Dear People of Trinity Church,

Out of gratitude for a community and colleagues whose presence in my life is a blessing, this Advent & Christmas season I wanted to create something extra special as a gift for all of you. In addition to my usual materials preparation for the season, I spent countless off-the-clock hours over the past two weeks preparing illustrations & motifs to include in this year’s materials as a ‘thank you’.

A student of the history of printing and printmaking, I based the framing, patterns, and motifs off of one of the most famous examples of Æsthetic Movement (1860s-1870s) print design, a cover page of the “Art Worker,” a publication that proposed — similarly to others of the period like English Arts & Crafts paragon William Morris — to abandon the hackneyed, mass-produced, and utilitarian printing of Victorian industrialism and replace it with art.

These were not merely printers, these were artists. They didn’t want to rifle through a box of premade cuts & ornaments, they wanted every element on the page to be prepared by hand specifically for that purpose. And that’s something I try to do in my work for Trinity, even at its most trivial. I have variously described my design sensibilities as “traditioned innovation” and “simplified ornateness,” paradoxical perhaps, but reflected in my approach:

To draw inspiration from the full span of history, from the distant past to the present day, to strip the shapes and styles down to their most elemental, rendering them in simple lines with uniform stroke widths, using more contemporary and even quite vivid color spaces, and bringing a kind of cohesion to a range of disparate styles — proving that the throughlines between our varied pasts and promising futures are stronger than its divisions.

That we can without contradiction be a 21st century people in a 19th century building in an 18th century town with a cultural tradition that spans millennia — the art, music, architecture, gestures, and even language of which are celebrated by us week in and week out.

So, in this season of expectation and celebration, I hope you will enjoy this digitally-mediated revival inspired by one of the several apexes of printing & printmaking. Below I have attached downloadable, high-resolution files that can be printed and enjoyed in their own right.

Have a very blessed Advent & Christmas,