I’ve taken up Christine’s Art for Advent invitation, and am producing one creative piece each week using a medium with which I’m not fully familiar.
This first one is a digital collage using various photographic manipulation techniques. It takes my knowledge of Photoshop Elements further, and I’ve learned quite a lot in the process.
And it does have connections with Advent, if you look carefully. The whole business of faith seems to me a little bit like a mad magic carpet ride. The woman in the middle is just looking up from reading her bible, and seems pretty calm to be hurtling through the sky with miscellaneous animals.
I put the fish in deliberately as a symbol of Christianity, but that little kitten insisted on being added to try and catch them. The other cat is fed up with the whole thing and going for a swim. And a bear and rabbit? No idea, they just wanted to come along for the ride.
Flying above them all, leading the way, is the pelican, symbolic of Christ.
(An ancient legend preceding Christianity has it that in times of famine, the mother pelican will strike her own breast, drawing blood, and will feed her starving chicks with her blood, giving up her life for them.)
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Nice work, Tess! I had never heard the thing about the Pelican representing Christ. Seems I learn something new here every day.
Thanks Jules. I think the Pelican thing might be mostly Catholic in origin. I dimly recall some prayer about it from my childhood.
I love this image Tess, such wonderful possibility here. I had not either heard the pelican story, very intriguing!
This is beautiful! I love it, very imaginative! I also have not heard the pelican story. I love animal imagery, because it enhances my perception when I’m outside in nature. It gives me a different appreciation.
Thank you Anne. And Christine, thank you for the link and the compliment.
I confess I was beginning to get a bit concerned about the pelican thing, wondered if I’d imagined it! So I did a bit of Googling, and there’s lots of stuff, among it:
Thomas Aquinas wrote, “Pelican of mercy, Jesu, Lord and God, cleanse me, wretched sinner, in thy precious Blood; Blood, whereof one drop for humankind outpoured, might from all transgression have the world restored.” During the Middle Ages, many artists placed a pelican with its nest on top of the cross.
Wonderful work, Tess. I enjoyed and was fascinated by your commentary and like Anne, Christine and heyJules, the pelican symbolism is new to me.
You didn’t comment on the background but I’m sure there is Advent symbolism there: searching the shadows for night visions (to borrow the title from Jan Richardson’s book). And of course there has to be the full moon that so many of us love.
So, so lovely, interesting, and meaningful.
Tess,
This is lovely and full of such wonderful symbolism. I was raised Episcopalian but all of my neighbors were RC and I loved the richness of their faith and wished I could be Catholic, too…and, at the very best, a nun!
We spent our childhood telling saint stories on their stoops. I did hear about Thomas Aquinas but did not know about the pelican as a symbol of Christ.
Thanks for the treats for mind, eyes and spirit, Tess. What talent!
Thanks for your comment Suz, and welcome here.
There is a beautiful mosaic tile floor behind the altar in the Chapel on the grounds of The General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church, NYC, that portrays the pelican story/mother pecking breast/blood, etc.
When my husband began his Master of Divinity program there nearly 14 years ago, we lived in Manhattan for 3 years. I had never heard the pelican story either until touring the chapel in an orientation session.
Glad you found your feet on solid ground with the story by searching the web….we can think ourselves crazier than usual occasionally when we receive little or no backup from a given audience:)
Love the symbolic piece you put together with PhotoShop – impressive! SS
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