I'd like to share two new paintings: one, The Presentation is a commission I recently completed: oil on canvas, 20"x20".


The second one, The Flight Into Egypt, I did to use as my family's Christmas Card this year. It is oil on canvas and 20"x16".


For a bigger image click here:Presentation or Flight Into Egypt

They are lovely, as always. Any particular meaning of the harvest in "Flight"?

FWIW, I took it as a sort of intertextual allusion to the idea of the "harvest" of souls gathered into God's heavenly barns (Jim has used similar imagery before). One might see the Holy Innocents as a sort of firstfruits of the harvest of Christian martyrdom, though unwittingly so. The Slaughter of the Innocents in the background even sort of looks like laborers handling bunches of wheat or grain in barns.

There is a legend associated with the Flight into Egypt: A man was planting a wheat field just as the Holy Family was passing by. The field grew miraculously overnight so the next day the man was harvesting his field when Herod's soldiers rode up . They ask the man if they had seen the family. He replied that thy had passed by when he was planting his field. Herod's men thinking that it had been six months from the time the man had planted his field turn around, giving up the chase.

I read this in The Meditations on the Life of Christ, a 13th c. book attributed to St Bonaventure.

But I like Steven's interpretation as well. One of the great things about visual art: many layers of potential meaning.