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| Ceramic Nativity Set, Grace Yeager c. 1960 |
Making my own Nativity Scene was in part inspired by the work of my father and my maternal grandmother. Two of the Nativity scenes that decorated my childhood home where original one of a kind manger scenes.
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| Ceramic Nativity Set, Grace Yeager c. 1960 |
My Grandmother painted and glazed ceramic figurines and at my mother's request made her a Nativity Scene. The figures are each about a foot tall. In making this set my grandmother chose to paint the people using a dark honey brown color for their skin. While the look is a bit extreme and looks odd on Mary and the angel whose yellow blond hair with such a choice of flesh tone makes them apear like they over did it at the tanning bed. However her tip of the hat to a non anglo european origin for this story is effective juxtoposed with the posture and dress of the figures which is clearly modeled on images produced durring the italian rennesance.
While Grammy produced her Scene some years before I was even born I have vivid memories of my Father working on his diorama of the birth of Jesus. He started out making figures out of plastic army men, whittling off their guns and weapon packs then draping them in glue soaked scraps of cloth. In fact there is a king with an orange headdress who started out as a Darth Vader knock off from a "Star Battles" bag of plastic soldiers someone bought me as a present. Later he made the people by bending a wire armature and then covering it with latex caulking, like the stuff in the tube used to close seams around the tub. The army men demanded accommodation, fitting the scene to the limited range of poses available. By contrast there was a freedom to present something closely fitting his artistic vision with the new silicon and wire people looked to suffer some serious skin condition.
My Dad wanted to show a scene that was more urban than normally pictured and which located the family and visitors off center and small relative to the overall image. He also wanted the stable to look like one and modeled the mangers pictured after ones originally used for horses in a barn on our own property which he used as an art studio. The overall theme you could say was to show the humanity, and humbleness of things as well as the hidden nature or anonymity in which the child is delivered.
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| Diorama Nativity Scene, Donald L. Roberts c. 1980 |
As with my own project both my Grammy and Dad set out to invite the viewer to encounter the familiar story with a heightened attention to some historical detail which is often obscured by stylized and sentimental images. Certainly there is much to be questioned and dismissed in both pieces as far as achieving historical accuracy. The Magi enter the scene some months after the child is born, there is no word of angels, Bethlehem would have been only slightly more cosmopolitan than Nazareth a town of maybe 50 adults, It never says that they where in a stable only that the child was laid in a manger, the inn was probably a reference to a guest room of sorts on the family property, and of course there is no reason to think this more than temporary housing after all the Magi are said to arrive at a house. Yet it is not historic accuracy in the actual scenes they produced nor in my own that I think is the goal.
At least for my own part I would say the hope of crafting a true to life image of these moments of religious history is unrealistic and fr ought with problems. However in our own telling of the stories over the years different generations recreate the vital and fleshy truth of the tales in how they depict the story as a mix of the familiar and to that age- every day aspects of life and in how they show in the nativity scene something foreign and other.
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| Diorama Nativity Scene, Donald L. Roberts c. 1980 |
After all it is meant to be something more profound than the historic equivalent of a candid Polaroid image. I think even artists who wish to shock us with the banal humanity of it all are unable to do so without showing both the grit and flesh of the matter and the ultimate truth that is there the heavenly story if you will. Angels are used to do this but so too my father's historically tenuous stable scene which reveals a truth of the story which is humility and meekness.
For my part I wanted to saturate the scene with elements that suggested a context which could explain in almost ordinary terms a child who might grow up and do as Jesus did, a mother who had drive and purpose, resources to allow for an education of some depth, a family located less at the social margins and able to broker the connections as we see in Jesus circle of well off and influential hosts and followers, and so forth. It is a bit grand in aim granted but it is a grand story and when seen in person it is a rather grand final piece.
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| Original Nativity Scene by Ralph Yeager Roberts, 2008-2011 |
