Blog Posts - Cavanagh Art

A Quick Digital Picture

4/5/2021

Blossom – Tram Scene

Just something I put together tonight. It took me about an hour, an hour-and-a-half, maybe? I didn't really bother to time how long I spent on it.

Recently I had a chance to ride on the Sydney Light Rail network to Randwick for the funeral of a family friend, so perhaps that is what inspired this picture. The telephone box is based on a preserved example at the Sydney Tramway Museum at Loftus. Other than those two things I've also had a few stray thoughts about Japanese paintings rattling around in my head. That about it really.

I have ideas of maybe making this into a 3D animation, but I don't know if it isn't anything more than just a pipedream at the moment.

Stay safe and God bless.

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Digital Painting in a limited palette.

Year of St Joseph - Part 3

1/5/2021

Year of St Joseph: Birth of Jesus.

Looking back on this picture as I'm trying to write a blog post for it, I'm stuck by how (without any forethought or planning) Joseph and Mary look very, very alike to a recently married couple I know. Funny how the subconscious works, eh?

Anyhow, the 1st of May is dedicated to St Joseph the Worker, so how do I commemorate this fact? I paint the Birth of Jesus in the cave/stable.
Specifically I had in my mind how Joseph must have been after the birth: dazed and confused, in a sea of emotions.
"Alright God, now what am I supposed to do?"
And there before him is Mary, totally ensconced in the new life sitting in her arms. She is a total rock of calm amongst the swimming tide of emotions overtaking Joseph as he tries unconsciously to sit down somewhere amongst the animals, inside that cave, on that awesome, and holy, night.

A happy month and feast of St Joseph to you all. Even if it's via Nazareth.

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Digital painting, based on a rough pen sketch.

Late Night Sketching

20/4/2021

Lately I've been participating in an online tuition course for Blender 3D, which has been a good if somewhat challenging experience. The challenging part being trying to work in a group with many other students in multiple different time zones (and the associated late nights that come with it), but I'll talk about that more in a later post. Sometime in May. Hopefully.

Below is the sketch that I made last night to release some of my creative frustrations:

Christ Pantocrator (2021).

I just needed to do something religious to make up for my recent lack of any such artworks.
The original Christ Pantocrator (roughly translated as "All-Mighty" in Greek), that is the inspiration of this image, is one of the first icons depicting Jesus in early history of the Church, and remains to this day a very important image in the Eastern Orthodox Church.
It depicts the two natures of Christ, being both fully God and fully human, through the different sides of His face.

Below are the mirrored composites of the left and right sides of my rough sketch:

Pantocrator Blessing, Mirrored.

Pantocrator Gospels, Mirrored.

Honestly, I had no real plan about how to mirror this image, I just had the vaguest of recollections of what a Pantocrator Icon should look like and I went from there. So I sketched in out with blue ballpoint pen and went over it with a water-based black marker, and added colour with text highlighters. In hindsight I really should've either scanned or at least taken a photo of the under drawing, but I decide to let it go and just keep on drawing with the black marker.

The one real difference between this sketch and the Icon it's based on, is that the real Pantocrator doesn't have the wounds of Christ in it, as far as I know.

So, until the muse next takes me or I need another outlet to create, God bless and stay safe.

Year of St Joseph - Part 2

19/4/2021

Continuing with St Joseph, here are the 2 most recent images that I have done. Both of them where created with Copic alcohol-markers and water-based pens, with pencil under drawings.

"Most Chaste Heart of St Joseph." This one was made on the first Wednesday of March (2021), because every first Wednesday of the month is dedicated to St Joseph. This was an opportunity for me to do the Chaste Heart of St Joseph justice as I'd only previously done a very small version for CATHOLinktober, Day 19, "Chaste Heart of St Joseph". It was also a chance to try out some Bristol Pad paper that I'd bought earlier.

"Reunion." Showing the reunion of St Joseph with Jesus after the crucifixion and before the resurrection. This was painted in honour of the feast day of St Joseph, Spouse of the Blessed Virgin (March 19), after having the haunting last few words from the poem Limbo by Sister Mary Ada running through my head that day.

