I pride myself on being an art history buff, so I’m humbled by the fact that I was well over 60 years old before I came across a fascinating theory about Michelangelo’s famous fresco “The Creation of Adam”.
I had always assumed that God was simply floating on a vague, billowy cloud or drapery, but on a recent tour of the Sistine Chapel the tour guide pointed out that the shape is actually a cross section of the human brain. Humankind is a product created from of the “mind of God.”
So what does this have to do with Christmas?
I do consider myself a Christian, but paradoxically I don’t think Christmas is as much about Jesus as it is about his mom. No disrespect to our Lord and Savior, but let’s be honest, Mary’s doing all the work here. Having seen my partner give birth twice, and my daughter once, I think a lot about this process of childbirth: the months when nothing seems to be happening, then the first kick, then the nausea, then the excitement, then the doubts, then the calm before the storm, and finally the furious last minutes (er, hours) before the work is done. And because these are the very steps many artists experience when creating work, it’s not that much of a stretch to say that I see Mary as belonging to the pantheon of the great artists in history.
In this painting I juxtapose Mary not as the Supreme Creator but as the Supreme Begetter. And instead of her reposing on the silhouette of a human brain I imagine her floating on a kind of celestial uterus, fallopian tubes and all.
Christmas Is Messy
I can’t speak for all Christians, but in my own experience Christmas is usually a roll of the dice. Yes, some years are pure magic, full of joy and wonder and gratitude. But almost just as many have been tense, grumpy affairs full of disappointment and sometimes full-blown depression.
Bringing the more graphic and biological elements into the painting is my way of facing this paradox of Christmas. Like childbirth, it’s supposed to be joyous and miraculous, but frankly that’s not always the case. But we still do it. Year after year, despite all the evidence that it’s probably not a good idea to bring children into the world, we do it anyway.
Miracles do happen. Just look at childbirth. But just like childbirth, they’re more likely to be accompanied by what the Bible euphemistically calls “flesh”: blood, mucus, saliva, urine, you name it. My hope for us all is that we stop looking for God up in some brain shaped spaceship in the sky, and look instead to the exhausted mother covered in sweat and the tiny little infant, covered in goo.