"Christmas Eve Dance" | Holiday Memories & Illustration Process

When my family lived in Hawaii my dad bought a big, warm-colored koa wood “entertainment center.” I put entertainment center in quotation marks because that’s how we always referred to it. Really it was just a big cabinet —a bit like a standing wardrobe except built to house electronics instead of sweaters. From Hawaii on, it moved everywhere with us.

It was built with a long cabinet door on the left side, and then another cabinet which could store a tv, (but never did, at least in my memory) and a set of drawers beneath it. The cabinet to the left held my dad’s CD player, which I never fully understood how to use. I did learn if you mashed one or two of the buttons, generally, (after a bit of sputtering) it would open and allow you to feed it up to five CDs at once. Inside there was a distinct smell — part oiled wood, part heated dust from the whirring of the player.

My dad has a pretty decent CD collection which he always kept in the second bottom drawer of the entertainment center. Certain occasions called for certain soundtracks. Breakfast for example, was the Cazimero Brothers. Dinner was Vivaldi. Weekend mornings ranged from Boston and Queen, to Whitney or Toni Braxton.

During Christmas, Dad would have my brother or I cue up two very specific Christmas albums: Merry Christmas, Baby (his preference, which includes ten tracks of classic 1950s and 60s Christmas songs) and En Riktig Svensk Jul (my mom’s preference — a collection of very old Swedish holiday music, which for any non-Swedish person would probably sound extremely strange. My husband, Michael, would likely agree, except now I think he’s just used to it.) To me, both of these albums are the definition of what Christmas sounds like.

A handful of Christmases ago, I was listening to Merry Christmas, Baby while decorating the tree with Michael. As we strung up lights and hung ornaments, I recognized a very old feeling. It’s the same feeling I have every time I hear these songs. Or, maybe, it’s less of a feeling really, and more like the sensation around an idea. Like nostalgia for something you haven’t quite experienced yet, but would like to.

Those Christmas songs, especially the old school stuff — “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” “The Christmas Song,” (aka Chestnuts roasting on an open fire…) “I’'ll Be Home For Christmas,” “Rocking Around The Christmas Tree,” or “You’re All I Want For Christmas,” — these songs shaped an idea about what it might like to be grown up. What it would be like to have parties, or be in love during the holidays, or to decorate with someone else in your own home.

It was funny, because while I was consciously recognizing this childhood experience for the first time, I was also actively doing the very things those songs made me wonder about. I was decorating with my partner, in our shared home, as a grown up (well, mostly, anyways).

Yet, listening to those songs evoked the same sort of wistfulness it did for me at twelve years old. Like a sort of foggy, still-life-daydream of what my older self and one-day life may be like, which may or may not include sitting regally by a fireplace in a fancy apartment somewhere. Perhaps at a holiday cocktail party? But most definitely in a big city, where it would be snowing (obviously).

That year, the year of the revelation, I was in San Diego (Big city — check). I was living in an apartment, but it was certainly not fancy. It was also certainly not snowing. But it was ours, and it was really wonderful. It was a really wonderful time in both of lives.

There’s the idea of something, and then there’s our lived experiences. Sometimes these seem to exist in tandem, no matter how old we get. I can’t help but smile when this happens. It’s like experiencing little synaptic glitches that reveal earlier versions of myself. As if little me is just stopping by for a moment to remind me of her ideas and feelings. There’s something sweet about it.

Anyways, this month’s illustration, Christmas Eve Dance, was inspired by that sweetness.

Also, in case you’re curious about my illustration process, here’s a few behind-the-scenes snaps of the development.

ROUGH SKETCH

I roughed out my sketch and used masking fluid to cover the areas I wanted to keep bright. Usually I tape off a border, but I couldn’t find the right size paper and I was too impatient, so I just went for it and decided I’d create a border later on in Procreate.

Tone & Color Palette Set Up

Then, I toned the paper with yellow ochre to set the mood of the painting. I wanted to keep it warm and a create a sort of vintage feel. Choosing a color palette is something I still struggle with quite a bit. There’s always something that gets a bit lost in translation from your head to the page, and I find translating the “feeling” of my ideas the most difficult.

I didn’t go through a traditional art school program, so color theory is something I’ve sort of had to muddle my way through. It’s a goal of mine to keep exploring color and color theory a bit more in the coming year in order to become more comfortable and hopefully make this translation a bit easier. For this one I landed on yellow ochre, alizarin crimson and ultramarine blue.