Here are the last 2 stanzas from that poem:

And there He was
Splendid as the morning sun and fair
As only God is fair.
And they, confused with joy,
Knelt to adore
Seeing that he wore
Five crimson stars
He never had before.

No canticle at all was sung.
None toned a psalm, or raised a greeting song.
A silent man alone
Of all that throng
Found tongue --
Not any other.
Close to His heart
When the embrace was done,
Old Jospeh said,
"How is Your Mother,
How is Your Mother, Son?"

Until next time, God bless.

Year of St Joseph – Part 1

8/4/2021

Back in December 2020 Pope Francis proclaimed a Year of St Joseph (8 Dec 2020 – 8 Dec 2021) for the whole Catholic Church.
More information about it can be found here, and about prayer to St Joseph here.

Below are the first 3 images of St Joseph that I painted in the Year of St Joseph proper:

"St Joseph and the infant Jesus." The starting point for this image was the Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 1, Verse 20; which was one of the prompts from the #Adventus202One art challenge during Advent 2020.
This image in not exactly of the moment described in Matthew's Gospel, but rather of a moment after Jesus' birth when St Joseph fell in love/accepted Jesus as his son for the 2nd or 3rd time.
Also the main inspiration for this image was the idea: if St Joseph had a beard before Jesus was born, how much of it would have been left after Jesus' toddler year (ie. pulling part of Joseph's beard out)?

"The Holy Innocents/The Flight into Egypt." This image was also another inspiration from #Adventus202One, this time being close to the scripture reference: Matthew, Chapter 2, Verse 13–15.
The inspiration for this was thinking about how the recently departed Holy Innocents may have processed with the Holy Family in their flight into Egypt from Herod's persecution, all under the protection St Michael the Archangel.

I just sketched this one rather quickly on some coloured paper and inked it with a calligraphy marker and text highlighters, because I just wanted to get it done and I didn't care how I got it done.
I'd been getting sick of doing so many watercolour pictures in a row and I wanted a break from that medium.

"St Joseph, Protector of the Holy Family." The title for this one basically explains all there is to this picture. Showing St Joseph as the Protector and Shield surround the Jesus and Mary.
Although I must not forget to acknowledge and appreciate @awememento's influence upon this particular painting of St Joseph and the Holy Family.
And her Etsy page can be found here.

Until next time, Happy Easter!

Happy Easter from Bishop Stumbers (Audio)

3/4/2021

Over a period of 37 days and multiple attempts here at last is my first 3D animation in Blender 3D with the assistance of Bishop Stumbers. Admittedly I didn't think his voice was going to be so deep, such is life.

Below is a little gallery of Bishop Stumbers focusing on different aspects of the model. Enjoy!

stumbers: Ash Wednesday, covid-style

17/2/2021

Above is my most recent Bishop Stumbers cartoon, which I finished and posted yesterday (Feb 16).

The idea for this picture began to come together in the previous fortnight over conversations about the new guidelines from the Vatican on how to distribute the ashes for Ash Wednesday during a pandemic (ie. sprinkling the ash on top of peoples' head rather than making a sign of the cross on peoples' foreheads) in a note published on January the 12th (link here).

Among the ideas discussed in those conversations was the fact that some of the more widely recycled memes about Ash Wednesday and the wide variety of cross placed upon the heads of Catholics would be no long applicable under the new guidelines, if anyone thought to think of it that way of course.
And so was born Stumbers' ponderance upon the collect of memes now made irrelevant, and somewhat historical, by the Vatican's new guidelines.

Hopefully next time I can get back to clearing the backlog of blog posts.
Until then, God Bless.

What happened after inktober

3/2/2021

First off I must warn you that this is hardly going to be either a concise or chronologically correct catch-up of all my artwork from the end of October, 2020.

Well, with that brief explainer out of the way here is (below) the final painting from my #CATHOLinktober (2020).

"Title of the Blessed Virgin Mary" was the 31st and last prompt of the CATHOLinktober challenge. As it turned out I wasn't the only artist participating who chose to paint "Our Lady, Star of the Sea".
Before asking God's intercession and throwing a Miraculous Medal, I had no idea which Title of the Blessed Virgin to paint. As such was rather stressed out trying to figure out what the final picture was going to be, but God did proved us an answer.

