Advent

I am working on sketches for my painting "Advent". I've decided to work on some paintings inspired by my reading of The Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine. It's a chronicle of the lives and miracles of the saints. I hope it will be broadly spiritual and meditative and help me work on my problem of conveying complex things more simply. As you can see, I started out with a very crowded and busy composition, throwing in everything I could find about Advent. Then I pared it down to a few elements that I felt were the most important. The Advent Calendars we are all familiar with, with the little doors that open. The idea of "beginning" in astronomical terms, novas, supernovas, stars colliding, imploding, and galaxies forming. I also wanted to retain the traditional Advent wreath with four candles, which in the end is pared down to just the four candles.