Merry Christmas !

Mick Rock, Truman Capote and Andy Warhol, 1979

Maria Berrio, Nativity, 2014

Even if I am not religious, I always find incredibly comforting the image of St Mary with her baby son Jesus, not for its religious meaning but simply for the idealised representation between a mother and her child. In many of these images, both characters are highly placid, very quiet, so far from reality, but this is probably why it has the power to calm you down.

So, because tomorrow is Christmas and tonight many will celebrate the Nativity, I wanted to share a another nativity, one of the most beautiful one found in contemporary art: the Nativity from Maria Berrio.

Maria Berrio, Nativity, 2014

Like the rest of her collages, this work is stunning. Here again, she celebrate the woman and the nature, mixing with images taken in mythology and mysticism. Her figures are strongly serene, and with a clever use of the patterned Japanese paper, they are also multiple and colourful.

She said: “A lot of my work is autobiographical…it could be about me, or my time in the world and how I am feeling or what I am imagining. […] Of course, it also relates to other people and other things too, to imaginary beings, to ecology, to magical realism, to surrealism too, but at the same time [it] is always me.”1

Oh yes, it does relate to us, and this is why we are highly touched. How not to be deeply drowned to her world, where disproportioned creatures seem to appear from a dream, humans being are in total symbiosis with the wild, and the whole in a fantastic blast of colourful flowers? 🙂

And 127 years ago, an ear has been banged up…

Yep,  on the 23rd of December 1888, Vincent Van Gogh mutilated his ear …

In the morning of the 24th dec., the following day, police officers of the city of Arles, find the painter with the face filled with blood and took him to the hospital. Van Gogh did mutilated his ear after a violent argument with his friend and confidant Paul Gauguin. Both artists were living together for several months, but the cohabitation became very tense in the workshop. In a moment of madness, Van Gogh threatened Gauguin before slitting his lobe, wrap it in a newspaper and then offer it to Rachel, a young prostitute that both men worshipped.

From this argument, the Flemish artist painted one of his most famous self-portrait where we see the painter smoking a pipe, the ear covered with a bandage…

That, is the thesis that the public knows, and which has also been supported by Gauguin himself a few years later. However, other hypotheses suggest that Gauguin himself would actually have been the author of the accident. As a fencing amateur, he would have cut the left ear of Van Gogh before escaping to the capital.

Van Gogh committed suicide a few months later, carrying in his grave his version of this story …

Vincent Van Gogh, Self portrait with bandaged ear, 1888