So, this came out of a formal idea about how to arrange parts of the composition on the canvas, something I have been exploring recently with my diagonals.  I like to use three as a generator, three objects, three colours.  Five is another prime number which can either be itself or one, unity, which seemed like a good religious idea. A quincunx would centre the Christ child and there could be four other images spread around the edges of the image as a whole.  In Mediaeval lectionaries and prayer books there are often tetramorphs featuring the Evangelists as symbolic beasts. a composite creature of a winged man (Matthew), a lion (Mark), an ox (Luke), and an eagle (John). These symbols originate from Ezekiel's vision of four living creatures in the Old Testament, later interpreted as representing the four evangelists and their gospels. I could substitute the new born baby with a new born lamb and have a new way of looking at the story, one that favoured my liking for painting animals.

I kept the crucifix so often shown in historical images of the Lamb of God, carried like a kind of lance in the crook of the front legs. The shaft extends down to the poor old ox who seems to get it in the neck! I thought that wings on the man would be confusing. Is that an angel? Showing Mark as a no nonsense man seemed consistent with his version of the Good News. I gave him a victor’s wreath and rather non-human eyes – the colours in the irises are reversed and the pupils are yellow – but this is his resurrected body after all. I played it straight with the other animals except for the Lamb. If you look closely, you might see a crucified man (but no cross) instead of the usual oval pupil sheep have.