Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Reindeer Prints

When I was blogging about Royal Historian of Oz Eloise Jarvis McGraw earlier this month I mentioned that she was trained as a fine artist as well as being a writer of books.

In the last decades of her life she was very interested in print-making of all kinds, and most years she made her own Christmas cards. One of the first I got from her was the Christmas card (at left) from 1982. It's a wood block print showing the Three Magi. Eloise designed the card, carved the two wood blocks (one for each color), and then hand printed the cards. This card is more detailed than most she produced.  As you might imagine, Eloise was a big fan of Barry Moser.


This one (at right) from 1984 was one of my favorites. It reminded me a bit of the cover of L. Frank Baum's Life and Adventures of Santa Claus. I especially liked all the fanciful objects serving as snowflakes falling from the sky.

Below is the card from 1985. Eloise wrote in it:

"Dear David - the title of this card should be Christmas Clichés. Ah well, I'll do a better one next year."

I think she did just fine! Happy Holidays!

As always you can click on any of the images to enlarge them and see them a little better.

4 comments:

Vincent Desjardins said...

Those are wonderful, thanks for sharing them!

Bill Campbell said...

What a fun collection to have - especially as each is it's own little original piece of art!

Glenn Ingersoll said...

Charming cars. Thanks for sharing them. I wonder if the stars in the snowy rooftop scene are supposed to be snowflakes.

David Maxine said...

@Glenn - Yes I misspoke. The objects are clearly snowflakes not stars! I'm gonna change the phrasing in the blog from stars to snowflakes.