Inking

I don’t typically ink before I paint, but this time I decided to use Octopus Ink in Seahorse Brown to outline before going in with color.

Finishing

After painting I used some color pencils to add a bit more texture and details and then threw it in Procreate to clean up a few things…. and there you have it! The final piece:

MATERIALS

• 5x7 piece of hot press watercolor paper

• Prismacolor pencils & Derwent drawing pencils

• Sennelier Alizarin Crimson, Ultramarine blue, and Yellow Ochre

• Princeton Select Round Brush,Size 12 and Princeton Neptune Brush, Size 4

• Procreate

Thank you for all who have followed along with me this year. I so appreciate your support and interest in my work.

I hope you all have a wonderful Christmas and start to the New Year.

Love,

Sara

Meditations on Time

One of the most pressing themes from my childhood is the passage of time. It was a topic that was brought up frequently. An ever-present entity looming over us, showing up on holidays and special events to whisper in our ears that a whole year, or two, or three, or five had passed since the last time we celebrated a birthday or sat around the table at Christmas. I can still hear my parents, each in their own wistful sort of way, ask each other: “Can you believe it’s been [insert amount of time passed here] since…”

Memory is a fickle thing, but it seemed this meditation brought with it a palpable sense of grief —something lost, never to be held or experienced again.

My family certainly doesn’t have the market cornered when it comes to nostalgia; but perhaps its effect on me was the degree of nostalgia. Or maybe I was just more susceptible to the personal undercurrent it carried for them. Regardless, this sense of loss is something I internalized deeply.

I don’t know when I first became conscious of the way this became part of own emotional lexicon. I can’t remember when I first started saying, “Can you believe it’s been...” with my own sort of sorrowful longing, but I catch myself doing this all the time.

For almost as long as I can remember it’s felt like I’ve been in a fight against the inevitability of time. It’s always slunking around, like a house guest that just won’t leave. Leaning on all the furniture, throwing sideways glances and silently pointing at Its wristwatch. Tick, tock. I’m certain my gender and ambitions; my own predisposition to anxiety make all of this sharper.

Now that my daughter’s here I feel this even more acutely — I can see the time passing as she acquires new skills and grows out of the clothes that seemingly swam on her just the month before. These are certainly gifts, and yet I wake up some days and I feel panicked, like I want to grasp at something… but what? I’m not exactly sure.

What am I afraid of losing exactly? Am I afraid to forget? That I won’t remember exactly what her weight felt like when I held her at 6 months? Or when she ate her first strawberry? Do I feel like I have less and less time to realize my own dreams and goals? Or is it that I simply can’t come to terms with the idea that nothing is forever and one day everything I’ve ever known will be gone?

I can’t answer any of these questions for sure, but I do know I don’t want to live the rest of my life with this kind of relational angst.

Recently, I’ve been working on a kind of peace offering with Time. I would like to change the way I’m interpreting its story. Instead of focusing on loss, I want to better celebrate growth and change; and with it, the new experiences, insights and wisdoms.

This is certainly shifting how I create and the marks I make. I find myself journaling more than ever before, and making more art, just for myself: a portrait that captures the gravity-defying nature of my daughter’s hair, a rough journal sketch of my husband feeding her watermelon for the first time.

I can’t stop time; but even if I could, I wouldn’t want that either. Not really.

The first time I heard the quote, “If you’re not growing, you’re dying,” it was part of a speech famed football coach Lou Holtz gave at an event I attended in my early twenties. At the time, this sentiment blew me away because I’d never thought about living like that before.

All these years later I’ve heard variations of this quote hundreds of times. Coach Holtz himself borrowed this quote from writer and artist, William S. Burroughs. The beauty of it is that it can be applied to so many aspects of ourselves. And yet, another perspective posits that from the moment we are born we begin to die — that the very quality of living is to walk hand-in-hand with death.

If I could stop time, any pleasure found in it would be temporary. Stagnation would set in, and along with it a multitude of little deaths: no more surprises to discover. I wouldn’t hear my daughter’s first words or improve my painting or ever finally learn how to play that one song on the ukulele. I know this, and yet the acceptance of the fact is still something of a process.

I suppose the trick of it all is to challenge ourselves to grow in all possible ways despite the inevitability of death.

And better yet, to celebrate the whole thing: all the beginnings and all the ends, knowing they are two sides of the same coin.