Most Catholic religious feasts commemorate the death of the saint. As far as I know, there are only three births celebrated in the Catholic church: Jesus (Christmas), Mary (September 8th) and John the Baptist (today). Jesus and John are mentioned in the Bible and I suppose once we had a feast celebrating the Immaculate Conception¹ of Mary, it was almost a certainty that nine months after that, the Catholic laity would celebrate Mary’s birth whether the hierarchy endorsed it or not so they might as well endorse it.
I kind of cheated in today’s picture, doing the faces completely white against the background and then adding the details back in using black, which gave a better result. I’m thinking that if I were doing a “real” woodcut, I would be drawing the artwork as a positive on the wood and then cutting away elsewhere anyway, so maybe this is not as much of a cheat as it seems, although I really would like to find a way to more accurately reflect this when working on the iPad.
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