In order to avoid a mad rush to catch the post just before Christmas I have got into the habit of producing a picture about a month early. Here is the 20201 offering.
It is called "The flight into Egypt"
The dominant composition idea was to have the donkey crossing the picture from top right to bottom left. Onto this I placed the Virgin cuddling her child, with Joseph on her right steadying her in the saddle and tapping the donkey along. An angel is placed bottom right, with his arm across the donkey's neck guiding them away from danger.
As in my "Resurrection" picture I wanted the angel to be obviously non human but with a similar shape. So he is given golden skin and hair and his robe and wings are purple. You don't see many of those around!
I like to think there is a paradox here. They are fleeing a brightly lit city - represented by the yellow area top right and fleeing down equally brightly lit steps into darkness. Why would you flee from the light? The answer is that they were very afraid, so much so that they were venturing into the unknown.
Yet in a way this amplifies the theme of the Christmas story,. The light came into the world, into a very obscure but politically unstable corner of the Roman Empire. Now the light is being carried into another community, probably to the large Jewish community that existed at that time in Alexandria.
