It's not often one receives a present from one's younger self for Christmas, but so it was this year: my mom found a nativity set I'd made out of clay (each piece dutifully inscribed “DB 2000”, when I was eleven) and wrapped it for me. Here's a photo:
It's always interesting to see what one's younger art looks like (especially when you've forgotten about in it the intervening decades). I notice with amusement a few things that feel very familiar, such as minute details and texture in some places and nothing in other (for instance, all the beards have detail scratched into them in what is otherwise a fairly stylized production). There's also a rigid adherence to a small set of colors without any mixing, but utilizing them in imaginative ways; I count just six colors of clay (purple, brown, tan, yellow, orange, light blue), and it doesn't look like I mixed any to produce different shades. Both of these are things I still struggle with to an extent in painting: it's easy to get lost in details while neglecting larger parts of a composition, and I still tend to use a relatively small number of colors in any single painting session (though I at least do mix them, now).
On the positive side, I'm pretty impressed with how this came out. Even at eleven I was coming up with interesting little details like the different crowns on the magi or the decorations on their gifts. (I'm pretty sure from close inspection that the first one was supposed to be holding a gold bar, to go along with the frankincense and myrrh of the others.) Anyway, that's a little something to close the year out with. Hard to believe 2024 is finally over! A hui hou!
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