After I had finished CATHOLinktober, I was commissioned to do a painting of "Our Lady of Guadalupe" for the iWitness 2020 Conference,, in a style similar to what I done previously with "Our Lady, Star of the Sea".

"Our Lady of Guadalupe" is the patron for the iWitness Conference which happens starts on the Thursday before the Third Sunday of Advent, and finishes on that same sunday. I had attended previously attended the 2019 Conference, which had been my first iWitness. During the whole of 2020, the thought of meeting up with previous friends and known face at iWitness had been one of the few lights of hope during the year, and I along with everyone who went to iWitness, as well as the organising team were relieved when it was able to happen under NSW restrictions. Thank you God!

In the above gallery are my photos of the 2020 iWitness Booklet I took when I got home on Guadete (Rose Candle) Sunday.

The iWitness Conference began as a grass-roots way for Catholic youth of Sydney and beyond to keep alive and renew their faith in God and grow deeper in the traditions of the Catholic Church in the afterglow of World Youth Day 2008, Sydney, Australia. It is run by an amazing team of dedicated Catholic youth for the youth, it has been held (as far as I am aware) every year since 2008, and have staked out the 4 days before and including the 3rd Sunday of Advent as their usual set dates. Together they bring in a variety of Catholic speakers to talk on a variety of themes centered around the main theme of that particular year. Such notable speakers have included: Archbishop of Hobart, Julien Porteous; Auxiliary Bishop of Sydney, Richard Umbers; Robert Haddad; Monica Doumit; and many other known and lesser known speakers, priests, missionaries, religious orders and many more.

To God be all the glory!

an etsy beginning

28/1/2021

But before that, a bit of an update.

The 2021 Calendar was published in mid-December 2020, however it took a lot of work to get there. Quite a lot of the Inktober material was used, but there were something like an extra 10 images needed since the Inktober drawings were smaller, and it took two of them to fill a Calendar page.

Then in very late November and early December I began making some of those images into prayer cards with a holy image on the front and a prayer on the back.

When 2021 began there was a bit of brainstorming done about 'What's next?'.
Investigating the possibilities of selling printable downloads of prayer cards via Etsy seemed like a good idea. So after a few days' research and planning that's what happened.

CavanaghArt wasn't available, that's why it had to be called CavanaghArtByVincent instead:
www.etsy.com/au/shop/CavanaghArtByVincent

The starting point was a prayer card suitable for obtaining the indulgence during the Year of St Joseph (8 Dec 2020 - 8 Dec 2021) for praying for the unemployed.

And the next one, with a prayer to St Joseph similar to the Hail Mary, began a week later.

It started out with a lot of hope and expectation, yet it has still to make an impact.

What else is there under the 'What next?' options? I don't currently know.

However due to the increased censorship on social media, I will be from now on giving primacy to the blog, and there's a back-log, (or should that be a blog-log?), of material to work with.

inktober 2020

30/10/2020

I thought I told myself that I wasn't going to do Inktober this year. But then a Catholic theme list came up (#Catholinktober), and I caved in.

It is the reason why you haven't seen much artwork posted here.
There is plenty to share, it is just waiting for some free time to put it on this blog. Instagram, Twitter and Facebook have had daily postings during October.

So here is a brief selection from the last 30 days:

The Chaste Heart of St Joseph inspires love and trust in everyone.

A version of the icon of the Mother of God of Tenderness.

New Testament Character: Ananias getting the message from God that he is to go and visit Saul, the persecutor of the Christians.

For the feast day of Our Lady of the Rosary, a decade of the rosary depicted with a big red rose for the Our Father, ten blue-white roses for the Hail Marys, and a triple golden ball for the Glory Be to honour the Most Holy Trinity. The hands are offering it as prayer, and the twelve stars are there to remind us of the crown of Mary, and her receiving the bouquet.

Charity in action.

Only one more to go, and the theme for that one is a title of the Virgin Mary.

Whatever passes for normal might return soon. :)